w(h)ither liberalism?

The work of Michel Foucault has had a deep impact on theorizing in gender studies, queer theory, critical disability studies, and other critical theoretical investigations of the production of certain types of embodiment. In particular, Foucault’s work on discipline, surveillance, power-knowledge, and biopower remain current in academic publication. Even when Foucault’s way of working or his analysis is criticized, the basic conceptual frameworks he developed in books like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality continue to underlie and underwrite critical theoretical investigations.

What is usually left behind is Foucault’s insistence on periodization in the production of power-knowledge. This theme, most prominently examined in Foucault’s pre-genealogical, transitional work The Order of Things, should caution us to resist positivist impulses to totalize any theory. In the game of academic publication, the posture of positivist totalization is a significant display of dominance, so it continues.
 
In so far as the theorist is dissatisfied with every partial truth, the theorist should interrogate the way that a given theory appears true—under what historical and political conditions, under what episteme (remember those?), under what regime. When times change, the ground shifts, and with it eventually the groundwork of theoretical knowledge.¹ And times have changed.
 
Foucault explored the births of the clinic, the prison, and sexuality. They share a general historical-political context, which in all cases coincides with the development of bourgeois industrial capitalism. To my knowledge, Foucault did not write anything about the development of capitalism that would parallel his theorizing about the clinic, the prison, and sexuality. My guess is that this was because of academic politics of the day, but an interesting thought would be that it is because capitalism was too base for Foucault’s theoretical tastes or capacity. In any case, these are all contemporaries, age peers.²
 
The basic set-up of capitalism has changed a great deal, even since Foucault’s death. Multinational corporations have overtaken the capacity of any state to control them, and the state and all institutions are being broken down, restructured and rebuilt through the auspices of corporations. Among the institutions undergoing this radical change are the clinic, the prison, and sexuality—and also identity, language, music.
 
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality both rely on a notion of the individual as the site of power-knowledge, produced through the construction of subjectivity, self-consciousness (a word Foucault eschewed), and self-identity. The Panopticon relentlessly called upon the prisoner to attend to himself as prisoner, to become penitent, and eventually to become productive citizen. For that power-knowledge to effectuate that conversion, the individual implicitly had to understand himself in terms of identity-within-society, as a person-with-personhood, as one who would be held to account, and to whom this account should be significant as a matter of who he was. Individuals-as-persons were needed, and their self-surveillance was needed. To become “docile”—Foucault’s name for the ideal type of socially productive, well-adjusted citizen-body—one must be interpellated as social being, as a being whose identity within society could matter.
 
On the other side of the ledger, the anonymous bearer of power-knowledge was subjectivized into a hierarchical, bureaucratic position by way of achievements of docility (e.g., earning PhDs, moving up the corporate ladder, etc.) The fundamental attributes of power-knowledge, leaving aside all details of their nominal spheres of endeavor, are the capacity to produce knowledge, the capacity to produce docile bodies, and the capacity to produce and reproduce its own hierarchical bureaucracy. In short, at its base, power-knowledge requires a division of labor and a division of social control that depends on every member doing the assigned work in the assigned time in the prescribed fashion. Without bureaucratization, the liberal institutions Foucault interrogated could not continue to exist.
 
Where we are now is a situation in which systems of bureaucratization and hierarchy are in crisis. Obviously, this is not due to a proletariat revolution.³ It is due to the contradiction inherent in bureaucratization as a form of power. Perhaps the exemplar of bureaucratization in our computerized, networked society is the dominance of control and decision algorithms for guiding financial, industrial, and other major economic behaviors. The relationship between computer systems which wield power-knowledge and individuals upon whom power-knowledge inscribes and prescribes is at so abstract a remove from lived experience that it is barely intelligible. To most individuals, most of the time, it is invisible not only in its production of oneself as a subject, but also in its prescriptions.
 
I am not personally very interested in knowing how my credit scores are arrived at, and I am not suggesting, nor am I interested in the notion that computer systems control my life. My point is this: the fundamental arrangement of power-knowledge has gone past the models Foucault concerned himself with. The persistence, omnipresence and invisibility of power-knowledge in the shape of something like a credit score makes it appear to fit Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon. But if I am not aware of being in prison at all, if I do not or can not understand myself as a consumer, for instance, then I can not be subjectivized as such.

