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I’ve just finished looking over <NAME>’s book, <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/9293551/just_vibrations" target="blank"> *Just Vibrations*</a>, (Michigan, 2016). It’s caused a bit of a firestorm on a certain website (essentially, a music gossip blog that doesn’t deserve a link) and the listserv of the American Musicological Society, the AMS-L. After the controversy that accompanied the conversation, I wouldn’t touch the debate with a ten-foot pole. I don’t really want to, either. I like the book and think it has prompted a healthy discussion (however frustrating some of it was). Anyway, I mostly just want to publically express solidarity with his work while he’s still precariously employed.

The book did make me want to write about one thing: labor in music studies. Cheng’s book is not just interesting as a manifesto for how to do music scholarship. It also calls attention to the relationship between music scholarship and *how* we do it. In other words, Cheng foregrounds the way we do our work. He focuses in particular on the tone of scholarship today. Drawing on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Touching-Feeling-Affect-Pedagogy-Performativity/dp/0822330156" target="blank”><NAME></a>, Cheng argues that *paranoia* constitutes the dominant attitude in academic thought. Cheng writes, “driven by negative affects and a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ such scholarship aims to outfox, to enact power, and to produce results beyond reproach… With seductive rhetoric and logic, they produce self-satisfying critiques, which in turn affirm, after the fact, that no one can ever be paranoid enough.” Cheng echoes a broader current of scholars especially in literary criticism, including Sedgwick, Felski, and others questioning the abundance of critique (I recently wrote a <a href=" http://jarekpaulervin.com/2016/07/17/Critique-Unlimited.html" target="blank”>blog post</a> about Felski in particular).

But Cheng helpfully makes it clear this is not just a pervasive strategy for interpreting literary texts, but a mode of behavior driving the academy at large. Paranoia abounds because

<blockquote>
academics frequently view their work and workplace as institutions under budgetary and ideological siege. Hardly a day goes by without multiple articles in the <it>Chronicle of Higher Education</it> reporting the financial gutting of universities. Anti-intellectualism evokes barbarians rattling the gates of the ivory tower, but adversariality also rages within the tower itself: notwithstanding the conventions and collegiality of mutual citation, scholars learn not just to write, but to write against—to uproot status quo, fill in lacunae, and change up the game.
</blockquote>

(That’s a quotation from the second chapter, “Sing the Ivory Tower Blues”). I’ve hinted at some particular limitations of the reparative approach in my Felski post. But generally, I think the argument is right on.

Shifting gears away from Cheng toward literary studies, I do think one the focus on paranoia can lead to an omission. This is sort of related to the lack of differentiation that generalizing about paranoia can lead to. Sedgwick argues that paranoia is “contagious” (familiar readers may recall the phrasing isn’t accidental, given that the pretext for her essay is LGBTQ politics and AIDS activism). It has spread like a virus, becoming the dominant attitude of academia *as such*.

But the problem isn’t really that such a position is too heavy-handed (I’d be fine with that on the grounds of its utility alone). More exactly, it isn’t properly differentiated in line with the structure of the academy. The university is a collection of scholars working, and trends do spread quickly. But it isn’t an undifferentiated collection. Rather, it is one with a very specific shape.

The academy has an internally complex structure. It’s a class structure. This is not only true because of the reliance of academics on a large population of working class people (ones who are <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/harvard-reaches-tentative-agreement-to-end-cafeteria-workers-strike.html " target="blank”>easily forgotten</a> in discussions of scholarly tone and topic). But it is also true within the academic ladder itself, which functions as a massive caste system. In the upper echelon sits an executive upper class of administrators. At the bottom sits a massive rank of disposable and flexible labor: adjuncts, tenure-track faculty, graduate students, and so on. And standing in between the hoi polloi and the CEO sits middle management: the associate professor. Materializing a theory of academic tone – that is, making it not just about tone but *trade* – gives a slightly different picture. Living in the academy isn’t making us paranoid. It is throwing us antagonistic.

That is to say, the academy isn’t set aside from class struggle. This is easiest to see when we confront the top tier of the academy. Most would agree the academy is a big business. It’s pretty obvious why administrators have tightened belts. You don’t need to read *Capital* to understand why administrators squeeze down on their labor force (if you want to, have a glance at Chapter 10, “The Working Day”). We should also keep in mind how it inflects those below. Associate professors battle to preserve their careers while graduate students battle to launch them. And from there, chaos ensues.

I was recently sitting in a city I’ll leave unnamed (I’ve been in four in the last month, so don’t try to guess where). I was sitting in a coffee shop, and I saw a young professor reviewing applications as part of a job search. He was sitting there with a colleague, who herself was hastily grading papers. Frequently, he would stop to mock aloud the applications he was reading. He ridiculed the desperation in one, the adjunct position at a lower tier school held by another, the lengthy time to completion of a third.

