As we know, I aspire to work at a learned profession, in a professional atmosphere, as part of a smart and energetic team, and to have a certain degree of autonomy. That is not at all an accurate description of the academic jobs I have had, and I am pointing this out since there may be graduate students reading.
I have said before that I might really go to law school. But I also might really become an investigative journalist, or a think tank researcher. Amusingly, the alternate jobs people who know me have come up with for me are: a better Martha Stewart, a better Oprah, a rapper, and an artist.
At one level, that only means they see me in teaching, conference presentation, hostess and recreational modes. For myself I prefer writing and research, even though lawyers also need to run talk shows and rap, and even though artist, the broadest category, covers it all.
An old friend just came up with journalism and creative writing as alternative career suggestions for me, not realizing that last summer I had come to that conclusion myself as an alternative to the Law Plan. And Unsane and Safe has had a dream in which I was an investigative journalist, so that three of us have thought of it. I could conceivably begin as a freelancer from where I sit. And then I have always thought Pico Iyer had an interesting work life.
I also think it would be really fun to have a job like the jobs of the professors I knew before I became one myself. They lived in cities, taught in their fields and otherwise wrote full time, in scholarly journals and in the sections related to their disciplines of newspapers like this. This summer I am pretending that I am already such a person. I am already amazed at how well this works. I may even write a journalistic piece.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
This post, of course, was written last summer when I was Reflecting. It came up at random, and I don’t know what to think of it now. I am sad for many reasons.
Hmm. Well. Once Zimbabwe shakes itself out or becomes Botswana, you can possibly go there and teach some self defence.
Or learn it! 😉
The basic techniques and attitudes of physical self defence are not hard to learn. As someone pointed out to me, they are different from martial arts techniques, which require constant and ongoing perfecting. So I — or someone else — could teach you self defence techniques in about a month, if you attended half a day each weekend. A large part of it is attitude, and realising when and how to fight back. Stewart would probably be able to teach you, too.
(How about mental and verbal self-defense?)
In terms of mental and verbal self defence, one thing I am learning is that you should have absolutely nothing to hide and nothing to defend.
I don’t mean that you shouldn’t act in your own interests and do so consistently. But do so without a defensive posture.
I think that one of the ways to learn this neutrality is through accepting that reality is both positive AND abject. If you reach for the former and try to eschew the latter you can get caught out in all sorts of ego knots. To accept and anticipate both means you are less likely to fall into typical traps set for the unwary (who are mostly egotistic or ego-oriented). Slip through that net by lowering your expectations, whilst keeping up the external momentum.
Good. Excellent points. I am actually using this strategy and it is working in the external world but it is not working on me internally well enough yet. But this is exactly right – keep on saying it.
I think it is likely that we live in a narcissistic age and context, so that anyone whose psyche is patterned upon different principles can effectively dodge the bullets that are aimed at a more common and predictable (in this time and age) psychological structure.
That – on dodging the bullets – is very much on point. I hadn’t thought of calling the whole age and context narcissistic, but it is true.
Sam Vaknin seems to suggest that it probably is that, although his position is a bit ambiguous at times.
In my case, I am able to go back to an earlier state of mind which is more purely my African one, rather than a Western one. In this, I am able to experience a movement away from experiencng my identity as an abstract category to be defended, and to place my centre elsewhere (in what I enjoy doing), rather than in my ego.
Yes. You know, I’ve always thought of the penchant for identity as a particularly “American” phenomenon but it is perhaps Western more generally. One has of course one’s identification with the regions where one has been acculturated, and so on, but this is not abstract.
Maybe what is so weird about abstract identity is that one may proclaim it and claim it but it is not actually a product of what one does, of one’s actual interactions with others. Ane therein lies the problem — it turns out that one’s identity is far less mutable than I had supposed. If I have an evil identity, I am stuck with it, because the identity is not based upon anything I might do or not do. (A white African identity is by definition an evil identity.) But then there are those who are defined as by their natures benevolent — bosses, males in authority and fathers. There are those defined as by their natures hysterical — women, females in authority. There is very little you can do about this. Your real behaviour can be the total opposite to your formal identity, but the second even a hint of what people believe to have been essentially there slips out, everybody goes nuts with confirming their prejudices.