To conclude this all too briefly. Industrial capitalism needs workers—that is, subjects who work, subjects who are conscious of themselves as workers, who are accountable for being productive, industrious, conscientious, and “free.” The institutions of power-knowledge belonging to the era of industrial capitalism likewise need subjects who are conscious of themselves and who are accountable for having knowable identities.
 
It is not clear to me at all that consumer capitalism needs consumers who are subjects conscious of themselves as consumers. Consumers need not be accountable at all. In this era, we are not called to account as productive, industrious, conscientious, and least of all as “free,” despite (because of?) the cultural currency of these brand names.⁴ While it may appear as if advertising and marketing has taken on a decisive role as the Panopticon of Panopticons in our era, the programming of consuming does not rely on the production of subjectivity in anything like the sense Foucault analyzed. Instead of power exerted to produce an affirmative active subject, consumer capitalism produces a passive recipient/perceiver.

---

<sup>1. I have always suspected that Foucault was deeply Hegelian, especially in the archaeological period: theorization of power-knowledge always comes on the scene too late to effect change. Critics who charge that Foucault provided no basis for action are fundamentally correct. The owl of Minerva flies only at the coming of the dusk.↩
2. We ought to be struck by the way Foucault’s analyses, even of power-knowledge, assumes the relative stability of bourgeois industrial capitalism and its production and reproduction of power. Who or what else could be power if it is the nameless, identity-less, universal that Foucault suggests? Who or what else could be everywhere at once, underlying all social forms, all forms of knowledge, all institutions? Being? God?↩
3. If anything, the contrary: it is due to the crisis of industrial capitalism, and the proximity of its catastrophe. ↩
4. The hierarchical relations of our age are beginning to resemble feudalism more than industrial capitalism.↩</sup>

academic freedom vs. freedom

 “This much understood term refers to the set of practices such as tenure and faculty governance that allow academics to generate new knowledge in an unfettered manner and to disseminate that knowledge using pedagogic practices that inspire critical thinking among students. With this freedom comes responsibility: scholars must conform to the mores of their disciplines, and their behavior is monitored through a network of institutions that enforce such professional conduct.”
     -- Ashley Dawson, in “Columbia versus America” in Dangerous Professors, p. 227.

Wow.

A very strange turn on academic freedom would be to consider freedom in Foucault’s sense. Freedom would be the “recalcitrance” and “intransigence” of the one to whom power is applied by various forms of governmentality. Freedom subsists in the shape of resistance to subjection, to the disciplinary regimes of social institutions/knowledges. For instance, freedom could describe the dubiousness of a person who avoids complying with a doctor’s firm advice to get a blood test, on the basis that this person is not eager to have the result, and not eager to be subjected to a regimen of treatment based on the result. Freedom could also describe the condition of incomplete or imperfect discipline of a person who has undergone schooling but resists proper performances of mandatory school tasks. Freedom is also the name of the condition of possibility of being disciplined through one or another regime of power. It is prior to discipline and power, and Foucault suggests that freedom is expressed by the choice of which regime to become subject to.

Freedom in this sense is certainly at odds with a demand of conformity to mores of a discipline — academic or otherwise. Dawson’s account suggests a freedom of means rather than ends, in as much as the “academics” will adhere to standards and practices of generating and disseminating knowledge. Obviously, the monitoring of behavior is subjection to surveillance in Foucault’s sense. So the situation Dawson calls academic freedom would be anything but. It would be academic autonomy, but not freedom.

Academic freedom, taking freedom in Foucault’s sense, might mean resistance to those very forms of discipline, responsibility, and moral normalization — not necessarily rejecting them, but treating them with recalcitrance.

I’m not sure where, if anywhere, to take this. I don't know if it makes sense to modify freedom with academic (or anything else).

ethics and ethical subjects

In short, for an action to be “moral,” it must not be reducible to an act or a series of acts conforming to a rule, a law, or a value. Of course all moral action involves a relationship with the reality in which it is carried out, and a relationship with the self. The latter is not simply “self-awareness” but self-formation as an “ethical subject,” a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines his position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. And this requires him to act upon himself, to monitor, test, improve, and transform himself. (Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, p. 28)

These lines crystallized the paper on faculty ethical responsibilities in the era of precariousness. I took the 4700 words I had yesterday, cut about 600, rearranged everything in the last 7 pages after inserting this quotation and some discussion of Foucault's ethics, wrote an additional 800 words, then cut 400 more. So, after 5 hours of work on this thing today, I've now got 4400 words. Sometimes it feels like I'm writing backwards.

