Hobnobbed postulation

Here’s an essay on things I wish I’d known sooner.

There’s a prevailing feeling of impostor syndrome in increasing numbers of spaces, from school to work, community to family. It’s a pervasive feeling, akin to a perpetually unfulfilled “when I grow up…”. The secret is that those who think they grew up probably didn’t, and those who did grow up feel like impostors.

I see many posts on the fediverse, reddit, forums, and news sites about impostor syndrome. It’s particularly prevalent in knowledge work spaces, where you’re selling your intellectual labour to the capitalist. This is a space with which I’m intimately familiar and I want to share a brief sketch of how this aids profits, not people.

I cannot stress enough, at this juncture, how little any career means in the scheme of the quite monotonously fascist globalised economy. A job doesn’t bring fulfilment, give us a purpose, hold a space for us, give our lives meaning, and it certainly doesn’t change the world. Unless the world you’re trying to create is a less equal, more violent one. If you, like me by this point in an essay like this, are already getting the ‘not enough’ tingles, stick with me for a moment.

The feeling of not-enoughness is not a malfunction. We’re told we should wire it inward, internalise the message, and make ourselves the problem. Actually, the impostor syndrome read is a correct one. We’ve looked at the room and sensed that we are not who it was built for, and that the people at the front of it are not what they claim to be. How could this be? or, perhaps, could this really be? Syndrome internalises the read, it becomes a fault to be managed with confidence workshops. In this essay I want to try and move it out. To consider it fully.

Some of this essay might feel basic. Some of it might feel annoying. Guess why I disclaim this? Impostor syndrome. So let’s examine the workings of this phenomenon instead, and get clear about why we might not feel that we can do or be “enough”. And, just to be up front, this isn’t a motivational speech or a self-help guide.

We need to understand some mechanisms through which knowledge comes to be validated. Because knowledge carries, typically, an approach or way of being intrinsic to its core function. That approach comes from a particular way of knowing, and it’s easier for some to understand than others. That’s because it is written for some, not others.

Let’s turn to schools and academia for a second, because they’re spaces where a lot of us, as students, are made to feel we do not belong, we are too dumb, or that we just don’t matter. Because of this, and merciless bullying (from peers and teachers), I dropped out of school before finishing year 10. I went on to finish a PhD and work as a senior lecturer running institution-wide programs, but I can tell you the impostor never went away, it just morphed.

To the middle class, academia is a place that ‘creates’ knowledge. In actuality, it validates subsets of knowledges usually created outside of the academy, and it does so to progress ‘the economy’. It’s quite literally an institution designed to safeguard capitalism, and put a rubber stamp on a set of skills, attributes and attitudes of its graduates. To understand what this means for our impostors, it’s useful to think about how one becomes a teacher in higher education (the path is much the same in most countries, as it is to become a school teacher).

The typical modern path to anything resembling academia is a PhD¹. During your PhD, particularly for the physical sciences and their clingers, you are often working on a problem with a lab. There are a lot of elements of collaborative and creative problem solving, usually working towards some kind of purpose². This can build quite a sense of comradery amongst lab members. For folks in the cultural, arts and social sciences, while there tends to be more freedom in the topic/s of inquiry, there is typically less comradery at the day-to-day level. Ironic given what social sciences generally want to do.

Admission to a PhD program, however, is shrouded in a veil of ‘prestige’ and (self)importance. Once you’re in, you find the same thing repeats from academics to their students, more senior academics to more junior ones, and so on to the top. At conferences and other hobnobbery, there’s usually petty squabbling over whose contributions are more ‘valuable’. Then there is the general perception among the middle class that academics carry an aura of superiority. Call that authority. It’s coupled with actual power, which senior academics hold over their juniors and so on back down in more iterations than we need to waste our time with.

CW: sexual violence.

These power dynamics, however, hold real interpersonal consequences. A PhD supervisor in an intimate ‘relationship’ with their student holds power over that student. A manager, a dean, a head of school, a peer reviewer: all these roles hold power that can be exercised in anything from the extremes (sexual predation and demands, blackmail) to the co-opting of ideas, misappropriation and misattribution. These are all injustices, some far more severe than others.

People who exercise power-over (control of others, as opposed to power with them) from a position they³ have deemed to be important are dangerous because they are unchecked. Junior academics, students, communities who are being researched, and many more are at a significant disadvantage to those with the power, because the institutional hierarchy is designed to prevent dissent.

Notice the words they use. Contributions are ‘valuable’. Research is ‘successful’. Value and success are measured against benchmarks the capitalist sets, and the people enforcing the measure sit above you in a structure built so that you can’t argue with them. They validate the knowledge, after all. So the gap between you and the measuring stick is felt as your deficit - stick⁴. But it is the stick that is illegitimate, violent, wrong and the hierarchy was made to prevent us pointing that out.

