THE AMBIVALENCESOF BECOMING A PROFESSOR INNEOLIBERAL ACADEMIA
Introduction
PhD students: Tell us what is it like to be a professor?
Professor: I don’t know.... Everything goes so fast that I feel I really have to think about this before I can say anything. It’s confusing, that I can say.
PhD student: Why don’t you write an article about becoming a professor?
The present text was inspired by the above conversation in a pub after a daylong workshop on bringing critical thinking into life in the Academia. The doctoral students involved in the discussion were part of the research community that the young professor was associated with. The question proposed to her in the pub remained in her mind, and after along consideration she decided to write the proposed article. She had become curious about the process of academicity, where being a culturally intelligible academic was understood as acitational and reiterative discursive practice within multiple and contradictory power-knowledge relations, as Eva Bendix Petersen has written (Petersen 2008, 56). For the young professor academicity was about doing, a continuous cultural and discursive practice by which the discourse produces the effects that it names (see also Butler 1990). Throughout her ‘academic career’ she had inquired about the possibilities to know and to theorize, and then wanted to write about the complexity and multidimensionality ofacademicity. She wanted to write about the process of seeing what framed her seeing, as a process of establishing a dialogue with readers about which discursive policy was being followed (see Lather 1993). As a young professor, she wanted to create something interesting but also politically relevant.
As a consequence, this paper became a mode of the drifting (KurkiIkävalko, forthcoming; IkävalkoKurki 2013) of experiences of a young female academic, a critical scholar who recently became a tenure track professor of social justice and equality in education in a Nordic ‘model-country of equality’.[1]Tenure track meant that she had to satisfy certain prerequisites in order to acquire a permanent professorship. She began as an assistant professor after which time she could apply for an associate professorship – if she passed the evaluationprocess. The prerequisites included publishing international (English-language) articles in top scientific journals (English[2]), demonstrating leadership, developing teaching, supervising doctoral students andobtaining funding. She was evaluated by a board which included several professors from the Faculty. The system was still quite new to her,and to the University as well so it was not easy for her to find exact information about the process and what precisely was expected of her. She just knew she had to produce much of everything.
By utilizing a written diary, notes from meetings, discussions in academia, and extracts from her lectures she wanted to ask how discursive constructions related to academicitytook hold of her body, took hold of her desire, and how certain discursive constructions were appropriated while others were discarded, relegated as irrelevant or even threatening (Petersen 2008, 55). She wanted to inquire about the conditions of academicity’s emergence and operation. She aimed to write the article in many ways, starting from different places, then from the middle, trying each time to catch ‘some of the threads of the rhizome’ (see also Guttorm 2014).
As someone who took societal power relations seriously, the young professor wanted to becontinually aware of the discourses through which people speak about themselves and are spoken about by others (Davies 2005). She chose to focus on her experience as ayoung professor at the centre of a particular situation. She believed that this would helpher to findthe fault lines in academic discourses,break them open and then find new discourses and subject positions to be able to continue as a critical scholar and politically active academic. She chose to write in the third person in order to create a critical distance from some events that were difficult to write about. By writing in the third person she tried to avoid ‘too easy’ ideas about voice, voice as present, coherent and stable. She wanted to find a way to troubleher own voice that engaged with the power relations that produce voices (Mazzzei & Jackson 2009). In the article, the concept of experience was not used in the sense of individuals having experiences (or the origin of an explanation), but about academic subjects who constitute themselves and are constituted as experiencing subjects (Davies et al. 2006, 17).
Of becoming
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) thinking on rhizomes enabled her to envision an article as something always becoming, in the middle, in between, as an assemblage and as a multiplicity. As with Deleuze, she also saw subjectivity as nomadic andrhizomatic(DeleuzeGuattari 1980/1987). Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre has called this the subject undone (St. Pierre, 2004). Theoretical resources from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, GayatriChakravortySpivak and Patti Lather, Bronwyn Davies and Elisabeth Adams St. Pierre provided a rather intriguingopportunityto take the notion of power and the patterns of power ofacademicity seriously. For the young professor, particularly interesting was to see how they shapedacademic subjects.
As Bronwyn Davies and her colleagues argue: ‘Encounters with poststructuralism enables the subject to see itself in all its shifting, contradictory multiplicity and fragility, and also to see the ongoing and constitutive force of the multiple discourses through which it takes up its existence’ (Davies et al. 2006, 91). Or asRosiBraidotti (1994) wrote in Nomadic Subjects, we do not speak languages, but languages speak us. She was keen on poststructural theory because itconstantly challenged her to rethink what she was doing - about research, about knowledge, and how to understand the world. Feminist researchhelped her realize that for the researcher no outside positions were available. Hunting for a more liberating or emancipatory approach to determining “right or wrong” with respect to academicitywas only going to reproduce the problems that academic work was already facing.
