Graduate School and its Discontents
Invisible Adjunct has another good comment thread going. Remember that interesting (and often symptomatic) thread about the MLA a few weeks ago? There have been interesting ones since, and now there’s an especially interesting one. Well I say that because of the two last posts (last at the moment, last when I saw the thread), 10 and 11. Number 10:
In the first year of graduate school in archaeology we spent so much time learning about post-modernist theaory and how archaeology could not really tell you about the past (it could only reveal your current political views on power relationships) that by the end of the year my professors convinced me that there was no reason to continue my studies in that field. I dropped out and went to law school.
Number 11:
I also remember a huge emphasis on postmodernism when I was a doctoral student in the college of education. Yes, I enjoyed postmodern theory, but there were never any other perspectives; I had to find those on my own. For example, we never studied education from a Marxist perspective; after all, Marxism had been determined to be too “modernistic.” I guess my big gripe with postmodern theory is that it tends to lead to nihlism and a total lack of social solidarity and responsibility. It really reached the pinnacle of craziness when issues like classroom management were turned into postmodern “points of view.” For example, I remember several of us classroom teachers posing serious questions about what happened in our classrooms. We weren’t looking for “how-to” answers, but something better than the “what is disobedience, anyway?” I’m sorry, but if you were to spend time in an 8th grade classroom, I don’t think you’d have any problem with the concrete reality of negative behavior. What was super-ironic is that whenever we would be looking at politics or power relations and anyone would give down-to-earth examples of how power REALLY operated (i.e. through control of workers, surveillance, etc.) then those became modernist concerns and were open to interpretation, not social action.
Yes, from everything I hear, people in real-life 8th grade classrooms have no trouble saying what disobedience is, and why you need some of the other thing if you’re going to teach 30 or 35 children. And there’s something really enormously…ironic? Or is that too modernist. Perhaps I mean playful? Yes, no doubt that’s it. There’s something enormously ‘playful’ in the fact that postmodernist theory causes people to quit archaeology and go to law school instead. Actually what should be happening is that everyone everywhere should be dropping out of all academic programs – because those are all modernist projects too after all – and going into advertising. What could be more postmodernist than advertising? Especially now, now that everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody ‘sees through’ advertising, and ‘transforms’ it into a ‘site of resistance,’ so that advertising gets weirder and weirder, or more and more postmodern, in order to out-resist and out-transform and out-postmodernize all those people in the postmodern audience. Surely it’s the duty of all good postmodernists to provide more sites of resistance for everyone. And of course the pay is better, and you don’t risk ending up in places like Ithaca or Lubbock, and you don’t have to do all that reading.
The jump between “The truth is imperfectly understandable” and “there is no truth” boggles my mind. In particular, that so many academics would come to hold the latter as being truthful (an oxymoron I’ve not yet heard a decent justification for) is all the more perplexing; doesn’t every academic discipline rest upon the notion that a multiplicity of opinions better aids the overall understanding of a given issue? isn’t a correct ‘understanding’ the same thing as the truth? isn’t the fact that people are involved communnally in a discipline proof that at some level this ‘correct understanding’ exists, even if we are unable to perfectly comprehend it? if it does not, then what other justification is there of the very institution of academia or its claims to understanding?
Certainly post-modernism has provided with the possibility to understand the influences that prejudice, culture, worldview, etc. place on the individual. The gaps between this and the majority of strongly-heald post-modernist beliefs employ leaps of logic large enough to make Raskolnikov blush. Taking this to mean that truth does not exists seems alsomost as ridiculious as R.’s (and Dostoevsky’s) conviction that absolute logic leads to murder (when in fact the line of reasoning isn’t logical at all).
The comparason continues, in my mind, to R.’s famous “everything is permitted” speech; the righteousness of the post-modern cultural theorist seems to exempt them from the bounds of the disciplines they work in. This is not in and of itself a bad thing, but when their theories invalidate what their claim to authority lies upon, you can only sit back and marvel (yet again) at the bullheaded naivete of those convinced of their own personal righteousness, especially amongst those whose, out of all groups in our culture, ought to understand the impossibility of their individual correctness the most.
My hope is that, like a great many other ideologies and trends in the past, this one can be incorporated into the more general conception of the world for its benefits and forgotten for its flaws. It seems as though slowly, my fellow students are starting to recognize this possibility (though there’s still a great number who cling to cultural theory, often, it seems, as a way of excusing themselves from any racial/sexual/class guilt they might otherwise feel).
In the meantime, I’m quite torn between going to grad school and leaving that world behind for the opportunities elsewhere (note, I’m not talking about business). But that’s always the choice, isn’t it – to stay and fight or simply leave. I just don’t know what I have the stomach for.
I too am feeling this disappointing sensation.
I went into archaeology to do something pure, interesting, and adventurous. Now I feel like a sucker. Like I should ditch those crazy misguided notions and go and work for the mining companies that I have been holding up through archaeology.
its not that I want money, its that I want to feel like I am doing something worthwhile. And it is hard to frame archaeology in that way because of all this post-modern business. And don’t get me wrong, I definitely tend towards the post-processual side in my thinking about archaeology.
My archaeology career so far has been damn adventurous, but at the moment it is NOT MORE THAN THAT. I dont love it for the ideal of finding out about how people lived in the past anymore. Dont love it for the potential to reveal that other people lived in different ways than the trap we must live now.
Because maybe we have to live in this trap to be relevant.
What do YOU think
Well, what I think is that I hope some people go on doing archaeology (postpostmodern, for preference), even if you don’t.