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The Body of the (Humanities) Academic, or, "What is an Academic"

Ruth Barcan
all rights reserved
http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Sept-1996/barcan.html

". . . one cannot avoid having to objectify the objectifying subject"


Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, xii
In this paper, I want to refuse the traditional caricature of the academic as a
disembodied rationality -- an egg-head in an ivory tower -- and focus
instead on the academic's body. I want to consider the effects of various
discursive constructions of "the" academic on academic practice and to
speculate about the possible bodily effects of such constructions...
Contemporary academics are situated simultaneously within a number of
different models of professional practice: scholarly, bureaucratic and
managerial/corporate. These models can be thought of as discourses in the
Foucauldian sense: that is, they are modes of knowledge that involve the
operations of power, that are produced within institutions, and that
produce a certain kind of social subject -- in this case, different versions of
"the academic." Each of these discourses produces a paradigm of what is
thinkable, sayable, or do-able as an academic... In the simultaneous, if
contested and uneven, existence of a number of models for understanding
academic work, and given the perennial competition for infrastructural
support, the body of the individual academic seems to me to be one prime
site where attempts to reconcile their multiple and often competing
demands may be played out...

The paradigm of the university as a corporate service provider works


alongside discourses of quality and accountability. Quality's mysterious
acquisition of an upper-case "Q" marks for me its shift from an adjective to
a noun -- from attribute to commodity. Attributes are hard to see and even
harder to measure, so in order for the institution to reap the financial
rewards associated with "Quality," attributes must be rendered visible. The
exigencies of the evaluation system soon begin to constitute the academic
practices under scrutiny: if one's teaching is to be judged by an externally
determined set of criteria, and financial reward is to ensue from this, then it
is not long before practices change in order to meet the evaluation criteria
rather than emanating from independently determined (and pedagogically
informed) aims and objectives.
In relation to teaching, the primary product is academic courses
themselves, which are now routinely evaluated according to the business
logic of "quality control." Student evaluation is framed as an impersonal
process, but it may produce personalised outcomes -- both "positive" and
"negative" -- which, either way, belie the supposed neutrality of the
academic as service provider. For academic courses are not commodities or
services emanating from distant or unidentifiable sites of production, even
though universities may increasingly function as corporations. At least in
the Humanities, they are idiosyncratic and individual -- designed, taught
and implemented by identifiable individuals, increasingly so, as monolithic
disciplines and course structures fragment into smaller and less generic
units.
The inextricability of the academic's life and work, on which the scholarly
model reposes, sits uncomfortably with the service-provider model, which
opens up the product to scrutiny. Moreover, the logic of product
evaluation comes to exert an influence over the intellectual and
pedagogical practices of the academic; intellectual paradigms, lecturing
styles and content areas may become subject to the logic of market
"appeal." It is within such a discursive context that I sympathise with some
of the staff anxieties associated with student evaluation.
The university course functions as both a corporate product and a product
of the interests, labour and "personality" of an individual scholar; the site of
intersection of these two framings is the personage of the academic. The
lecturer's "performance style" -- inseparable from his/her embodied
"personality" -- becomes subjected to market scrutiny under the guise of
neutral product evaluation. Evaluation places the academic under the gaze
of the student, academic colleagues, university administration and

promotions committees, and, ultimately, under the self-scrutinising gaze of


the academic herself... Academics are also scrutinised as producers of
teaching materials. Staff in-servicing is one mechanism of effecting the
required corporatisation of product. The logic at work is that academics are
preparing a quality commodity for their customers.
The monitoring of other kinds of "output" -- especially research output-takes place across a wide spectrum of modes of visibility -- from the
writing of reports (every two months at my institution), to the construction
of the academic persona via the curriculum vitae, to promotions
committees, academic gossip, and even the joyous celebration of book
launches.
Finally, in a classic Foucauldian formulation, such intense surveillance
functions most powerfully as thoroughly internalised self-surveillance,
overdetermined by such very different factors as the desire for promotion,
the pleasure in creating an academic persona, a commitment to social
change or the advancement of knowledge, a belief in the importance of the
disciplinary framework in which one works, and the traditional scholarly
inseparability of research work and personal pleasure...
I am not attempting to disentangle the complex knot of value associated
with research output -- the interweaving of pleasure, pain, choice, desire,
social conscience, prestige, and coercion. The point is, of course, that no
such separations are possible; neither in terms of values and affectivities,
intellectual functions, nor even in terms of working hours, since the
simultaneous invocation within universities of both scholarly and
bureaucratic discourses means that weekends and evenings are not the
automatic province of the private, the bureaucratic or the corporate
intellectual.
It is, however, my contention that the gross mismatch between the pressure
to "produce" and the time allocated for research work means that the
individual body/person must attempt to deal with the resultant structural
feelings of inadequacy, and the perceived systemic surveillance. Academics
are structurally inadequate by dint of working in output-driven institutions
and within intellectual paradigms organised around a logic that renders us
always already not good enough: that is, the logic of "yes, but" that
structures much academic interchange. Much of the critical enterprise is
organised around the premise that knowledge is advanced through only
temporary, provisional, contextual or partial acceptance of any truth claim,
and quite often through outright rejection of such claims.