As several researchers had already argued, becoming a recognizable subject in academia means learning how to present oneself the “right way” (Davies 2005; Petersen 2008). Accordingly, once aprofessor is categorized as such, she soon learnshow to belong to that particular category, and thus become submissive to her professorship-ness. If one does not succeed in producing the right kind of discourse, the responsibility remains a problem for the individual herself. The young professor had become aware of this well beforehand, so instead of just settling these doubts passively, she decided to work them out by choosing a method that would allow her to utilize her experiences in academia.
She was excited aboutthe idea of becoming. Judith Butler had written that becomingis no simple or continuous affair, but an uneasy practice of repetition and risks, compelled yet incomplete, wavering on the horizon of social being (Butler 1997, 30; Petersen 2008). Butler’s and Davies’s accounts of subject and agency provided a way of understanding agency as a subject-in-process,and as the redeployment and effect of power (Butler 1997; Davies 1998). Butler had written that “the subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process” (Butler 1992, 13; Davies 2005, 1).
She hopefully thought that, accordingly, if academicitywas a regulated process of repetition taking place in discourses, it simultaneously meant that the possibility exists to repeat it differently. Because the capacity to act was not a possession, there was no need for a pre-existing subject with agency (Butler 1997; Pulkkinen 2003). When involved in academic discourses one wasboth conditioned by and dependent on the prevailing norms, and at the same timeneeded to find one’s way ethically and responsibly (c.f. Butler 2008).So it was the paradoxical simultaneity of submission and mastery, and the related ambivalence,that was explored (Davies 2006). The dual nature of subjection was so readily (mis)understood in the binary structure of western languages as necessarily either submission or mastery, but not both. The idea that began to take this article forwards was that conditions of possibility for the subject itself required both. And while writing,there was of course always frustration with the fixed meanings of language and the ways words once put on a page reflected static positions. The negotiations needed not to be an either/or dilemma, rather both/and (see also Author 2009).
The young scholar had recently become acquainted with concepts from what is known as the affective turn (BjergStaunaes 2011; Massumi 2002). She was interested in seeing how performing academicity seemed to energize the register of affectivity. Bjerg et al. referred to Massumi (2002) by talking about how the subject was managed through offers of being moved by a special affectivity or intensity, which in turn refers to the increase and decrease of tensions and quality in affects, atmosphere, senses and emotions. So for further specification of the vitalization, forces and leeway or lines of flight that are implied byacademicity she added the production of affectivity to her analysis. In her definition of affect she agreed with Massumi (2002), who described how the concept of affectivity includes moods, sensations, sense perceptions and sentiments that affect and move us in different ways. The use of the word ‘affect’ rather than ‘feeling’ was an attempt to appreciate intensities as expressed in the body (Bjerg et al. 2011).
Revisiting the data and analysis
The young professor became interested in the work ofPrecarias a la Deriva, which was a collaborative initiative between research and activism arising from the feminist social centerLa EskaleraKarakola in Madrid. She first heard about it from her PhD students as a mode of drifting (IkävalkoetKurki 2014; Kurki andAuthor 2014). She learned that Precarias a la Deriva was a group of feminist activists who refused to sit still and instead chose a method that would take them on a series of itineraries through the metropolitan circuits of precarious work. The group had written that these derives(drifting) through the city defied the division between work and life, production and reproduction, public and private, to trace the spatial-temporal continuum of existence, the double (or multiple) presence. By utilizing various kinds of data (e.g. discussions, reflections, video and audio-recordings), they went out with the hope of communicating the experience and the hypotheses they might derive from it, taking their own communication seriously, not only as a tool of diffusion but as primary material for politics (Precarias a la Deriva 2004).
Inspired by this kind of mode of drifting in the same way her doctoral students had been inspired earlier,she revisited and reconsidered her data. Mode of drifting she understoodas a research that is embodied in different times, places and spaces (Ikävalko & al. 2013).She decided that no data was to beconsidered as evidence of ‘truth’, and no data wasgiven precedence over any other. She began by gathering a number of informal discussions from academia. In addition,she utilized memories from these encounters while keeping in mind that this kind of data could be considered“incoherent”. She understood data to be something that wasalways partial, incomplete, and always in the process of re-telling and re-membering(Jackson & Mazzei 2012;Kurki & Author 2014; Ikävalko & al. in press).