Here's a weird thought: if Foucault were at all committed to Enlightenment notions of Reason, one could take this "ethical subject" stuff to mean something closely approximating Kohlberg's rational stage of moral development -- the one he found so little evidence anybody ever actually achieved. After all, Foucault is suggesting that ethics is a matter of deliberately, and in everyday practice, forming oneself as a certain kind of moral subject, and not rule-following.

(By the way, music cue: Queen, "I Want to Break Free.")

In the paper I argue that tenuous-track faculty can do, and do, exactly this, through the very active groups that form the nucleus of the contingent faculty movement in North America: COCAL and New Faculty Majority being two of the most prominent. I do not argue, but I think I could, that many or most tenure-track faculty typically do not engage in the work of ethics. This makes sense to me, because if your identity is in line with the prevailing regime of power, your identity is not problematic. By this, I think I mean something very insulting like white male professors aren't good candidates to be ethical faculty. And I'm okay with that, especially since I'm not a professor.

ethics and tenuous-track faculty

One problem I have with writing about the experience of contingent academic labor is that I seem unable to avoid writing about my own experience, and I am concerned that what I write may seem to be special pleading, or worse, a call for pity. From my own experience, I can attest to the general degraded working conditions and forms of humiliation that tenuous faculty face on a daily basis (as compared with most tenure-track faculty, that is). What I need is some way to make a claim to knowledge about this experience, that is not merely subjective.

I also have a problem writing about Foucault's ethics as a way of understanding the situation of tenuous-track faculty. I have what I think is a very strong argument to demonstrate that official statements of faculty ethics like AAUP's Statement on Professional Ethics can't apply to most faculty (it addresses "professors," after all, and not anybody with any other title). That opens the issue of what ethics could mean for tenuous faculty, and that's what leads me to Foucault's notion of ethics as freedom, the conduct of oneself, and one's own subjectivization: tenuous-track faculty have to make shift for themselves, both practically and ethically, because of their bizarre institutional status.

Foucault can't provide any prescription for how tenuous-track faculty (or anybody else, for that matter) ought to conduct oneself, because that would close the door to the very freedom of self-conduct. So, what can I say, in an affirmative voice, about tenuous faculty ethics?

It seems to me a basic step in Foucauldian ethics is to acknowledge that freedom, to acknowledge our subjection and our subjectivization -- to acknowledge that regimes of power make determinations of shapes of life and ways of acting morally, but that we can and do resist these regimes. The prevailing regime of academic work links ethical responsibility to the ideology of the professoriate so eloquently stated by the AAUP, and is very differentially deployed by administration through compliance apparatus. These apparatus affect tenure-track and tenuous-track faculty, as I said, very differently. (I once attended a brief meeting regarding a complaint by a student of sexual harassment against a lecturer. He was offered the choice to resign, and the university would not tell prospective employers why he resigned unless they asked; or fight the charge, and the university would fire him and offer the information to all prospective employers whether they asked or not. During that same semester, a tenured faculty member was similarly accused of sexual harassment, and was required to complete an online sexual harassment training.)

It occurred to me that the first problem is addressed by dealing with the second problem. What I can say about the ethical conduct of self by tenuous-track faculty is that the contingent faculty movement in North America has developed a large counter-discourse about our experience, expertise, roles in our institutions, and the missions of the institutions themselves. This counter-discourse is both the basis upon which I can make not-merely-subjective claims to know the situation of tenuous faculty, and also an initial step of conduct of self. In a way, it is the kind of ascetic writing Foucault calls for, as well.

My new problem is finding a way to write this in less than about 5000 words (right now I'm at 4000, and haven't quite put the argument together like I have here), for a conference presentation that should be around 3000 words.

Warning to Foucauldian friends of mine: I'm going to be bugging you with this.

