The Double-Edged Sword of Affiliation: Progressive Alliance or Disciplinary Bondage

Affiliation is always a double-edged sword.

—Cary Nelson (209)

Affiliation . . . is a two-edged sword.

—Marjorie Perloff (142)

The twofold vibration of affiliation in the lives of contemporary academics is a perpetual condition of academic self-identity that produces a contrary motion.

—Jeffrey R. Di Leo (5)

That so many of the contributors to Jeffrey R. Di Leo’s important new collection, Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture, stake out their positions depending on which side of the proverbial sword they most affiliate with stands to reason. Ever since Foucault taught us to think of contemporary life as a modern incarnation of the disciplinary society, we have tended to align ourselves (in both intellectual and political terms) with either the positive, productive capacities of disciplines, or the negative, exclusionary forces that constrict alternative possibilities for academic work. Not, of course, that we could be purists with respect to which side we choose to cut our careers. In virtually everything we do as teachers, scholars, or critics, we find ourselves negotiating between the enabling and constraining dimensions of academic disciplines. Possibilities for academic affiliation have typically been registered as bonds to specific academic disciplines or to the exemplary figures we try to emulate on the path to advancement in relatively self-regulating fields of expertise. But the studies of academic affiliation in this book reveal a more complex set of circumstances than the adage of the disciplinary sword might lead us to believe.

No doubt academic life in the modern university is a matter of one’s place within the institutionalized practices of disciplinarity. Despite all the literature of resistance, change, and postdisciplinarity, “The logic of disciplinary specialization remains,” as Terry Caesar puts it, “the only logic there is” (157). On the one hand, this is a hard claim to contest, given the obvious dominance of specialized knowledges. But the binary logic of either/or tends to play by the rhetoric of the discourse it describes. The articulation of an “only logic” renders academia a totalizing abstraction rather than the increasingly complex collection of activities in which disciplinary resistance to special interests now seems to be turned belly-up, and the underside exposes the corporate interests that openly fuel university research and vocational training as the primary goals of privatized education. Caesar himself acknowledges the whirlwind. Although it remains the case that “no other professionally authorized narrative obtains for having a career . . . than for a college professor to have a special intellectual plot to defend,” it is also becoming increasingly clear that “this narrative is already changing” (158). The central claim I will make about this book is that the essays themselves tend to imply a set of possibilities that move beyond the binary logic even as most writers explicitly describe the two-edged formulation of academic disciplinary affiliations.

Unfortunately, even after several decades of institutional critique and academic re-structuring, few critics have followed up on Edward Said’s provocative formulation of affiliation in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983). This neglect of affiliation has been costly. Bluntly put, if theory is always and inevitably a writing of foundations, however provisional, theorizing affiliation directly addresses that which is most “primal,” and perhaps most foundational, in our academic lives: our emotional, psychological, political, economic, and even spiritual investment in the work we do. As Di Leo puts it, affiliation is “one of the most primal yet unacknowledged aspects of academic life” (1). Nothing so primal should be so long ignored, and for this reason alone this volume deserves a wide readership, especially among teachers and scholars in the humanities.

My own take on this book is that the essays end up revealing that to formulate resistance and/or affirmation as a form of affiliation exclusively to or with a discipline is itself the primal theoretical error. The disciplinary logic of the modern university does indeed tend towards binary operations of inclusion or exclusion, but from a labor perspective...