And that deficit is profitable. Someone who feels not enough works the extra hours to close the gap, takes the casual contract without negotiating, competes with their peers rather than organising with them, and blames themselves long before they’d think to blame the boss. Then the institution sells them the confidence workshop. The feeling does the rough-handed manager’s job for free.

The power, then, needs to be traced, because it’s more than a problem for institutionalised learning, research or academia. Moreover, it’s certainly not a you problem, as much as they want you to think it is. But there are also questions to be asked here about the relevance and legitimacy of such power in a “post-truth” society⁵.

Right, anyway, so where does that authority come from? We might think it comes from outside of us-all. There’s probably a million different ways of understanding power, but for our intents and purposes we can largely put it down to well organised propaganda. So what the authority is backed by, then, falls apart in your hands. It’s just words. But let’s dig a little deeper on that, because I can still feel that little twinge of resistance.

Academia bills itself as the pinnacle of knowledge creation, sharing and, increasingly, sales. It’s where many knowledge workers are trained. It holds a (false) position in knowledge work spaces as a revered hall, while it extracts from and manipulates its participants on all fronts. To do this it leverages a hierarchical structure, increasingly populated by capital’s organic intellectuals from the private/business and large enterprise sectors, which are overtly predatory. Here, many academics argue that the academy has been eaten by the professionalisation of management (sometimes code for neoliberal management)⁶. Others say it’s because the academy is too much of an ivory tower. Those in the finance world say it is a slow-moving relic of no ‘real’ value⁷. So, it’s not without critics, but just because its authority has moved doesn’t mean the predatory power-over has.

We could, as those abused, extracted from, rejected and bullied by the academy, take some solace in the turning of the tide in the world of post-truth, but this would be a cheap and hollow win. Yes, academic superiority has lost its own footing amongst the broader bourgeoisie. Now, rather than being, notionally the mainstream centre of knowledge validation, the ruling class’s intellectual, academia has become secondary to business’s knowledge systems. The ascendancy of the professional manager in academia says a lot, but the larger transformation is political. Any authority academia had over knowledge production is being actively sidelined, primarily by populist right-wing parties and movements, but also on the left in pockets. And it’s not just the end of the academy, it’s the end of hand-waving ‘democracy’ as we verge hard into fascism.

Why hollow? Because none of this undoes the harm to us, and it doesn’t lift our feelings of (not) being enough. It just moves the enoughness problem around more broadly. It’s in this that I see class struggle, and thereby a possibility of reunification between the working and middle classes (both of whom are largely proletarian anyway), but that’s a story this old marxist can tell later. Nor is academia somehow redeemed. The knowledge industry is still based on exploitation, and the foundations of western ‘science’ are stolen from eastern, southern and Indigenous systems the world over. There may have been a horde of white ruling class men in europe who dubbed themselves enlightened, but they were busy ‘borrowing’ from the east⁸ while they did it; Voltaire, Leibniz and Wolff all leaned on Confucius.

So when we plug together a knowledge system built on exploitation, one that used to vouch for that exploitation, with a hierarchy built to prevent dissent and exclude those of difference, we end up with a pile of nastiness. This nasty beast is also in its death throes as it scrambles for relevance and oligarchs cackle with glee over the robotification of ‘knowledge’. We see, then, an institution prostituting itself to business for a semblance of its former glory. But it never had glory, its knowledge is taken from systems it doesn’t credit (the same co-opting and misattribution it practises on its own students, but at scale), and its hierarchy is enforced by people whose own status is a bluff. The academy is the impostor. It just convinced a long line of people that it’s the centre of the universe, and the impostor feeling has landed on us. It isn’t ours.

Working class folks, those with whom I was raised, are quick to tell you that academia is hobnobbed postulation. Maybe not quite in those words⁹. And this holds, to me, after a ten-year ‘career’ in and around academia. What they’re pointing at is a cunning, hollow institution whose purpose is to be a cog in a much larger machine to separate people from the practices, knowledges and work we have done for generations, and can do without the academy at all.

What all this means is that the power dynamics of ‘knowledge production’ play out in a vacuum of authority. This, perplexingly, increases power-over in interpersonal relations. But even in this there is nuance, and it’s been named in a bunch of ways, and even the naming often seems to come from academia. Fuck, everything is tainted, ey. But this one has merit as an idea, even if you just take it by name ~ intersectionality. The intersections where race, gender, ability, class and more meet. And look where it actually came from: the Combahee River Collective was describing interlocking oppressions in 1977, out of Black feminist organising, before Kimberlé Crenshaw named it inside the academy in 1989. Knowledge made outside, validated inside. Hmmm.

