Deviant Identity Crisis (Redux)

As happens in most faculty meetings, our meeting last Friday generated a distressing identity crisis.  Doubts about ourselves are never far from the surface, so it doesn’t take much to set us off.  On Friday, our rousing discussion of class scheduling was interrupted when a junior colleague noticed that we have a habit of sometimes using Deviant as if it is an honorific and asked, “Why exactly is that?”

Upon hearing this question, one of our more cranky senior faculty glanced at the junior colleague, saying, “Bless your heart.”  Happily, another faculty member quickly rebuked her, pointing out that there was no call for vulgar oaths and hostility.  With that bit of bad manners out of the way, we could proceed with de-railing the agenda in our more usual collegial way. 

Upon consideration and as often also happens, we realized that our junior colleague was right.  We do sometimes use “Deviant” as an honorific. 

Sometimes this rather predictably follows from delighted awe at our Deviant ancestors, as when Dogen inspires us to entirely reconsider the phenomenology of cooking supper.  Or when Mengzi reminds us not to climb trees when we want fish.  Times like that make us want to bestow veritable crowns of Deviance upon some ancestral heads. 

But sometimes we use Deviant in praise of the living.  And however fun it is to pass out imaginary crowns, we’re less sanguine about resting them on living heads.  More to the point, we are suspicious of what heads we may leave bare.  Deviant can be just a descriptive used in reference to us poor benighted souls laboring long to know more things, including those who are paid to do it and those who are training in it.  But therein lies the rub when usage slips into the honorific, for we notice this can lead to some dubious verbal shenanigans.

We have, for example, heard speakers implicitly distinguish between those they deem Deviants and (mere) “professors of Deviance” or (measly) “teachers of Deviance.”  This sort of thing is far worse when people are denying that someone is a Deviant.  Typically this will occur with some softening gesture that attempts to equivocate between Deviant as an honorific and Deviant as descriptive.  The Deviant will be ascribed characteristics that are generally desirable (the honorific) but Deviant status (pseudo-descriptive) is denied as if it is merely remarking reasonable divisions of labor:  “Deviants are fearless…. He works in religion, not Deviance.” We call shenanigans on that.  For it can’t be a good thing if using Deviant to refer to people works as an honorific that can be withheld based on petty methodological differences or status signaling.  Start treating Deviant as a verbal reward for the well-placed, well-behaved, or like-minded or start withholding Deviant to scorn those who lack professional advantage, act up, or disagree and pretty soon we’re going to need a Confucian to come in here to rectify some names.  Maybe even to bless hearts all over the place. 

So, finally, we decided to save the verbal crowns for the dead.  Where the living are concerned, we concluded, we have no trouble with descriptive usage.  At least we think we don’t, but wait around a bit since we’re sure to become queasy about that too.  Still, henceforth we’ll try to use Deviant descriptively when talking to and about each other. Of course even there, our usage will need to be loose and flexible, as we’re never entirely sure what properly belongs in the category Deviant and what does not.  Aw, hell, we thought, we haven’t even finished this paragraph and already we can feel trouble brewing with even that basic conclusion… Aware that we stood at the precipice of a renewed and more vigorous identity crisis, we were saved by the abrupt recognition that we have to call ourselves something.  Otherwise, how will the administration know where to send our funds?  And what will they put on our students’ degrees?  So, Deviant it is.  As Nagasena would say, it is but a way of counting and convenience.  That Nagasena, he was such a Deviant!

As for the class scheduling issue, since time was short, we decided to cut to the chase and voted unanimously that next fall we’ll teach some stuff.

Joint Colloquium Plans Disintegrate into Mayhem

Alert to how admin loves “collaboration” and “interdisciplinarity,” the DoD recently experimented with the idea of holding joint colloquia with the Department of Normalcy.  Our first colloquium was to be a session on Meiji era European philosophy, but planning quickly foundered on the rocks of what to call the session. 