Oh, and the other thing that came up today is that I could write this entire thing a different way by interrogating the concept of academic freedom.

where the hell have I been?

I might explain where I've been, one day.

I'm working on a paper on the constitution of faculty subjectivities and faculty ethical responsibilities. It's based on two aspects of the philosophy of Michel Foucault.

From the earlier work on regimes of power and panopticism, particularly from Discipline and Punish, I'm writing about the formation of faculty subjectivities, focusing on how faculty work defines what one is and what one can do. Like a prison, a school, or the military, the institution in which one works deploys technologies of power to constitute members as "docile bodies" that are ultimately predictable, controllable, and interchangeable.

I'm sketching out the different kinds of subjectivities, the different kinds of docile bodies, that higher ed institutions form as "professors" and as that larger group of faculty who have no proper name ("adjuncts," "lecturers," "contingents," etc.), whom I prefer to call tenuous-track faculty. Some of the differences are obvious, but what I'm hoping to get at beyond the obvious is the way that professors, who are presumed to have great privilege, are also docile. (As I've argued in this space before, I often think professors are less free than tenuous-track faculty.)

That's all setting up a brief version of the argument that the official statements of the ethics of faculty, notably the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics, do not meaningfully apply to the majority of faculty -- an argument I've made before. If I'm right (and I am), then what does ethics mean for tenuous faculty?

To respond, I turn to Foucault's work on ethics, which begins from the premise that ethics is about determining who one is, and engaging in continuous self-invention. Ultimately, I'm going to argue that resistance, self-invention, and critique are the key ethical tasks for tenuous faculty, and the only way tenuous faculty can take responsibility for their academic work -- especially given that the institutions where we work systematically deny us other ways of taking responsibility.

More broadly, this addresses a very interesting argument made by ethics bigshot Michael Davis in the last chapter of Engineering Ethics, that overly bureaucratized professional work denies engineers the possibility of taking responsibility for their work. Intriguing claim, and, in as much as ethical responsibility could be defined strictly in terms of the ideology of the profession, precisely correct. But Davis begs the question, and, if I'm right (and I am), Foucault's work on ethics answers it. There are more things in heaven and earth, Mikey.

what I really need - a new philosophical task!

Right now, I've got the following balls in the air:

• stuff about the phenomenological concepts of normal and abnormal, and the critique of these concepts by Foucault and Canguilhem
• something about the construction of faculty subjectivity, via Foucault, in order to get at some kind of non-professional or para-professional or renewed professional ethics of faculty, given the ongoing degradation of our work and employment status
• more phenomenology, of orientation
• still more phenomenology, working out further the ontology of subjection

It's fun, or it would be, if I weren't teaching five classes, staring at the first of five sets of papers I'll receive between yesterday and Tuesday, and doing faculty rights work. I have also been taking all of my blog posts and turning them into Word documents, in preparation for putting them all together as a book, sort of as a gift to my mom. 

To avoid reading student papers, I was just re-reading a post about language, from a series of entries about Merleau-Ponty. In this post I said that we describe our experience using the concepts of truth and reality. It took me aback.

So now I have another thing to think about, and to try to track down, doing what could be a weird kind of Foucauldian phenomenology of the way we describe our experience using such terms, and I suppose some others. It wouldn't be a genealogy of truth like Foucault's, but it would borrow from his scholarly methods and certainly owe a lot to his philosophical spirit. It would be phenomenological: how does something like truth or reality become constituted on the basis of lived experience -- and why? And are there alternatives?

But now I have to go to class.

more on faculty ethics - add Foucault, shake, pour into cocktail glass, and add a twist

I've been thinking that my presentation at the AAUP conference on Thursday needed more bite. On the plane from Newark to Portland, and then again on the flight back from Newark to San Francisco, I took some notes. Here's a bit of the 2000+ words I've added to the behemoth paper I'm presenting. (By the way, I'm doing this without including what will now have to be a massive scholarly apparatus. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.)

