julie levin russo

This is a write-up of some remarks I delivered today at the “long table” session of Performing Under Pressure, a graduate conference at Brown on Life, Labor and Art in the Academy. From my perspective in media studies, I wanted to talk about how the late capitalist imperative to render ever more of our subjectivity as labor intersects with new technologies of self-presentation. Let me first note that this scenario is common across many sectors of creative and knowledge work, but academia’s historical positioning as a vocation/”labor of love” may make it somewhat unique — on one hand being a scholar has always been ideologically constructed as encompassing the whole self; on the other it has been relegated to a corresponding realm of non-work.

In this context, I have observed that emerging scholars, in the process of constructing ourselves as commodities on the job market, are often pressured to fulfill contradictory imperatives. We must cleave to the strictures of a conservative academy, ratify systems of distinction, participate in traditional forms of knowledge production, appear and behave appropriately, and generally build a CV that manifests orthodox standards. At the same time, we must smack of the cutting edge, continually reproduce the new, incorporate digital media into our pedagogy and scholarship, assert our relevance, and generally “innovate” according to the neoliberal schema. On the surface, this simply entails doing more work — all the old kinds of academic work PLUS all the new kinds of academic work. But the paradox can’t always be resolved additively.

I think the obligation to create and manage an online persona is a paradigmatic example of this double-bind. First, there is the demand to be publicly visible — at the most basic level, to show up legibly in search as a singular entity (we had a few laughs exploring some of Rebecca Schneider‘s googlegangers). In Google’s help post about managing your online reputation, they oh so helpfully suggest creating a G+ profile as a means to gain more control over search results. The recommended course is always to produce MORE — more pages and profiles under your proper name — in order to push any secondhand or incriminating content off the first page or two. But this of course creates further problems of identity (and time) management, not least because each social network you might join is a corporate platform with its own privacy settings and personal connections to navigate.

Thus beyond search visibility, there is the question of HOW you appear online, which entails constantly negotiating the contradiction I outlined above. Let me take the redesign of my website as an example. In grad school, I approached j-l-r.org as an active archive of my ongoing work. I posted term papers, compiled conference materials, chronicled my comprehensive exams, and let stand the occasional weird or belligerent comments.

Even when I pulled things down from an index post like this one, I sometimes tracked older versions or left them commented out in the html.

This year I decided that it felt unruly and vulnerable to expose so much of my intellectual history (call it a lesson from last year’s job market). I relaunched the site in a stylish WordPress package, stripped of most of its previous content. I imported only more recent blog posts, and hid the blog behind a link. The front page is now a “lifestream” which gives the impression of constant activity by aggregating my incidental clicks and tweets across various social media sites. The tradeoff here is that all the included profiles become more or less professional spaces (after five years on Twitter, I finally caved and made a second locked personal account). I should add that I concurrently deleted my Facebook profile. These are some of my own responses to a job market culture of risk and fear, particularly for those who may aspire to be personally and/or professionally radical.

Presuming that you, like me, aren’t prepared to stage an intervention by dismantling boundaries around the professional professorial self, I see two options. One is to compartmentalize by maintaining several separate online identities. Folks in fandom and other online subcultures have long used pseudonyms to engage meaningfully in communities insulated from one’s “real life” persona. The practice of pseudonymity is under siege from Facebook and Google Plus in its wake which encourage or enforce real name policies because their advertising revenue depends on data mining singular and static individuals. While there is radical potential in refusing anxieties around privacy and insisting on a fully integrated self-presentation (“the personal is political” after all), pseudonyms can also be empowering as a tactic for code-shifting between different performances of identity.

The other option is anonymity, which we can see in full flower on the infamous Academic Jobs Wiki. Denied any other outlet where we can speak openly about searches or the darker side of the job market experience, the wiki acts as a release valve for coveted information, questions, arguments, trolling, trivialities, polemics, and every minute neurosis. Comments can get ugly, but I maintain that anonymous exchange can be a valuable conduit for what was called in our discussion the “excess affect” of academic labor.

But can we envision other possibilities?

This is a macro from Academic Coach Taylor (h/t Hans Vermy), a tumblr curated by a self-styled “charming queer phd student” that iterates the advice meme format to dole out words of wisdom and encouragement from the Friday Night Lights character. The reference is to a book that is something of an intellectual meme in theory circles right now: Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. It comes up a lot in reflexive discussions of the present and future of academia, I think with good reason. Faced with all the contradictions and overdeterminations of our existence as immaterial laborers most of us can hardly help but fail. There’s some hope in the idea that failure might open up lives beyond the neoliberal narrative of career success. Is there a way we could ask not “how do I get a job?” but “how do I want to work?”