Thus the knowledge practices of Humanities disciplines are usually linear


and forward looking, and often adversarial and contestatorial in their deep
structures, even at their most collegial and friendly. They proceed from a
subtle and delicate interplay between consensual and adversarial
knowledges -- between the underlying set of paradigms or assumptions
that can be held to be true at any historical moment for a particular
community of scholars, and the always-open-to-debate claims of any one
scholar at any moment within those paradigms. As Bourdieu puts it, the
academic field is "that site of permanent rivalry for the truth of the social
world and of the academic world itself" (xiii).
The complex relations between the corporate body and the individual
academic body are epitomised in this: an academic's research output will
affect the funding of his/her department, which will, in turn, affect staffing
levels and therefore, ultimately, the availability of time for research...
In the face of the multiple and often competing demands of several
paradigms of academic work, bodies can collapse... The difficulties of
obtaining scarce infrastructural and financial resources, as well as the
individualising logic of such tenacious notions as "coping" or "not coping"
mean that it is all too often individual bodies that carry the weight of the
overlay of and gaps between the various scholarly, bureaucratic and
manergerial/corporate discourses.
It is a hazardous academic enterprise to speculate as to some of the
symbolic bodily economies that might be called into play by academic life.
If there is indeed a deeply symbolic dimension to the constitution of our
bodies, then bodies must surely signify, above all, the singularities of the
life they constitute. Can there really be an academic body, or even a range
of academic bodies? What about the possible corporeal effects of academic
temporal rhythms? The feast-or-famine rhythms of study leave, for
example, where, typically, three years of gross overwork are followed by
six months of paid relief; or the metaphors of input and output that govern
corporate and bureaucratic understandings of research? Is the increased
difficulty in balancing input of time and output of research a kind of
bulimic or anorexic rhythm, where ingestion, digestion and evacuation are
out of balance and where output can by definition never be sufficient? And
might these rhythms be productive of actual bodies?
These are questions I cannot and dare not answer. But I will say that a tacit
and insidious equation between stress or weariness and professionalism
has begun to creep in to academic life. I have heard "jokes" already in

which looking well, fit or happy is interpreted as a sign of underwork. I


take this as an ultimately logical, if perverted, response to professional
overload, and I find it highly alarming that such jocular observations are
underpinned by an increasingly internalised mutual or self surveillance.
Thus, in a very tight employment market, stress (or the visible markers
thereof) functions increasingly and paradoxically as a signifier of both
professionalism and weakness. The right amount of stress shows that you
are working hard enough; too much stress signifies the body/person that
"can't cope," and therefore has no place in the strangled employment
market of academia. The tired body may signify professionalism, but the
less-than-well body signifies corporate deficiency. Having tipped one over
some finely drawn and invisible line, the sick body signifies
unproductivity, inability to cope, moral, intellectual and professional
"weakness." Thus, by mutual surveillance and an increasingly internalised
self surveillance, we come to know who "is" or "isn't" up to the rigours of
an increasingly demanding profession. To some extent, whilever the
academic marketplace is so strained, employed academics are condemned
to an almost daily performance of their right to a job, and the same
principle, working differently, applies to unemployed academics...
I see a number of possible long-term consequences of such framings of the
body. Many academics suffer from a chronic ability to "cope"; if illness is
one of the few occasions for pause given legitimacy within workplace
culture, bodily illness would seem to me a logical material solution for
those driven by an over-enthusiastic work ethic and a strong sense of
professional responsibility...
I am concerned that if the overworked and over-policed bodies of the
Australian academic community are not given more institutional and
bodily space, then they may not have the strength, energy or staying power
to research those matters of more urgent social import that ought more
properly to be their object of attention.
Ruth Barcan lectures in Cultural Studies at the University of Western Sydney.
This is an extract from a paper to be published in a forthcoming issue of Southern
Review.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus. Trans. Peter Collier. Cambridge: Polity,
1988.

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" In Josu Harari (ed.) Textual


Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1979. 141-160.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
Harmondsworth: Penguin-Peregrine, 1979.

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