A couple of thoughts on professing and professionalization:

1. The word “Profession” related originally to religious matters. A profession was a statement made before God; a professional was one who entered a religious order. This devotion to a “higher power” and a code of practice relates to my earlier remarks about modern-day professionals (e.g. doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc.) and the notion of professional ethics.

2. However, it seems that the term professional has an almost equally long negative connotation. In the sense of someone who does something for gain rather than for higher reasons (e.g. a “professional politician”). Here I wonder if one might make a connection to Plato’s criticism of rhetoricians as opposed to philosophers. Rhetoricians make arguments without concern for the “Truth,” while philosophers devote themselves purely to the pursuit of Truth.
3. Once we secularize the academy to some degree with the rise of humanism, we can speak of academics who profess a devotion to Truth and a code of practice, and who eventually focus their devotion and practice into disciplines.
4. Thus we have the academic professor as a priest-class with a devotion to a higher truth looking down upon a more degraded, marketplace “professional,” who does his/her work for commercial purposes (regardless of whether or not s/he “loves” the job). This results in an obvious schism between the professor, who looks for at least a pretension to a devotion to knowledge from students, and students, who may or may not have a desire to pose as, or be, intellectual but are primarily concerned with their future.
5. It strikes me that one move is to imagine a third-space, the neglected/occluded other in this dialectic between the priest/philosopher/professor and the commercial professional (the “degraded” rhetorician). This is where I was going in my earlier post regarding the shaman/sorcerer as a professional. In my haste there, however, I hadn’t really thought about how the shaman/sorcerer relates to the priest/philosopher/professor. Though shaman/sorcerer treats his/her work as a trade, as commercial work, s/he cannot treat it strictly as a marketplace-driven professional. The shaman/sorcerer has obligations, an etiquette that must be observed in transactions with the “beyond.” However, these obligations are not like the “profession” made by the priest.

For anyone familiar with the Nietzschean aspects of Deleuze and Guattari, the critique of the priest and of professionals from psychoanalysts to teachers as priests is recognizable. D/G make productive use of the shaman and sorcerer, particularly in the plateau on becoming in A thousand plateaus and in their discussion of Carlos Castaneda. Anyway, I’m not going to detail that here! However, that’s my intellectual launch point. There’s also Ulmer and his discussion of Black Elk.

So what would it mean to think of the future of English Studies, of the humanities, in its confrontation with market forces, not as the defense of faith against commercial interests but as the emergence of a new mode of “sorcerous” professionalism?

For one, it would mean an opportunity to address directly the “dark matter” of writing, in that writing both founds and exceeds the limits of the philosophic and monotheistic traditions it enables. Writing is something that cannot simply be “professional” in the conventional sense.

Unlike priestly professionalism, the sorcerer does not require logical contortions, cynical manipulations, or ethical hand-wringing to engage commercial interests. Because (of course) religious and academic institutions and professional orders and guilds have always engaged in material and political matters, there has always been a need to excuse, cover up, or demonstrate regret. Witness the discourse on part-time academic labor. The sorcerer recognizes the need to thrive in the context of the marketplace without seeing this as a compromise.

On the other hand, the sorcerer does not commit to the interests of the State. Indeed, when the State captures sorcerous practices and technologies, it transforms them into a priest class. Under the weight of critique, it is clear the priest has always already served the interests of the marketplace, that Truth is ideology. As D/G would describe it, the sorcerer bears an anomalous relation to both the pack and society. Picking up momentarily on a Derridean phrase, “the mark of belonging does not belong,” there is a sense here of the sorcerer as an interface, as a site for the transmission of affects between the pack and the social. So, while the State will, at times, seek to incorporate the sorcerous, it also relies upon the sorcerer’s anomalous relation to itself.

One way of thinking about this is as a deconstruction of professionalism. This is something Derrida does in a little essay titled “The University without Condition” or something like that. There he speaks of the tension between constative and performative discourses, which is quite similar to the tension I’ve described between the priest and marketplace professional. As is the trademark Derridean move, we look beyond/beneath the dialectic to the aporia it occludes. In this essay, he explores the concept of the “event” as an irruption of discourse.

So how might one imagine a professional, a (post-)humanistic professional, as neither priestly nor commercial but as articulating an anomalous relation between the marketplace and the “dark matter” of writing? As an event that neither makes claim to verifiable truth (constative) or to achieving specific ends (performative) writing becomes a site of mutation, of intercourse with materiality of thought. Hence the professional writer is not one who tames writing for use in the communication/management of preformed constative statements or for enacting commercial transactions but rather practices writing as a conjuration.

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