This is a great account in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking of how what I think of as avant-garde theorising, valorising conceptual and linguistic novelty as an end in itself, expresses the competitive individualism of the academy rather than being some sort of radical bulwark against it. From loc 471:
The need for a different way of being extends to all aspects of scholars’ lives, including—to return to the agonistic approach to advancing knowledge in the humanities that I mentioned earlier—our critical methodologies. This sense of agon, or struggle, encourages us to reject the readings and arguments that have gone before us and to focus on advancing new ways of looking at the material we study. It is this mode of argumentation that leads Fluck to posit a pressure to “outradicalize” one another, given the need to distinguish ourselves and our readings from the many others in our fields. However, the political orientation of our critiques is ultimately of lesser importance than the competitive drive that lies beneath them. Distinguishing our arguments from those of others working in our fields is the primary goal; that we often choose the terrain of the ideological, or wind up embroiled in what Paul Ricoeur describes as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in order to effect that distinction is a mere by-product.
From loc 436, loc 448 and loc 461 on the competitive individualism more broadly:
However much we as scholars might reject individualism as part and parcel of the humanist, positivist ways of the past, our working lives—on campus and off—are overdetermined by it. The entire academic enterprise serves to cultivate individualism, in fact. Beginning with college applications, extending through graduate school admissions, fellowship applications, the job market, publication submissions, and, seemingly finally, the tenure and promotion review, those of us on campus are subject to selection. These processes present themselves as meritocratic: there are some metrics for quality against which applicants are measured, and the best—whatever that might mean in a given context—are rewarded. In actual practice, however, those metrics are never neutral, and what we are measured against is far more often than not one another—sometimes literally: it’s not uncommon for research universities to ask external reviewers in tenure and promotion cases to rank candidates against the best two or three scholars in the field.
The competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for establishing credit and priority.
This is no way to run a collective. It’s also no way to structure a fulfilling life: as I’ve written elsewhere, this disengagement from community and singular focus on the race for individual distinction is a key factor in the extremely high risk of burnout among college faculty and other intellectual workers. It is all but impossible for us to structure our lives around the things that are most in line with our deepest personal values when we are driven to focus on those things that will create distinction for us, that will allow us to compare ourselves—or our institutions—favorably with one another.
Mark Carrigan 