Crisis and Collegiality

The idea of collegiality—of one's interaction with others in the professional workplace—is a profane concept modeled on the idea of free linguistic exchange. A good colleague participates in a process of reciprocal exchange—a conversation—that produces a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The idea of collegiality thus stands in contrast to the idea of the sacred. In sacred interaction, the individual is not an equal participant in a conversation but, on the contrary, a speck in the face of the infinite, a mortal confronted by immortality. God gives commands: he does not cast his vote among a democracy of equals.

But this way of putting it suggests the inseparability of the concepts of collegiality and hierarchy. In the scene of human action, the equality of "peripheral" linguistic exchange is fundamentally related to the hierarchy of "central" sacred exchange. What makes this relationship essentially scenic is the inseparability of the central object's significance or sacrality from the profane "linguistic" attentions of those on the periphery. For instance, for 99.99% of the population, voting in an election means granting someone else power, power that may be used against the very same voters responsible for electing the person in the first place. Or, to shift from politics back to religion, God gives commands, but you have to believe in him first in order to hear those commands. More precisely, you already have to be capable of "profane" dialogue in order to understand God's "sacred" instructions. Thus, whether or not God exists, the very fact that we are able to talk about him indicates that the question of his existence is in the first place a question of his sacred designation within the general scene of human representation, which is to say, of his central significance among "profane" or "peripheral" language users. Nietzsche's slogan, "God is dead," depends upon this anthropological analysis for its philosophical bite. The slogan is really a backhanded complement toward religion, because it acknowledges the superior generative power of the sacred over purely "metaphysical" abstractions such as Being.

As Durkheim realized, the difference between sacred and profane is a generative difference, from which all other cultural differences derive. In the compact ritual societies studied by Durkheim, reciprocal exchange among profane equals remains strictly separated from sacred exchange with the gods. It is tempting to believe that modern societies have dispensed with the old hierarchical forms of sacred exchange, upon which so-called "primitive" people appear irrationally to depend. But this is to take a needlessly parochial attitude toward the sacred by assuming that its often bizarre appearance to the outside observer is an indication of its ultimate uselessness. By describing the sacred as functionless, we do not so much explain it, as explain it away. The sacred becomes an epiphenomenon of history. Like purgatory, it is destined to decline and fade as people become progressively more enlightened as to religion's ultimate basis in the supernatural. If, on the contrary, the sacred is taken seriously by an anthropology, it must be understood as a constitutive category of anthropology itself.

In this analysis, I assume that the sacred exists in muted form today, just as it did at the origin of humanity. If we listen carefully, its distant reverberations can be heard beneath the general turmoil and profanity of modern life. I will not, however, seek to show how the sacred appears across the spectrum of professional organizations. The purpose of this essay is to analyze its manifestation in one particular group: among professors of literature. I hasten to add, however, that I think my remarks are generalizable to other areas of university life, in particular, to the other disciplines in the humanities and "soft" social sciences. In extrapolating to those disciplines which share the same general anthropological focus as literature departments, I certainly do not wish to imply that individuals in the "hard" natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics are not every bit as...