Academic anxieties

Publi le 29 septembre 2014 par David Berliner

You start with herbal meds, you end up with Xanax. This formula summarizes the
psychological trajectory of many researchers in academia today. I dont want to pity
them more than other professions that are so much more exposed to the effects of
neoliberalism and global burnout. Not all researchers are taking anxiolytics either.
Research in the social sciences (I am an anthropologist) is, above all, pleasure:
jubilation to solve a scientific puzzle, accumulate facts, read endlessly, the pleasure
to not understand (says French anthropologist Jean Pouillon) and to propose
theoretical models to explain the world (1).
However, unlike the stereotypical view of the researcher as a butterfly collector (for
anthropologists: a kind of Indiana Jones always traveling to some exotic country),
contemporary academics need to be on many fronts: to publish in the best journals
and in different languages; to attend dozens of conferences per year while pursuing
their research; to teach at their local university and on other continents; to head
research programs that will generate money for their universities; to be international
and national militants; to mentor their doctoral students; to be useful to their
university administration; and so on. These obligations make the researcher a true
entrepreneur of his own intellectual life (2). As a matter of fact, the world of research
leaves no room for hesitation, wander, doubt and serendipity. Our era is that of the
neoliberal intellectual, caught in an economy of citationality, obsessed with its
editorial visibility and always with an eye on Academia.edu and Google Scholar.
Especially in the social sciences, this neoliberal scholar is nevertheless a fierce and
ironic critique of the system. A kind of neoliberal revolutionary, as I call it... Beyond
the oxymoron, such posture holds incompatible values between claimed
romanticism and strategic hyperproduction.
There is, indeed, growing cynicism against these neoliberal conditions in academic
worlds. Some, like Rosalind Gill, invite us to break the silence (3). Suffice it to read
some posts of The Professor is In (a forum about mental illness in
academia:http://theprofessorisin.com/category/mental-illness-and-academia/) to get
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a sense of the psychological distress experienced by some colleagues. Many

academics, young and old alike, are paralyzed by doubt on the legitimacy of their
scientific practices. Few researchers still dare to claim this useless part that is
essential to research. Is there a place for the researcher who needs time to write
(taking into account that one must usually wait until our fifties to write something
worthwhile, said Bukowski)? Many of us have the feeling of being consenting victims
of a system that limits our intellectual freedom. The well-known formula "Publish or
perish" is indicative of the alienating regime in which we operate, where access to
the most prestigious journals, mostly based in the US and the UK, is the essential
criterion for obtaining the best jobs in the best universities (although there exists
great initiatives, particularly with regard to Open Access journals such as Hau and
Cultural Anthropology). To be efficient, knowledge is compartimentalized to the
extent that one can nostalgically dream of a time when an intellectual was at once a
physician, an inventor, a naturalist, a philosopher and a poet. Today, Powerpoint
thinking dominates: simple ideas, concise formulas ready to be consumed fast.
Goodbye complexity and interdisciplinary? Adieu the intellectual quest?
At these anxieties of the neoliberal time, increasingly denounced by academics as
the success of "manic depression in culture" (4), one can add others inherent to the
practice of research, writing and teaching. One of my anthropology students, Edgar
Tasia, has just written an excellent Master thesis about these issues (5).
Anthropology, because it questions the stability of our certainties, is an anxietyriddled discipline, as brilliantly discussed by Devereux in his book "De l'angoisse
la mthode" (1980) (6). The deconstruction of these things taken-for-granted, our
most familiar and intimate representations of the world, is a destabilizing intellectual
enterprise triggering a lot of anxieties. Similarly, for many, writing does not rhyme
with inner peace. In the process of writing, the whole organism tenses up. Insomnia
is never far away. Teaching is also a real physical exercise. After school,
Wittgenstein used to watch movies to let go the tension triggered by teaching. To
these one must add: competitions between researchers in an unequal international
world; local academic hierarchies (e.g., mentor/PhD student relationships
summarized by Georges Steiner as: Ill never equal my mentor, but Id like that, one
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day, he takes me seriously (7)); the loneliness of research; rampant gender

inequalities; uncertainties about the future (what to do after a PhD? And after the
postdoc?); but also the profound psychological identification of researchers with their
intellectual production. An article rejected, some aggressive comment from a
colleague, and the world seems to collapse. Gregory Bateson, the eminent British
anthropologist, wrote: Some men seem able to go on working steadily with little
success and no reassurance from outside. I am not one of these. I have needed to
know that somebody else believed that my work had promise and direction, and I
have often been surprised that others had faith in me when I had very little in myself
(8).
I have long felt that there was something necessary, exhilarating and suffering in the
current academic ethos, torn between romance and overproduction. I participated in
it 200%. I met with scepticism discussions about slow science inviting us to slow
down as Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers puts it (9). Not that I wanted to
emphasize quantity over quality. Not that I found neoliberal temporality adequate for
research. Quite the opposite. But I wanted to accelerate, passionate and excited by
my desire to contribute to anthropological knowledge. It also seemed to me that, in
some European Universities, we needed more international evaluations and a
certain dose of meritocracy against localism and clans. Yet I was also greatly
mistaken. In the face of multiple pressures, in the midst of the current evaluative
craze, academics also deserve a politics of care, an attitude of concern and
responsibility about their vulnerability. This requires, above all, the recognition of the
anxieties inherent to their work and the real risk of psychological exhaustion carried
out by the neoliberal ethos.
(1) David Berliner. 2013, Le dsir de participation ou Comment jouer tre un autre,
LHomme 206 : 151-170.
(2) See Shore, C. N., & McLauchlan, L. 2012. 'Third Mission' Activities,
Commercialisation and Academic Entrepreneurs. Social Anthropology, 20 (3), 267286.

(3) Gill, R. 2009. Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia.
In Flood,R. & Gill,R. (Eds.) Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist
Reflections.London: Routledge
(4) Emily Martin. 2007. Bipolar Expeditions. Mania and Depression in American
Culture. Princeton University Press.
(5) Edgar Tasia. 2014 Anxiety anthropologists. The emotional impact of
anthropology on the anthropologist. Master's thesis. ULB.
(6) Georges Devereux. 1980. De l'angoisse la mthode dans les sciences du
comportement. Paris: Flammarion.
(7) Georges Steiner et Ccile Ladjali. 2003. Eloge de la transmission. Paris: Albin
Michel.
(8) Gregory Bateson. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
(9) Isabelle Stengers. Une autre science est possible. Paris: La Dcouverte.
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