Mission statements
I am trying to put together a proposal for a PhD. This means thinking about what I think I ought to be doing, what the whole enterprise of history, even academia as a whole consists of. As I develop answers to these questions, I wonder if I am pre-emptively ducking the real problem. The horrible realization that quickly dawns on graduate students is that the primary activity of undergraduate work - criticizing others - is a lot easier than actually producing work yourself. This produces massive amounts of self-doubt, even amongst the most arrogant. After all this time wondering why so many intellectuals go so far wrong (they cannot all simply be stupid or lazy) you ultimately begin to wonder whether you might end up as one of the 'bad guys', producing stupid, unreflective, unreadable work that will make readers cringe at the gaping holes in your argument and the awkwardness of your over-edited prose.
Foucault seems to offer an answer: since it is obviously easier to criticize than to do it yourself, then stick to criticism. "My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual."
Doesn't he make it sound so appealing? So edified? So defensible? But a nagging doubt remains. Does all this mean we have given up on representing the past? Are we happy to abandon that project as flawed or hopeless? Doesn't this kind of attitude involve some kind of fundamental denial of all the problems connected with the (un)knowability of the past that give history all its meaning? Can one go looking for the freedom people do not know they have when we are hardly any closer to understanding what it means to be free? Or maybe the answer is the opposite. Maybe it is necessary to go looking for the freedom people do not know they have in order to find out what it means to be free.
Or maybe what is needed is enough humility to understand that a single work will never uncover what it means to be free, but it could form part of a whole that goes somewhere useful. And after all, perhaps the critical approach makes the humble nature of such work a little easier to swallow - when you have as many people angry with you as Foucault did (and still has), you must be doing something right. And perhaps it is necessary to focus on process as much as result. "If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?" Constantly delaying a sense of satisfaction or achievement to an unspecified, and always advancing, future point (submission/acceptance/publication) is what really drives graduate students mad. We are all here to learn, after all - can't it be pleasure enough to reach an understanding of a concept, or better, to catch a glimpse of that enigmatic freedom that the idealistic among us see beneath the most dreadful oppression. (The question of why those who insist on the centrality of freedom to be grasped appear so obsessed with concentrated power and unfreedom will have to wait for another day).
Foucault seems to offer an answer: since it is obviously easier to criticize than to do it yourself, then stick to criticism. "My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual."
Doesn't he make it sound so appealing? So edified? So defensible? But a nagging doubt remains. Does all this mean we have given up on representing the past? Are we happy to abandon that project as flawed or hopeless? Doesn't this kind of attitude involve some kind of fundamental denial of all the problems connected with the (un)knowability of the past that give history all its meaning? Can one go looking for the freedom people do not know they have when we are hardly any closer to understanding what it means to be free? Or maybe the answer is the opposite. Maybe it is necessary to go looking for the freedom people do not know they have in order to find out what it means to be free.
Or maybe what is needed is enough humility to understand that a single work will never uncover what it means to be free, but it could form part of a whole that goes somewhere useful. And after all, perhaps the critical approach makes the humble nature of such work a little easier to swallow - when you have as many people angry with you as Foucault did (and still has), you must be doing something right. And perhaps it is necessary to focus on process as much as result. "If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?" Constantly delaying a sense of satisfaction or achievement to an unspecified, and always advancing, future point (submission/acceptance/publication) is what really drives graduate students mad. We are all here to learn, after all - can't it be pleasure enough to reach an understanding of a concept, or better, to catch a glimpse of that enigmatic freedom that the idealistic among us see beneath the most dreadful oppression. (The question of why those who insist on the centrality of freedom to be grasped appear so obsessed with concentrated power and unfreedom will have to wait for another day).
posted by UK plc at 12:24 AM
0 comments