By the way, I’ll look at your draft.
I just woke from a dream which had me passing alongside a set of shops late at night. There was then some kind of late night picnic, and everybody left, leaving behind some library books. I picked them up from everywhere they were scattered. One was underneath a table leg, propping up an uneven table. So I grabbed them all, until my arms were overflowing. I also looked inside the glove box of the car we had hired to drive. There were my two pairs of glasses, which I retrieved. As I did, I asked a question about them: “This is not my legacy or is it?” I think the answer was, “Yes it is, yes it is.” Then I offered some big guy who was in the bus or truck with us to have one of the books, but someone told me that I wasn’t free to give them to him, so I offered to buy him a book of his choice. “Is it okay? Would you like that?” The guy seemed a little slow, but assured me that he would.
First comment – yes. Dream – so, getting people to read is your legacy? Or: You find books, public books, by chance and accept them and want to share them. Your legacy is reading them, looking at them, disseminating them, propagating them … ?
my legacy is a couple of spectacles. That is all. Bad eyesight.
Or at least, this was a dream about the material remnants of intellectual work — what remains from it; what is tangible.
I read your paper. It’s very fine. You seem to have covered all the escape routes back into more conventional thinking about identity.
Dream – that’s also true. I dream of offices in which water pipes have burst!
Paper – thanks! If the ideas still seem current (you’ll have seen that the citations are old) I will update it (much has been written) and put it in my book. It was hard to publish where I tried, at least, because disagreement with that author is considered to be misunderstanding – especially by someone whose name is in English, as mine is!
I think the ideas are still relevant. They make more sense than periphery and centre, as you have pointed out.
OK. Got it! 🙂
I think that we’re still coming out of an academic mode of high theory (concerning identity as an abstraction) into a mode that is determined by other qualities more tangible. You write of borderlands that take “serious, life-changing work to enter”. This idea invokes the tangible and the emotional aspects of being. So this engages in a movement out of the mire of pure theory. Who knows when we will finally break out of the conceptual bubble of high theory as typical or defining academic practice? It seems so much a part of the 80s, but we are still not free.
It is really 80s, but having gone to graduate school then I remember that it was just something we did in class, or observed as a sometimes phenomenon of
social life. Now academia is moving beyond it but it has taken over many other spheres!!!
Somewhat related is this video, on (against) the sophistry of G.W. Bush:
http://amfunknola.blogspot.com/2008/05/thanks-keith-olberman.html
I’ll have a look at the video. I’ve just finished my draft on the master race masturbation (on my site). I think the Nietzsche references in it are a bit unclear but can be fixed up later.
I saw half the video. Sometimes videos tend to jam half way. Yes, it is very good. You really wonder why people don’t say this sort of stuff more often, because Bush’s sophistry really isn’t all that intellectual — it’s just a form of mimickry of certain attitudinal stances. Somehow it really rings false at an innate level (even if you weren’t sure if there were WMD or not, the very manner in which the message was delivered disinclines you to believe that it is genuine communication).
So I think we are stuck at the level of reading regurgitated and stereotypical gesture, and mistaking it for the real thing. But this is monkey stuff. Perhaps the real problem is that monkey language is genuinely something new for us — a relative novelty brought on by social darwinists who take Darwin too literally? Monkey language definitely levels the playing field (something the rightists themselves say can’t be done) by making the narcissist’s imitative language of gesture into the standard language of communication. So, we no longer come to expect subtelty in communication — and as a consequence our ears are no longer attuned to subtle cues that could enable us to distinguish truth from lying.
Correct. And somehow related: I heard that a study was done of aphasiacs, who do not understand language as we do but who easily distinguish truthfulness and deceit. Apparently the subjects in the study were very amused by Ronald Reagan’s speeches, even if they did not understand the content, because he was so clearly lying.
very interesting.
Aphasiacs, i believe hold a valid key to some un known truth!
You know, I hear the military is searching for the best and brightest…. they have journalist related “careers.” As a fun exercise, go to goarmy.com and view their MOS for “46Q.”
Then, laugh.