Practice: Discuss...

I enjoyed thinking through MacIntyre’s discussion of communal practices and their relations to institutions – especially as this response is due the same day that submissions for competitive awards.

It seems to me that we have (I have, at least) been oscillating throughout this colloquium between arguments regarding what Macintyre would call “external goods”: getting jobs, ideally ones that pay well, and having careers in the university – ruined or otherwise, and the “internal goods”: the rewards within our practice(s) that cannot be gained elsewhere (188). Perhaps herein lies the crux of what I’ve been struggling with this term. Internal goods are most valuable to those within a community, and in the case of my own research, difficult to “sell” to those outside of it. When we are asked “what is the point of your research” – something that I am asked frequently – I answer in terms of external goods because they seem to be more convincing non-academics (and non-opera enthusiasts) even though my more accurate answers would likely fall on the internal goods side.

Jana noted in her last post that we seem to be struggling with defining commonalities in this colloquium, and perhaps in the humanities as a whole. I would really like to spend some time considering the extent to which we as scholars are engaged in a common practice, and how we can define that.

What are our internal goods that parallel the satisfaction of MacIntyre’s chess well-played? How do the virtues of “justice, courage and honesty” (191) fit into our practice? How does our institution support, and how does it threaten our practice? Do we even have a practice? I think we do, and I’d like to explore that as a group – if others are interested of course. I seem to have a bit of space left, so below are some related thoughts on "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

For Eliot, the practice of the poet would seem to be a depersonalized situatedness in a particularly historical setting – work that he says “cannot be inherited” and must be undertaken by each individual (14). In addition to reminding me of Bourdieu’s definition of cultural capital, I wonder how this might be placed in context with our own traditions of scholarship. Certainly I think a knowledge of critical trends within our own sub-fields is important across the board, but in contemporary contexts of the university I’m unsure about depersonalization: while Eliot is of course speaking to poetic endeavour, our “texts” include autobiography and a wide range of narratives that embody specifically personal responses by our writers. Do our own practices value or even seek Eliot’s “significant emotion” (22) that exists solely within writing, and has no personal embodiment elsewhere, or is that again a value located within more narrowly defined traditions? To what extent do we as academics locate ourselves within our work?