playing seriously

Omar

Kudos should certainly go to Fabio for attempting to bring some order to the chaos that is managing to get through grad school (if you haven’t check out Grad School Rulz soon to be compiled into an edited volume by Blackwell). Academic success in scientific fields is certainly a mysterious thing. We all have seen equally talented (in comparison to ourselves) friends flounder while some less than talented friends go on to becoming fairly prominent members of academia. Certainly one thing that appears to be the case when it comes to predicting success out of grad school is that raw “brains” is not the explanation (this leads some of us to head scratching fits of “what’s going on here then?”). Instead, successful academics appear to have a certain je ne se quois, an “attitude” or “aptitude” that makes academia their “calling.” Others don’t seem to have this required ethos, and those are the really bright people that end up dropping out after their third year.

I propose that one important component of success in science is the ability to not be serious about the “right” things and to be serious about seemingly unimportant things. This ability is not equally distributed: some people seem unable to not be serious about serious things. Other people are almost constitutively incapable of being serious about non-serious things; they are the ones who “don’t get” the scientific game and who think that getting into a (serious) shouting match over whether Simmel’s contributions have been justifiably neglected or whether Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism is incoherent is the weirdest spectacle on the planet. My sense is that if you are one of those latter people and you are still in grad school, if you are “too cool” to take mere ideas seriously, you probably should be thinking about another day job.

This idea, like all ideas in academia is not original:

We should take Plato’s reflections on skhole seriously and even his famous expression, so often commented upon…”to play seriously.” The scholastic point of view is inseparable from the scholastic situation, a socially instituted situation in which one can defy or ignore the common alternative between playing…joking, and being serious…by playing seriously and taking ludic things seriously, busying oneself with problems that serious, and truly busy people ignore–actively or passively. Homo scholasticus or homo academicus is someone who can play seriously because his or her state…assures her the means to do so, that is, the free time, outside the urgency of a practical situation…and, finally but most importantly the disposition….to invest and invest oneself in the futile stakes, at least in the eyes of serious people, which are generated in scholastic worlds. (Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. “The Scholastic Point of View.” Pp. 127-140 in Practical Reason. Stanford: University of Stanford Press).

This is no joke, and it may have some serious consequences, including explaining the inability of (seriously) politically committed scholars to crack the scientific field as well as the loss of minority scholars in the upper-echelons of the discipline (something we talked about before). Because the social conditions of production of the disposition to play seriously are not equally distributed in social space, academia may, against its best intentions, continue to reproduce certain forms of privilege.

Can you play seriously?