I was a bit horrified. It’s a bit scary to hear someone who, though he won’t actually be an arbiter of my work, might share sentiments with those who will. But I don’t actually blame him (even though his behavior was particularly nasty). I know why a guy who has to spend his afternoon frantically reading 200 applications is angry. He probably had grading to do, article proofs that are overdue, a second book manuscript growing dusty on his desk. The guy is middle management, forced to make the hard choices for his underlings while also worrying about advancing his own career. And given who stands above him, all he can do is punch down at a bunch of grad students (most of whom won’t be around in the business much longer).

This frame helps explain the pervasiveness of a certain mode of critical intervention, what gets construed as paranoia. It isn’t really paranoia driving the cart. It is the antagonism that arises as we are forced to squabble over the few positions that are dangled like carrots to keep disposable labor on hand. This, I think, is a more helpful grounds to understand the pervasiveness of bad behavior in the academy. My sense for a long time is that much of the hostility I encounter around the academy arises here. It’s abundant within the graduate student world. The shouting at panels, the name-badge checking at cocktail parties (“you go *there*?”), the closed door gossiping and resentment… this is an obvious response as we all fight to avoid dropping down into the academic *Lumpenfakultät*.

We should also think about how this constitutes the positive content of academia, not just our negative self-understanding. Antagonism is different from paranoia, because it isn’t just a worry. It also includes the shrewd manipulation of academic codes. Struggling is figuring out how to create something novel in a business that thrives under a model of innovation. Critique pervades because it fulfills the demand for innovation in the realm of ideas, and promises to help us climb the ranks. Tearing down last year’s ideas is a way to squeeze out a bit of surplus value, to revolutionize the machinery of scholarly production.

Thinking in these terms also shifts us toward a more dialectical account of the relationship between reparation and paranoia. I’ve often lamented the tendency for reparation theorists like Sedgwick to overlook the ways in which reparation itself shares in the world of critique (again, see my Felski piece). Reparation too can be understood in line with the demands of the academic labor market. If you can’t overthrow the old academic producers, you might as well play the game. One great reason to play nice in the academy is because if you don’t, the person reviewing your article or your job application might remember. Of course, I’m all for solidarity and being nice. But, let’s not forget that the incentive to play cautious in our scholarship is because that idea we critique belongs to someone whose ego could get burned. Much better to share the love. Or more realistically for those at the bottom of the ladder, to bite our tongue, flatter, even pander. Reparation isn’t always the positive alternative for those who feel the need to stay silent, lest we invite critiques from management.<commit_msg>Update 2016-10-25-Love-and-Labor.md<commit_after>---
layout: post
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I’ve just finished looking over William Cheng’s book, <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/9293551/just_vibrations" target="blank">*Just Vibrations*</a> (Michigan, 2016). It’s caused a bit of a firestorm on a certain website (essentially, a music gossip blog that doesn’t deserve a link) and the listserv of the American Musicological Society, the AMS-L. After the controversy that accompanied the conversation, I wouldn’t touch the debate with a ten-foot pole. I don’t really want to, either. I like the book and think it has prompted a healthy discussion (however frustrating some of it was). Anyway, I mostly just want to publically express solidarity with his work while he’s still precariously employed.

The book did make me want to write about one thing: labor in music studies. Cheng’s book is not just interesting as a manifesto for how to do music scholarship. It also calls attention to the relationship between music scholarship and *how* we do it. In other words, Cheng foregrounds the way we do our work. He focuses in particular on the tone of scholarship today. Drawing on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Touching-Feeling-Affect-Pedagogy-Performativity/dp/0822330156" target="blank”><NAME></a>, Cheng argues that *paranoia* constitutes the dominant attitude in academic thought. Cheng writes, “driven by negative affects and a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ such scholarship aims to outfox, to enact power, and to produce results beyond reproach… With seductive rhetoric and logic, they produce self-satisfying critiques, which in turn affirm, after the fact, that no one can ever be paranoid enough.” Cheng echoes a broader current of scholars especially in literary criticism, including Sedgwick, Felski, and others questioning the abundance of critique (I recently wrote a 
<a href="http://jarekpaulervin.com/2016/07/17/Critique-Unlimited.html" target="blank”>blog post</a> about Felski in particular).

But Cheng helpfully makes it clear this is not just a pervasive strategy for interpreting literary texts, but a mode of behavior driving the academy at large. Paranoia abounds because

<blockquote>
academics frequently view their work and workplace as institutions under budgetary and ideological siege. Hardly a day goes by without multiple articles in the <it>Chronicle of Higher Education</it> reporting the financial gutting of universities. Anti-intellectualism evokes barbarians rattling the gates of the ivory tower, but adversariality also rages within the tower itself: notwithstanding the conventions and collegiality of mutual citation, scholars learn not just to write, but to write against—to uproot status quo, fill in lacunae, and change up the game.
</blockquote>

(That’s a quotation from the second chapter, “Sing the Ivory Tower Blues”). I’ve hinted at some particular limitations of the reparative approach in my Felski post. But generally, I think the argument is right on.

