In his recent book, The Affective Researcher, Andrew Gibson has pointed out the disproportionate emphasis that is placed in the contemporary university on being “effective” in research. He draws attention here to the ever-increasing focus on meeting deadlines, reaching targets, producing deliverables, and having impact. The problem with this emphasis, as Gibson is only too aware, is that it threatens to shoehorn research into a rigid, relentless, and ultimately linear trajectory. In this paradigm, the problems thrown up by our research – uncovering a text or critical perspective which casts your previous contentions into doubt, being asked a challenging question at a conference, being told that your work is hard to understand – are just that: problems – inconvenient addendums to the research itself, annoyances to be pushed through as quickly as possible. But are these issues not the core of research?
As with so many other things, thinking with Lauren Berlant is illuminating in this instance. As an affect theorist, Berlant highlights the felt elements of the world(s) we inhabit. Her core contention in so much of her work is that the very things that invite us into feeling – into encountering those very elements which might yield the most enlightenment – are too often brushed aside for being inconvenient in a world that values frictionlessness, progress, and constant forward motion above all else.
In terms relatable to any researcher in the throes of writing, Berlant describes the feeling of “impasse” as “a holding station that doesn’t hold but opens out into anxiety, that dog-paddling around a space whose contours remain obscure” (Berlant, 2012, p. 199). This feeling, of going around in circles, is something we all seek to avoid – especially in the contemporary neoliberal university in which “scholarly individualism and intellectual mastery” is paramount, and “to admit to struggle undermines our professional identity” (Berg and Seeber, 2016, p. 2).
This feeling, of going around in circles, is something we all seek to avoid – especially in the contemporary neoliberal university in which “scholarly individualism and intellectual mastery” is paramount, and “to admit to struggle undermines our professional identity”
We might even link this unrelenting rationalisation and fear of not (immediately) knowing to the Enlightenment, and to the divorce, instituted by Enlightenment thought, between the mind and the body. By associating the body with dumb inertia and the mind with reason and, thus, godliness, mainstream Enlightenment thought upped the stakes of stewing in ignorance. Neoliberalism – and the speed at which contemporary academia is waged – only intensifies this anxiety. The streamlining of rationality means that struggling to rationalise becomes itself tantamount to failure.
Pushing back against the idea that the body – and the senses – as unknowing, Berlant and others draw on Spinoza’s philosophy to reinstate the fuzzy penumbra between feeling and cognition. Other affect theorists highlight this space in which something happens but that something is not yet understood or categorised as the site of real enlightenment. What do we stand to learn, affect theorists ask, if we “suspen[d…] the invariance that makes happy happy, sad sad, function function, and meaning mean” (Massumi, 1995, pp. 86-7). Beyond this suspension, what might we gain from the process of researching – the movements between not knowing to curiosity to knowing a bit more but therein uncovering all manner of other unknown things – if we are willing to eschew the demand for speed and frictionlessness, and if we instead dwell a moment longer in this un-foreclosed, un-attributed, and dialectical space where thought and feeling comingle, mutually reforming one another?
What might we gain from the process of researching – the movements between not knowing to curiosity to knowing a bit more but therein uncovering all manner of other unknown things – if we are willing to eschew the demand for speed and frictionlessness, and if we instead dwell a moment longer in this un-foreclosed, un-attributed, and dialectical space where thought and feeling comingle, mutually reforming one another?
The insights provided by Berlant are relevant particularly to research undertaken during the Ph.D. Most people involved in academia would agree that the PhD is much more than “the mere fulfilment of discrete roles within a clearly defined timeframe” (Pirrie, Manub, and Necib, 2020, p. 45) and yet, the risks of living and researching as though it isn’treducible in this way is simply too high for most PhD students under current structures. Rather, it is a common experience for PhD students to find that it is only at the end of their doctorates, with the majority of their writing done and with some papers and other extras under their belts, that they finally have time to really read. Before, they might feel paradoxically guilty for sitting down with important texts that they had read in the past and had a fair grasp on but which nevertheless invited rereading, posing questions that should be dwelt with. Weirdly, the PhD can teach us that reading is not productive, unless it has a distinct and clear end. The PhD is a time and space in itself and not, as the contemporary university would have us believe, a training programme or waiting room for “real life”.
The PhD is a time and space in itself and not, as the contemporary university would have us believe, a training programme or waiting room for “real life”.
Returning to Berlant: In her conception of the “impasse”, we are forced to slow down, and to occupy “a singular place that’s a cluster of noncoherent but proximate attachments that can only be approached awkwardly, described around, shifted” (Berlant, 2012, p.199). Bearing Berlant’s ideas in mind and thinking in particular of the university in 2024, we would therefore pose a closing question: If not an awkward and noncoherent approach – moving dog-eared jigsaw pieces around a table before deciding that the entire jigsaw (and most likely the table as well) is completely flawed – what is doctoral research at all?
If not an awkward and noncoherent approach – moving dog-eared jigsaw pieces around a table before deciding that the entire jigsaw (and most likely the table as well) is completely flawed – what is doctoral research at all?
Dr Orlaith Darling is the coordinator of the International PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) at the Justus Liebig University Giessen. Orlaith Darling — Das Graduiertenzentrum (uni-giessen.de)
Dr Áine Mahon is Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at University College Dublin.
Works Cited
Berlant, L. 2012. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Berg, M. and B. Seeber. The Slow Professor. 2016. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gibson, A. (ed.) 2022. The Affective Researcher. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Ltd.
Massumi, B. 1995. ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Cultural Critique 31:2 (83-109).
Pirrie, A., Manum, K., and Necib, S.E. 2020. “Gentle Riffs and Noises Off: Research Supervision Under the Spotlight”, Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (1).