In her article, the emphasis on language referred to a domain of struggles: conflicts over what was or was not true and who had the power to pronounce the truth. The focus, therefore, was on the effects, what language does, and what it enables academics to imagine and to do to themselves as well as others. This helped the young professor to write about discourse as a fairly consistent system of meanings circulating in policies, practices and everyday conversations in academia (Foucault 1976/1990). What wasconsidered as important, what was focused on, what was left unsaid, what was regarded as central and as marginal, was defined by discourses (Foucault 2000). Understanding discourse in this sense enabled her to analyse the structure of the forms of power connected to the politics and practices of becoming a professor. It also allowedlooking for more fluid perspectives concerning both the subject and agency. Furthermore, for her, combining an affective with poststructural turn enabled expanding the concept of performativity as a way of thinking in relation not only to language, but also affectivity and materiality (see also, Bjerg et al. 2011).
The constant ambivalences
There is hardly anything about You. You need to show from the beginning that You have created this, You have done this, You have led this…You need to put yourself in the centre. (Feedback received from some of the young professor’s colleagues on her application before submitting it, 2012)
It already began while sitting alone at her desk on a summer morningwhen she decided to apply for the professorship. ‘Now or never’, she thought. She wrote the application over a period of two weeks, carefully writing and rewriting. Her mother hadjust died two months earlier and she sadly dreamed about discussing this with her. Yes, your daughter is applying to become a professor, how about that Mom! As part of her application she was requested to submit a work plan for the next five years. She wrote enthusiastically aboutthe importance of acknowledging power and strengthening collectivity and democracy. She realized how precious and unique this professorship was. She wanted to use it to create a stronger critical and democratic community which because of academic capitalism and constant competition currently seemed to be lacking at the moment. She was already excited about Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s idea of rhizome (DeleuzeGuattari 1980) and dreamed about the community as rhizomatic. She thought that her professorship would provide resources and enough authority for the kind of development she hoped for the whole community, even for someone who was young, female and a critical scholar.
But she also knew it would sound naïve.She had exactly the same feeling after her colleague commented on her application. She quickly shortened the parts concerning collectivity and democracy. Shewas aware she had to perform individuality, effectiveness, and the ability to be in charge because that was what performing academicity meant. She wrote the words ‘I have done’, ‘I have created’, ‘I have developed’, feeling shame and betrayal due to neglecting the most important lesson she had learned from critical research, that knowledge is always produced collectively. The biggest struggle started from exactly there, she thought later. She began to struggle to achieve and maintain recognition as a legitimate and relevant subject – in relation to others and, simultaneously, in relation to herself,which was sometimes contradictoryas Petersen has written about scienticity and academic subjects (Petersen 2008).
…and, once again, these achievements demonstrate academic standing and leadership.
She appears highly active and proficient, capable of becoming a leading figure in terms of research and teaching.
The candidate shows strong leadership.
(Extracts from her tenure professorship evaluation, 2013)
The whole application process could be thought of as an operation of the mechanisms of power where the soon-to-become professor served as a vehicle of complex power/knowledge relations. Theillusion of individual autonomy within academia was created through the process as a consequence of the constant ‘autonomisation’ and ‘responsiblisation’ of the self. The young womanhad learned to utilise the same discourse, as a way to perform ‘discourse virtuosity’, as she herself had conceptualised the ambivalent position of being a critical scholar and a feminist researcher (Author 2009). She also became aware that not everyone was happy with her nomination. Competition for the position had been fierce, and had created tension in the community. One person approached her implying that she was not chosen because of her expertise but rather because she was able to perform neoliberal ideals of individual leadership. She chose to ignore such comments as part of letting off of steam following the tension her nomination had created. But she also knew she was performing leadership in accordance with what was expected of her. Much hadhappened before this application process when becoming an academic and being subject to, and vehicle for, a myriad of discourses and subject positions (Davies and Harré 2000).
You need to toughen yourself. People will envy you and challenge you constantly but you must avoid showing feelings in order to look strong. In difficult situations, just try to look as neutral as possible.
Now it’s all about you, only you. You’re the boss.
Everyone will look up to you now.
Yes, you will be watched.
The extracts above were meant to be friendly advicefor the young professor fromcolleaguesand friends after she had assumed her new position.She also asked for advice because she felt she had suddenly been thrown into the deep end and had to show she could swim. She thanked her colleagues for the advice as a good girl should,replying that she would try to do her best. At the same time she felt uncertain and devastated. She knew she was in an ambivalent position. On the one hand she had to perform individualistically but on the other she wanted to put her position into a more political use, as a resource to be utilised by the academic community.