Shifting gears away from Cheng toward literary studies, I do think one the focus on paranoia can lead to an omission. This is sort of related to the lack of differentiation that generalizing about paranoia can lead to. Sedgwick argues that paranoia is “contagious” (familiar readers may recall the phrasing isn’t accidental, given that the pretext for her essay is LGBTQ politics and AIDS activism). It has spread like a virus, becoming the dominant attitude of academia *as such*.

But the problem isn’t really that such a position is too heavy-handed (I’d be fine with that on the grounds of its utility alone). More exactly, it isn’t properly differentiated in line with the structure of the academy. The university is a collection of scholars working, and trends do spread quickly. But it isn’t an undifferentiated collection. Rather, it is one with a very specific shape.

The academy has an internally complex structure. It’s a class structure. This is not only true because of the reliance of academics on a large population of working class people (ones who are <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/harvard-reaches-tentative-agreement-to-end-cafeteria-workers-strike.html " target="blank”>easily forgotten</a> in discussions of scholarly tone and topic). But it is also true within the academic ladder itself, which functions as a massive caste system. In the upper echelon sits an executive upper class of administrators. At the bottom sits a massive rank of disposable and flexible labor: adjuncts, tenure-track faculty, graduate students, and so on. And standing in between the hoi polloi and the CEO sits middle management: the associate professor. Materializing a theory of academic tone – that is, making it not just about tone but *trade* – gives a slightly different picture. Living in the academy isn’t making us paranoid. It is throwing us antagonistic.

That is to say, the academy isn’t set aside from class struggle. This is easiest to see when we confront the top tier of the academy. Most would agree the academy is a big business. It’s pretty obvious why administrators have tightened belts. You don’t need to read *Capital* to understand why administrators squeeze down on their labor force (if you want to, have a glance at Chapter 10, “The Working Day”). We should also keep in mind how it inflects those below. Associate professors battle to preserve their careers while graduate students battle to launch them. And from there, chaos ensues.

I was recently sitting in a city I’ll leave unnamed (I’ve been in four in the last month, so don’t try to guess where). I was sitting in a coffee shop, and I saw a young professor reviewing applications as part of a job search. He was sitting there with a colleague, who herself was hastily grading papers. Frequently, he would stop to mock aloud the applications he was reading. He ridiculed the desperation in one, the adjunct position at a lower tier school held by another, the lengthy time to completion of a third.

I was a bit horrified. It’s a bit scary to hear someone who, though he won’t actually be an arbiter of my work, might share sentiments with those who will. But I don’t actually blame him (even though his behavior was particularly nasty). I know why a guy who has to spend his afternoon frantically reading 200 applications is angry. He probably had grading to do, article proofs that are overdue, a second book manuscript growing dusty on his desk. The guy is middle management, forced to make the hard choices for his underlings while also worrying about advancing his own career. And given who stands above him, all he can do is punch down at a bunch of grad students (most of whom won’t be around in the business much longer).

This frame helps explain the pervasiveness of a certain mode of critical intervention, what gets construed as paranoia. It isn’t really paranoia driving the cart. It is the antagonism that arises as we are forced to squabble over the few positions that are dangled like carrots to keep disposable labor on hand. This, I think, is a more helpful grounds to understand the pervasiveness of bad behavior in the academy. My sense for a long time is that much of the hostility I encounter around the academy arises here. It’s abundant within the graduate student world. The shouting at panels, the name-badge checking at cocktail parties (“you go *there*?”), the closed door gossiping and resentment… this is an obvious response as we all fight to avoid dropping down into the academic *Lumpenfakultät*.

We should also think about how this constitutes the positive content of academia, not just our negative self-understanding. Antagonism is different from paranoia, because it isn’t just a worry. It also includes the shrewd manipulation of academic codes. Struggling is figuring out how to create something novel in a business that thrives under a model of innovation. Critique pervades because it fulfills the demand for innovation in the realm of ideas, and promises to help us climb the ranks. Tearing down last year’s ideas is a way to squeeze out a bit of surplus value, to revolutionize the machinery of scholarly production.

Thinking in these terms also shifts us toward a more dialectical account of the relationship between reparation and paranoia. I’ve often lamented the tendency for reparation theorists like Sedgwick to overlook the ways in which reparation itself shares in the world of critique (again, see my Felski piece). Reparation too can be understood in line with the demands of the academic labor market. If you can’t overthrow the old academic producers, you might as well play the game. One great reason to play nice in the academy is because if you don’t, the person reviewing your article or your job application might remember. Of course, I’m all for solidarity and being nice. But, let’s not forget that the incentive to play cautious in our scholarship is because that idea we critique belongs to someone whose ego could get burned. Much better to share the love. Or more realistically for those at the bottom of the ladder, to bite our tongue, flatter, even pander. Reparation isn’t always the positive alternative for those who feel the need to stay silent, lest we invite critiques from management.
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