The destructive argument

Like most professional codes of ethics, the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics addresses relatively powerful people, and does so in total abstraction from their actual working conditions. It functions as an expression of professional ideology – what the official ruling establishment of the profession says about itself in order to create a normalized reality effect. Like most professions, the ideology emphasizes the profession’s alleged authority and self-regulatory autonomy, standards of conduct, as well as its commitment to the public good. While its application to the majority of those serving as faculty is clearly doubtful – since the majority simply are not professors in the sense denominated in the Statement – it is also not clear how well it applies even to those who otherwise appear to be professors.

What I think this means is that, at present, there is no operative faculty professional ethics whose legitimacy anyone regards, or should regard, as binding. There are documents, there are utterances – mostly high-minded or hypocritical, whether stated by faculty, administrators, politicians, or culture-warriors. All of those utterances that I’ve heard or read strike me as, at best, ethically bankrupt. No one can say knowledgeably either what faculty do or what they should do.

One obvious thing to say is to make the political claim others have already made – that faculty – all faculty, but especially the faculty majority – need to organize, and need to organize all the faculty. This is the political solution. It does not address in a direct way the ethical question, and here I think the catastrophic nature of the crisis needs a radical proposal to meet it.

What is required in this situation is the free choice, taken up by each person working as faculty, of what sort of being he or she will choose. That is, the kind of faculty member one will become, how one will resist or reproduce the dominant structures of power in institutions of higher education, will have to be the leading choice, the determining choice, of what sort of “code” one may adhere to.

Faculty subjectivities, faculty power: the constructive argument

A basic question regarding faculty ethical responsibilities is, who are the faculty? The majority status of part-time faculty, and the huge majority of tenuous-track faculty, demand that we cannot take tenure-track professors as the presumed model for faculty in general.

Rather than a natural species, faculty are socially constructed, and, obviously, differentially socially constructed. Analyzed through Michel Foucault’s later work on power relations, institutions, and subjection, what would we find as the basic shapes of subjection adapted and adopted by those who become “professors,” “lecturers,” or “adjuncts,” respectively? (Not an exhaustive list.) Indeed, I have already been describing some of the key differences between these subjectivities. “Lecturers,” for instance, are subjected to teach heavier loads, accepting or even being grateful for these opportunities, and so forth.

From a period during graduate school, most PhD students in the humanities learn that taking “adjunct” work – a course here, a course there, for very low wages and no benefits – is a necessary starting point for most aspiring professors. Despite the fact that this “starting point” is for most of these PhD students an ending point (that is, that the majority will never have tenure-track “jobs”) , we take on this subject-position, continue to work the conference circuit as much as our dire financial conditions allow, revise and submit papers to journals, hustle for book contracts and continued “adjunct” employment (in order to continue to have the basic legitimacy that a college affiliation offers) – all under the normalizing framework that this is how academia works, and that if I am going to get a “job,” I have to keep at it. (And wow, they're pathetic. I know because I was one.)

The longevity of this “adjunct” subjectivity depends on a number of factors, including an individual’s personal exhaustion point, competing interests like starting a family or paying ever-looming debts, and of course, getting hired tenure-track. My observation is that, for most of us who occupy either the subjectivity of aspiring to tenure-track employment, or the subjectivity of tenure-track professors, there appear to be no alternatives. Thus the imputation that those who never make the leap from this kind of “adjunct” work to tenure-track work have “failed” in some respect, or the alternative analysis that blames either “the job market” or “the over-production of PhDs." For those thus normalized, ethical responsibility means adhering as much as possible to the values and behaviors of the tenured elite.
Any analysis of the state of the academic “profession” which accepts this simplistic binary, and implicitly accepts the notion that faculty employment is accurately characterized as dividing the small minority of academic “winners” from the undeserving “losers,” fundamentally misinterprets, or ignores, the daily working lives of faculty, and the subjectivities, interests, perceptions, and intentions of those working as faculty. In short, it denies ethical responsibility to the majority of faculty, by denying their subjection.

I’ll use myself as an example. I am completely pessimistic about my prospects for a tenure-track “job” at this stage of my career. My PhD has passed its freshness date. I earn too much to be an attractive entry-level employee. I carry baggage as an activist/troublemaker. I continue to research and write, I continue to present my work at national and international conferences, and I continue to stay as much as possible up-to-date in my field. If I do all this without hope of a tenure-track “job,” and if my work looks very much like the work of a tenure-track faculty member, then what sort of faculty member am I, exactly?