My argument, here, is that impostor syndrome emerges because of power-over: exercised in a vacuum of authority, wrongly held, and differently deployed.

And me? The part that took me ten years to see is that when an institution loses its authority, its hierarchy does not loosen. It tightens, and it turns inward, on the margins first. Those margins, too, were hard-won by activists fighting for a seat at the knowledge production factory’s table, even if those activists were slightly misguided and liberal (small l) in their assumptions.

That tightening is the first injury. Things that I noticed, and believe me when I say I learned this the extremely hard way, sitting at the edge of three of those intersections, while still carrying some privilege:

• Status anxiety compensates downward. A senior academic who is no longer the hegemon’s intellectual still has students, and juniors and students and juniors can be made to feel it.

• With no external validation left, the approval of seniors becomes the only currency in the building. Dependency rises. The supervisor’s opinion of you is now the whole economy.

• Management logic replaces any collegial logic. Once you are a resource, extraction from you is just ‘good management’¹⁰.

• The hierarchy was built to prevent dissent when it had something to defend (something it stole). It still prevents dissent; now it’s just pure authoritarianism.

• Patronage buys a lot less outside the building. The job, the career, the network your supervisor dangles are worth less every year. You are being dominated, worked, for a prize that is shrinking as you reach for it.

And finally, from where I sit now, gratefully outside this world (if traumatised), here is where the second injury arrives. This one produces the tingles quite directly. It is that the measure you are failing, the stick with which they are prodding you, is one the world outside has already stopped using. Not just the working class, but the ruling class too. The middle class still half-believes, out of habit, and that habit is about all that’s holding the building up.

You are subject to power that is exercised over you without check. And the standard that power enforces is one nobody outside the building really believes in (any more). Not enough, by a measure that is itself not enough. That, offloaded onto us, is what impostor syndrome is.

Now let’s turn things on their head¹¹. Who doesn’t feel like an impostor? (not rhetorical) Every institution is built around a subject, the person it assumes, the one it was designed to reward. In the academy (where not?) that subject is white, male, middle-class, able-bodied, unencumbered by care, at home in English, and with a parent who has been there before. The nearer you sit to that subject, the less the machinery produces the not enough feeling in you. Not because you are better, just because you fit in. Not feeling like an impostor is evidence of fit, not merit.

Fit becomes allegiance, allegiance builds power, and power is exercised over. Easy. They belong. If the institution’s common sense is already their sense, there is nothing to question and no one to be othered by. They don’t have to choose the hegemon’s side; they’re already on it. They aren’t worrying about all the people they crush. The people who don’t get the tingles are, overwhelmingly, the people the room was built for, and that is exactly why they can’t see the bluff. And often why, on analysis, they appear to be so very empty, self-assured and, well, (chronically) unexamined.

I’ve used the academy because I know it, and because it is the institution that shouts loudest that its hierarchy ranks by merit, by intelligence. If the tingles are endemic here (they are), where the sorting is supposed to be by ‘mind’, and they track fit instead, then any meritocratic claim is dead. And every other institution that makes the same claim (tech, law, medicine, the corporate ladder, the public service) runs on the same model. Don’t even get me started on the military and the military-industrial complex. Same hierarchy built to stop dissent. Same measure set by capital. Same subject at the centre. Same feeling in everyone else.

There is some intelligence in the academy. There is some novelty, and creativity, and people in labs and archives doing things they love. These people largely go unrewarded by the academy, and are increasingly shunted to lower-paid, more precarious positions because their market value is less than. What it rewards is ‘successful’ research, by the capitalist’s benchmark, which in practice means research that leaves the political order alone at best, and increasingly means research that dresses an openly fascist mainstream in the language of evidence at worst. If you feel like an impostor in that room, ask what you would have to become to stop feeling it.

I quit. Not because I finally got over the feeling; I never did, and I’m now sure that was the accurate perception. I quit because I worked out who the impostor was. The feeling was right. It was just pointing the wrong way.

My working class friends had it in two. Hobnobbed postulation, you bloody wanker.

Footnotes

1. in australia, industry experience is sometimes accepted, but only in a small number of areas. ↩

2. Increasingly this purpose is openly commercial, rather than dressed up as a ‘public good’. That makes the collaboration ring hollow. ↩

3. and/or with those around them (broader, at the societal level). ↩

4. ↩

5. don’t get your knickers in a twizzle. There’s no such thing as capital-T Truth, and you know it. ↩

6. I do not believe there is inherently any difference in actuality between an academic manager and a professional manager. They are managers, working for the capitalist’s agenda. ↩

7. as though they would have any idea what was valuable. ↩

8. hell, even these directions were a colonial weapon, east of what? ↩

9. you bloody wanker. ↩

10. ‘just good business’. ↩

11. at this point I’m just taking the piss with academic writing. ↩