Our Normal colleagues protested identifying any philosophy as “European,” saying such would be but trite “identity politics” and that the best philosophies cannot be contained within cultural markers.  In return, DoD representatives were simply confused:  Why not listen to the European philosopher first – after all, how the hell should we know whether European-ness matters in advance of encountering some?  We might even need to ask that European some questions and hear some answers.  Heck, we might even need to tarry in some heady uncertainty about ourselves before our questions even become good ones.

From there, the planning session went wholly off the rails – yea, verily, the trolley of “collaboration” wantonly mowed down entire villages of people just trying to get along.  What if, the Normals asked, our colloquium attracted Europeans to philosophy for the wrong reasons, seducing them into thinking their identity might matter?  Here again, deviant representatives were left wondering how the hell we would know if that’s a bad thing – after all, we’ve not yet settled on a set of right reasons for this, or indeed for all manner of human endeavors. 

It swiftly emerged that relative to our colleagues in the Department of Normalcy, we here in the DoD operate at an overwhelming a priori deficit, an affliction that has us persistently prefacing remarks with how-the-hell-should-we-know formulations.  We were game to keep trying our hand at this collaboration thing but, alas and alack, the Normal faculty departed the meeting as soon as the stale institutional cookies had all been eaten.  We appear to be running at a deficit in those as well.

Deviant Identity Crisis Averted (for now)

As most of you know, all work abruptly stopped during the faculty meeting last week, when our newest junior colleague interjected to ask: “Who is this ‘we’ we keep referring to?”  This drew all of the tenured old dogs up short as they immediately realized this was an exceptionally diverting question – indeed, it was the bomb and far more interesting than the budget (which, as always, aspires to someday achieve shoestring status).  All department effort was redirected to puzzling this out and the following tentative conclusions were drawn:

a) “We” make ourselves plural partly because we revel most in deviance carried out in company and think Confucius was on to something in noting the joy derived from practicing the things you learn among friends. 

b) “We” aspires to be a linguistic refuge for deviants, those poor huddled masses turned away at the Ellis Island of Normal.  We also hope our “we” could be a nice place to visit for those who live most of the year in Normal.  They could even live here year-round if the spirit moved.  Basically, human solidarity is one of our favorite things.  We like it so much, we think we love it.

c) “We” is also a perilous word easily abused and we resolved to try never to use it in situations of disagreement between individuals – e.g., quarrels over the proper scope of deviance are best handled when people speak for themselves rather than trying to marshal magnifying force for their own views by framing them in the collective “we.”  We should thus be worried about ourselves when we say things like “What you fail to understand is that in deviance, we do ____.”  Say too much stuff like that and we may have to bring out the shame ray.

d) However much we might want our “we” to be total, it surely won’t be and thinking it is would carry us several long strides down the road to perdition. We admire Shakespeare and think Hamlet was astute in saying, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”  Thinking you’re all-the-we has never worked out well in human history and in our endless quest to know more things we think listening to non-we interlocutors is the finest of bad dreams.  They’re what’s saving us from living in a walnut pretending to be king.  We like the ridiculous but are trying real hard not to be it.

e) Talking about “we” while simultaneously using it to refer to oneself is hard.

As with all topics deviant, our metaconclusion was to hold all of our conclusions lightly and resolve to revisit them often.  In lieu of the budget we were meant to plan, we will send the conclusions above to administration and hope they don’t notice the difference.  

Department of Deviance Submits New Mission Statement

The DoD faculty met this past week at a don’t-call-it-a-retreat.  The aims of the meeting included:  making a mission statement for the department, writing a strategic plan, and eating meals on the university budget.  After two days of intense discussion and stale institutional cookies, the department boldly resolved upon the following:

            MISSION STATEMENT:  Know more things!

STRATEGIC PLAN:  Find out more things by reading more, listening to more people, and asking about stuff we don’t understand but sure would like to.

The administration has been restive awaiting the results of our don't-call-it-a-retreat so we plan to submit the new statement and plan sometime in the next year or, if we get distracted, then at least the year after that.