Total Institutions

I'm often asked at this point in my fellowship whether or not I've become homesick. Alternatively, are there things in Canada that I miss terribly?

My answer, perhaps disappointingly, is: no, actually. And, maybe that merits some explanation.

It's not that I'm an emotionally indifferent person, with all countries and contexts alike in meaning. I've previously had plenty periods of intense homesickness while living in new places, which I've weathered both well and poorly.[1] I was even feeling a little that way inclined after a hurry-up-and-wait situation between the time when I took possession of my apartment here in Bochum and when my fellowship actually started at CAIS. But, once work began, I have been an utterly happy camper. How strange!

Even stranger is the analogy I'm about to spin for you. In searching for an explanation, I keep coming back to some drafts I read of one of my PhD student's dissertation. She's a former Veterans' Affairs officer, who did years of support work for people leaving the military. And, in studying one particular dimension of veteran trajectories [2], she had to do a lit review on the sociology of military life more broadly. As her advisor, I had the pleasure of reading over her shoulder. 

One thing that's stayed with me is this very indirect reading of Erving Goffman and his concept of "total institutions." These are contexts where groups gather in closed settings to perform all-encompassing work tasks (the military, but also boarding schools, monasteries, and maybe spaceships) or to be cared for in all-encompassing ways (mental asylums, prisons, nursing homes). In either case, the institution is total in the ways that it wraps around all aspects of professional and personal life. This can often be punitive and invasive--you don't want to be thrust into a total institution against your will, sundered of the relationships and privacies through which you otherwise experience yourself. Also, goodness knows Foucault has a lot to say about the nature of power in such contexts (yes indeed everything is like a prison in this case!). But on the flip side, these institutions can also be affirming and constructive of new selves, giving people roles and community and environments that span the sum of their hours and social horizons, both within and outside of work. This is why, in the context of this student's work, the veteran is a cultural problem societies need to solve: to leave the military is to leave not just a job, but a totalizing environment that constitutes your sense of self.

So, here I am clearly drawn to paint an indirect and perhaps unflattering picture of academia. It has a lot of these characteristics, especially as experienced by the grad students and early career scholars who uproot themselves to study in new places. One encounters a job--a challenging one that will demand much of your time and discipline your attention--as well as a set of relationships and social settings that extend out from that job, perhaps in a near totalizing way. We are not cloistered, exactly, but we do certainly have little narrow psycho-geographies (the library, the student pub, faculty housing, the student ghetto) and social patterns (a paucity of friendships with normal and sane people, potentially all consuming hierarchies with advisors) that can mimic a fair bit of the monastery life.

To be fair to all the unhappy Goffman heads out there, I will acknowledge that academia falls short of his full definition. Spaces of work and play are not so completely collapsed together, privacy is still a real possibility, and there's a blazing amount of eccentricity that flourishes under our, at times, rather loose administrative orders.

But still, consider: I have traveled to a new continent and linguistic context in order to perform a set work program. Yet, my experience is one of remarkable continuity and institutional support. I live in a company apartment along with several fellow Fellows, who have also traveled to be here on a similar schedule and share common research interests.[3] We are even formally expected to eat together twice a week; in practice, we do so much more often. Our working language is English. Functionally, I have been assigned both a home, a job, and a community that feels an awful lot like the one I've temporarily left behind.

If academia approximates a total institution, there is much to be gained for it. The breadth of the institution makes it possible to take someone from one corner of the world and place them in another, far flung from home, and trust that there will be a home ready to be found there. Standardization, but also totalization (if I may bend the language here a little), makes it a relatively friction-less possibility. I am just a monk traveling from one monastery to another.

Of course, there are also dangers to this social form. Goffman details how the work of total institutions is both destructive and constructive at the same time. By removing someone from their previous personal relationships and space, you are positioned to exert a terrible amount of control over their well-being and self-constitution. This is why recruits are broken in boot camps, heads shaved, sleep deprived, and forced to bond with both each other and their uniforms. Even if you don't intend to do terribly much with the reigns, their presence is still felt. Witness the intense kinds of interpersonal curiosity students will bring to their advisors and teachers--sometimes mimetic, sometimes interrogative--for figuring out why they are like that might be essential to understanding both how to take criticism in these newly heighten stakes, as well as understanding what kind of scholar you yourself may want to become.[4]

One powerful danger of the total institution is that you may one day be forced to leave it. This problem haunts academia all the more, given the paucity of all manner of jobs today and the precarity of the majority that do remain. 

German academics, I have since learned, feel that pressure with particular acuity. There are laws here (written with good intentions) that set a fixed limit to the amount of time in which one can be employed as a post-PhD researcher, without being given permanent status. The monkey's paw closes: instead of forcing universities to give permanency to long-suffering post-docs and visiting professors, these academic cadre are instead held on carefully calculated fixed contracts and then barred from every door when the time elapses. The clock carries on from university to university. It is the scholarly life, as a whole, that drips through the hourglass. Few can stop time by winning permanent professorships.

So I sit with unease thinking through all the ways that my facility in international exchange is bound up in the same structures that cause so many rough exits. I wonder what a version of Veterans' Affairs might look like for scholars forced from our total institutions--and more than just the clumsy alt-ac career seminar or Internet grifters that people are often left with. It's certainly an economic question, but also one about identity, community, cultural norms, and common languages. It is not just leaving a job; it is leaving an environment that stands up your sense of self. 

... 

 

This is an admittedly grim note to conclude on, so let me now briefly inventory a few possible, if glib, answers to the question of homesickness:

• I miss jaywalking in good company on the street
• I miss knowing, with certainty, whether doors unlock by turning keys to the left or to the right
• I miss buying groceries in absurdly bulk quantities
• I miss cheap, bad drip coffee
• I miss frequent encounters with street cats

But it's ok! Soon enough I'll be slurping terrible brews while petting rogue cats in the middle of the road with a stranger, on my way walking home with a 70 liter pack full of vegetables, unbothered by how I'll open the door when I get home.

 

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1. For instance, starting up a supper club with friends, vs. loudly besmirching the artistic value of salsa and trying, petulantly, to get every DJ in Cusco to play me Daft Punk.

2. Her project is very cool! She's studying how veterans are sometimes recruited into beekeeping, and the complicated parallel ways both bee and beekeeper are treated as 'damaged but managed' populations. Maybe there's the possibility for multispecies solidarity here? Ah, but alas, patriarchal script get in the way of fully unlocking that potential.

3. To my delight and surprise, one of my colleagues here was also a PhD student with me back in NYC! A very pleasant continuity indeed. 

4. Interpersonal harms, both marked and diminutive, can grow all too easily in this kind of context. On the professor's side, one is so often not just a supervisor of a work program, but also the unwitting participant in the becoming of a student's sense of selse. All to easily, feedback on a piece of writing can be taken to be much more than a question of prose or argumentation. As best I've found, the only thing for it is to deliberately show students your own efforts, frictions, and path of self-improvement, or you risk being imagined as someone thoroughly concluded and therefore also potentially entirely unreasonable when you inevitably display all too human foibles. Of course, there are also those professors whose transgressions are more than mere foibles, and who take a little too much pleasure in being thus perceived! And then there are the sexual and emotional predators too. It can be terribly depressing.