I’ve recently been reading the indescribable blog Spurious – a newly-acquired vice I’ve picked up from Larval Subjects, which maintains a watch on the blog’s author. I read Spurious differently from other blogs: it’s not unusual for me to need to break away, mid-post, and read something else, and then return much later to finish reading. The cause is not the distracted reading that can occur in online contexts – where one simply loses a train of thought and wanders away. Instead, Spurious’ posts often have something about them (at least for me) that requires a bit of processing before moving on – it’s a bit like I fill up, and need time before taking more in. I keep writing and deleting a sentence trying to describe my reaction a bit more clearly, but none of my words seem to have the right connotations… We’ll leave it, then, at indescribable.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that some recent posts at Spurious reminded me of some conversations I’ve been having lately – and of other, similar conversation I’ve had many times before – on the issue of intellectual ambition. I should note that this isn’t exactly what Spurious is writing about (and I’m a bit conscious of reducing these writings instrumentally, for purposes of introducing my topic…). Still, I’ll cite the passage to which I’m reacting:

W. speaks mournfully about my intellectual decline. Of course it’s not my decline he laments, but that of his own judgement, and his own phantasmic hopes: how was it that he placed his hopes in me? why does he need to place them in anyone at all? I tell him at once I only appeared intelligent, but in fact it was a sham.

I’ve written occasionally before on the blog about feeling as though I often benefit from a kind of academic halo effect. I can acknowledge that there are things that I do reasonably well – although I tend to think that I do these things far less effortlessly than other people sometimes assume. There are even a few small areas where I have something I might regard as expertise – although, again, these areas are far more circumscribed than other people seem to believe. I don’t think I misrepresent my skills and knowledge to other people – I don’t think I’m a deliberate sham, so to speak – but the practical difference is likely negligible: people routinely appear to assume, in quite casual ways, that I will achieve far more grandiose goals than I am actually seeking to achieve. Periodically, this then leads to quite severe recriminations that I am not living up to my potential.

I’m always a bit shocked when this happens – I’ll be trying, as I have been recently, to make some fairly mundane career decision (important to me, of course, but of few implications for the world at large), and someone will suddenly lash out with a criticism that is clearly informed by some wild vision that endowed chairs will be tossed at my feet when I finish the PhD, as long as I don’t undermine myself by accepting some low-tier position like [x] now… Or they will threaten – as I had someone recently do – letting me know that I’m “getting older”, that soon I will no longer seem like “the bright young thing”, and that I will soon be displaced by other, more novel thinkers, unless I immediately place myself on the high-pressure track to do [y]…

I have a strange emotional gap where other people seem to feel ambition. I have no interest in whether I work at a highly-ranked or lowly-ranked institution. Really. None. I have some interest in the practicalities, of course: work arrangements and research support do vary, and I’m cognisant of those differences. I’m also aware, though, of more intangible issues relating to how I work – of the fact, for example, that teaching is actually more productive for my writing, than the sorts of research work regarded as higher-prestige in Australian universities… I’m aware that the highest-prestige academic appointments here, which are geared to research to the exclusion of teaching, run a risk of demoralising me… I’m also aware that I tend to become depressed when working in environments where other people care a great deal for their prestige. I want to work around people for whom this is not a major goal.

I have even less interest in whether I’m a “bright thing” (I thought I’d already taken care of the “young” part by sitting out of academic life for the better part of ten years…), or how I compare to other people doing academic work. I’ve never been competitive in my intellectual life – I think this is why people are always pulling me aside and advising that I keep key elements of my work under wraps, lest someone should “steal” them: I know people do worry about this sort of thing, and I can understand that there are solid, “material” reasons to worry about it, but I can’t personally bring myself to do it. My greatest fear is actually that no one will be able to “steal” my work – that I won’t be able to figure things out, or express things clearly enough, to be of any use to someone else. Part of me has always sort of hoped that someone else has already done what I’m trying to do – I’m relieved when I find authors who seem to be pointing in the same direction. I think the substantive goal to which my work is oriented is extremely important. Whether I’m the person who achieves this goal is really kind of beside the point…

All of this seems to make me a frustrating person for the various people who have ambitions on my behalf. And leads to occasionally angry interactions, as people feel they’ve gone out of their way to open doors I seem unfathomably reluctant to enter – or to block doors through which I’d misguidedly like to pass… If it were a simple matter of shrugging off negative reactions, this would be one thing – but there are often more… material consequences, sometimes quite unpleasant ones…

There are, of course, exceptions – people who have a realistic sense of what I actually can, and can’t, do; people who don’t have a discernable “stake” in what I decide, but who nevertheless care about the outcome; people who will argue with me, and who won’t be surprised when, as often happens, I lack some pivotal bit of knowledge or simply make a mistake… I explained to the reading group early on that what I’m mainly looking for, at the moment, is a place to be openly ignorant and stupid (and hasn’t this group given me my wish… ;-P). A friend who does have a stake in the outcome of a decision I’m trying to make, but who also has the rare gift of bracketing this when speaking with me, recently abstained from offering any advice, saying only, “I think you need a great deal of quiet and space.” My question is why these exceptions are so unusual – not that I expect (or desire) friendships with large numbers of people, but I do want deter people from investing such strong hopes in me, where they will predictably receive such poor returns…