| |
|
Been talking to a few friends who are academics recently, I had a real love/hate relationship with it, and came to the conclusion that it attracts people who want this tiny hermetic world, and that often they suffer from 'brain in a bottle' syndrome, so can be highly intellectually gifted while being staggeringly emotionally and socially stunted. And that to succeed in academia they have to want to accelerate this, not to become more rounded people.
Ya. There's a comment somewhere made about Aldous Huxley and his wife (sorry for the sexism / horrendously traditional gender roles here folks, it was the 1950's). He was hyper-clever and socially useless, she had few qualifications or intellectual interests. A visitor commented that "she, knowing nothing, understood everything, whereas he, who knew everything, quite obviously understood nothing". Focussing on the intellect handicaps one in other areas, which is why I always find it amusing when people are intimidated by academic types. Their choice, but I myself find it hard to be intimidated by someone who will happily spend three hours looking for the spectacles which are on top of their fucking head the whole time. And devotes their whole intellect to a very narrow area, knows more about less, "fling themselves into an intellectual obliette" in John Fowles' words. I lost my all-round knowledge years ago, an occupational hazard.
More specifically, social scientists (by which I mean sociologists like myself and, I guess, anthropologists) are always misfits in the first place but then the sense of outsiderness, I find, has to be cultivated and tended... being there but watching as well as doing... "the eye in the centre of the storm", as a collegue was once described. It's exhausting and alienating, but necessary for the job. The best analogy I can think of is a metaphor in Iain Sinclair's Radon Daughters where there's a guy who is addicted to X-rays, which are slowly eating him away somehow... he needs to get that transparency of vision but doing so is dangerous and making him ill, perhaps even killing him, I don't recall. Dunno who it was who defined social science as 'the study of people who don't need to be studied by people who quite clearly do' but they were right.
Dunno... I have thought about leaving academia for this reason but my misfit tendency will always be there... not sure there's much point in just being a third-rate lawyer with a mild case of alienation. But yes, I agree that academix might well make careers out of angst of some sort. It's a bit compulsive, a bit neurotic. But then, so are a lot of careers, especially 'creative' ones, and in my defence I am slightly sceptical about this notion of a "well-rounded person" sometimes. Was talking to an artist who said he didn't paint 'cos he wanted to, he painted 'cos he'd go mad if he didn't. Burroughs said pretty much the same about his writing. That's what it's like, sometimes, like it chose me, not the other way round.
She once described it as a 'you're not in Kansas anymore' sensation... there were things that she recognised from 'her model' of academia, but also things that were totally alien...
Yeah, when I did medical sociology it (obviously) involved interacting with 'medical types' and there is a different 'personality type' and a different subculture to be dealt with. I note that Cultural Studies is a little more hippie-ish than both the mainstream and other bits of academe, hence what sis noted about expression of emotion or personal stuff. I'm no expert here tho', so I'm sure the good Doctor 'Nesh will tell us all about the realms of the medical. |
|
|