I’m a “lecturer,” but that means so many things that it means nothing. I’m an academic outsider in many respects, because my status, and my aspirations, do not adhere to the dominant ideology of the academic profession – the ideology of the professoriate so eloquently stated in the AAUP Statement on Ethics. What shall we say are my ethical responsibilities, if I have reasons that I find compelling to be suspicious of my field of expertise (academic philosophy), to withdraw my compliance with my institution’s rules; if I am unable to seek or state the truth as I see it, or to encourage or model intellectual honesty for my students; if the public at large sees little value, or simply does not see what I do to contribute to the public good?

By and large, every day, I have no problem understanding what I should do, because I have already settled, for myself, the issue of my ethical responsibilities as a faculty member. That is, I have a relatively stable subjectivity which directs my actions according to a relatively stable, though tacit, code. In relationship to the dominant ideology, my own code is one that variably adopts, adapts, and resists – and so does yours, and so does the “adjunct” whom you have never met, who teaches one class each semester at your university’s remote campus.

If I accept that I have some responsibility to my discipline, to my students, to my colleagues, to my institution or to the public, this takes place for me every day in my classroom. If I am honest about my or my discipline’s limitations of wisdom, if I question the dominant power structure of my institution or classroom or society, if I make my primary concern the state of my students’ souls, or the state of their judgments, or their development of critical thinking skills, or their satisfaction of institutional requirements to advance to the degree — and in turn, if I don’t make one or another of these my concern — in any and all of those free and deliberative actions, I commit myself, though not irrevocably, to an ethic, and express that ethic.

This is an ineluctable faculty ethics, I think — one that cannot be codified (that precedes all codifications), and one that does not dissolve, no matter how much my power is diminished by my status, because I walk into the classroom, or go online, and I am a certain “faculty member” then.

weekend & cross-posting& kittens kittens kittens

In one of my classes, I'm requiring students to participate in an online threaded discussion board. We'd been reading about Foucault and surveillance, and a question came up about the adjustments people have made that allow them to relax about the constant surveillance we're under, especially in social networking sites.

I took it in this direction:

I'm not usually a fan of trend-thinking (identifying and analyzing passing trends), because it often seems to be either a kind of futurism, or else devolves into fairly obvious commentaries on something essentially already passé. In the case of social-networking sites and the mode of self-disclosure, there does seem to be a change in the way we deal with matters we keep secret and those we disclose.

An example of this is journal or diary keeping. The electronic language of on-line journals alters relationships between self and others, both known and unknown, both intimate and anonymous.

We could interpret this as a genre of narrative, as well, and track how online self-disclosing expressions operate as performances or constructions of self or of identity. I keep an online journal, in the form of a blog. It's fairly self-disclosive, but in the shape of a narrative of personal events, world events, ideas, and so forth, that are genuinely expressive of certain shapes of my identity. I even have a name for this identity (as do many online diarists - their handles or screen-names): Doc Nagel.

Am I Doc Nagel? At least provisionally, at least in some respects. That identity is located somewhere between/among my instructor-identity, my academic-identity, my activist-identity, my philosopher-identity, my gourmet-identity, my hockey-fan-identity, my kitten-obsessive-identity, and my private life. All those intersect, are played out, and are shaped and addressed through the journal. I'm careful about how I write in it, though not all that careful. (Then again, I'm not all that careful about what I say in any public forum or in any university venue.)

Exposure, surveillance, and discipline are decidedly at issue. At one point, I was asked by a university official to either take down or to eliminate a link to my online journal, because its contents were printed off and mailed to the university in order to try to get me into trouble (it's a long story, and no, I'm not telling). Some people have been fired for criticizing their employers in online journals, and a good friend of mine has changed journals three or four times to evade being identified as the blogger in question (though not because she's particularly critical of anybody).

In other news, I have completed 4 weeks of non-stop work, stress, and craziness. I am taking the (vast majority of the) weekend off. Penguins-Rangers in just over an hour. Woohoo!

Kittens kittens kittens kittens. Alexander is now 2.12 pounds, and Alex is 2.07. Pictures to come soon. Stay tuned. They'll get nipped in 3 more weeks. Meanwhile, total kitten insanity reigns.