My current thinking and writing is around philosophy, social theory and the fractured society. It is a complex project with which I am and are likely to remain happily engaged. I am a sociologist still. I guess I’m essentially an ex-academic though, for all that I retain the title of Emeritus Professor and five years ago became a Visiting Professor; and I still do occasional lectures and the odd keynote address. Of course, to borrow Merton’s terminology, and considered in the round, I have a fairly comprehensive status-set and accompanying role-set: I’m a husband, father, grandfather for a start, as well as a retired or former academic. Maybe I’m a writer? But why am I bothering to ask such questions of myself?
I should say at the outset of this reflective piece that I have little truck with identity politics, not because gains have not been made under its rubric but because only too often, and in my view disasterously, it has displaced and relegated the politics of class and class struggle. Identity politics is at base a form of neoconservatism, as Habermas argued of postmodern thinking (remember postmodernism?).
But this blog is in a way about identity. In retirement these seven or so years, the question ‘who am I?’ has a certain resonance. I have often referred to my pattern of thinking/reading/writing while on the move, for example in cafes and bars. I’m a peripatetic sociologist. Moreover over time a pattern to this pattern has settled into a consistent rhythm. I travel with my laptop most Wednesdays, either to London or Dorking, or more rarely Guildford. When I do so I write more or less continuously for five or six hours. This is why I need to have several projects on the go: I can switch from draft to draft when I get stuck. Ironically, these relatively long shifts probably exceed those I was able to conduct pre-retirement. I find they are beginning to tire me more, or at least it takes me longer to recharge my batteries. I also put in shorter shifts in my local pub – the King Willie is a hundred metres down the hill from my place – one or two evenings a week (notably on Thursdays when Annette attends the village choir). This probably adds up to another four hours or so. Plus I pick up pieces on and off in my study, that is when I can edge my way past innumerable piles of books to my desk and its splendid revolving chair.
Does this make me a writer? No I agree: of course it doesn’t matter! But when friends ask me what I do in retirement, expecting me to grow roses or learn the guitar or to paint in oils, I say ‘I write’. But because I’ve always written books, chapters, papers, as it were for a living, this is not seen as a post-work hobby. They often look bemused. If writing was ‘work’, why do I still do it, despite the fact that it has no worthwhile material return?
If I wrote novels or poems, or in fact any form of fiction, I wouldn’t hesitate to affirm my credentials as a writer; but non-fiction?
I have never made a living as a writer: far from it. I should add that this is largely my fault. Increasingly, I find, academics reflexively, indeed calculatingly, pursue more popular markets for their wares, peaking in the run up to Christmas. This is ok (though a fair percentage of the resultant output is predictably dumbed-down crap). For the length and breadth of my babyboomer academic career I was of course obliged to publish as part of the job, so my salary covered it. I was never interested in marketing my products, sometimes to the chagrin of publishers. Marketing was for others. I was interested in ideas, not the investment they might, with care and attention, have represented. There is no self-congratulation here. I can understand and respect academics who think differently; and I certainly appreciate attempts to make abstruse ‘expert’ thinking and theories accessible to wider publics, an area in which I have myself fallen short. For better or worse I have written almost exclusively for my fellow academics.
In retirement minimal royalties from the two dozen or so books I’ve written, co-authored or edited barely supplement my pension.
Ok, so I am then a retired academic sociologist who still publishes stuff. I can live with this. But I guess I have learned some lessons over the years, even if not to my benefit.
- An excellent writing style can disguise if not compensate for lack of content, and this can sometimes fool enough people enough of the time.
- Over-the-top arguments can help immediate sales no end, and authors can always row back later.
- Writers typically write too much.
- What is castigated as jargon in the social sciences is applauded as specialist technical language in the natural and life sciences.
- Self-promotion as a writer has become the order of the day.
- Neoliberal universities don’t like boats rocked.
- Casualised employees in neoliberal universities daren’t rock boats.
- Many original, creative books have small runs and remain little-known or used – and grotesquely over-priced – hardbacks.
- It remains somewhat stigmatising to be a public intellectual in the UK, the norm being academics writing for each other.
- Academics oriented to Habermas’ ‘communicative action’ often become confused when entering the public sphere, where ‘strategic action’ predominates.
- Senior (and ex-)academics should slow down as they run out of new things to say.
- Elites prefer to learn about society via fiction, not least because novels don’t constitute evidence for change.
- Publishers salivate over simple, straightforward textbooks.
- Students, now ‘clientalised’, prefer Wikipedia and online summaries to actually reading stuff, Moodle over libraries.
- Bookshops have become increasingly ‘McDonaldised’, eschewing abstruse academic thinking in favour of obtuse popular thinking.
- With a handful of exceptions, there is likely an inverse relation between the significance of an academic book and its sales.
- Academics, having long since ceased to be Bauman’s ‘legislators’, are no longer even ‘interpreters’, but have now to gain entry to the marketplace as ‘celebrities’.
- There exist exceptions to all these propositions.
- I have personally fallen short on numerous counts, but mostly I don’t care as much as maybe I should.