Those of us who are academics, I suspect, got into this business because we loved what we were doing.  It was fascinating and gripping.  Sometimes it was painful and hard and difficult in many ways.  But the positives massively outweighed the negatives.  I think they still do.  

But life has a way of making you take for granted all the good while still presenting every new bad thing as its own fresh annoyance.  The asymmetry between pleasure and pain has been a commonplace at least Freud; economists talk about it in terms of the "decreasing marginal utility" of every ice cream cone after the first.  Even Sade has discussed this in her work.

Invariably, as one day succeeds another, and then another, we have to remind ourselves why we got into this game, and what we get out of it.  Most of the time that succeeds.  But it's also true that, as the years go by, we can slip into routines that make us more automatons than agents.  It's an old story, and applies to many spheres of human life, but that doesn't make it less true, nor less pressing as a challenge.

Recent years have seen a number of humanist academics wonder if the past few decades of high theory have hindered our efforts to love things, to care for them, to be committed to causes or people or projects.  I share these concerns. 

Some high humanists have begun to worry that the critique of social norms has become radically self-consuming.  Is this a matter of middle age, for me and for the humanists?  Some nostalgia for the rosy blush of a lost youth?  Or is there some insight that such worries communicate, that may be shared?

I think the worries are worth hearing.  Lisa Ruddick, an English prof at U of Chicago, has a great piece that’s been floating around the lit theory world for a bit but that few of us outside of that have stumbled across.  It’s a complaint that a desiccating cynicism, or (worse) a pose of desiccating cynicism, has infected her corner of the humanities, and maybe spread beyond it, in a terrible déformation professionelle:

Is there something unethical in contemporary criticism? This essay is not just for those who identify with the canaries in the mine, but for anyone who browses through current journals and is left with an impression of deadness or meanness. I believe that the progressive fervor of the humanities, while it reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction. In the name of critique, anything except critique can be invaded or denatured. This is the game of academic cool that flourished in the era of high theory. Yet what began as theory persists as style.

…

These days nothing in English is “cool” in the way that high theory was in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, you could say that what is cool now is, simply, nothing. Decades of antihumanist one-upmanship have left the profession with a fascination for shaking the value out of what seems human, alive, and whole.

…

it encourages an intellectual sadism that the profession would do well to reflect on.

Why has it been hard for this community to shift away from norms that make ruthlessness look like sophistication, even as dissenting voices are periodically raised and new trends keep promising to revitalize the field? The reflections that follow, in proposing some answers, touch on the secret life of groups.

…scholars us[e] theory—or simply attitude—to burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation. Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the engulfing collective. Ultimately I suggest that within English as a human system, this gestalt works to create a corps of compliant professionals. Novices subliminally absorb the message that they have no boundaries against the profession itself. The theories they master in graduate school are such as to make their own core selves—or what, within the lexicon of D. W. Winnicott, would be called their “true selves”—look suspect and easy to puncture analytically. What by contrast is untouchable, and supports a new and enhanced professional self, is what Slavoj Žižek, without apparent irony, has called “the inherent correctness of theory itself.”

…

An extensive academic conversation has, of course, questioned the ideals of the inner life and the bounded individual, on the strength of various critiques of liberal individualism. Some of the most powerful scholarship of the last decades is rooted in this more or less Marxist intellectual tradition. Among other things, this work has shown how liberal theory, in presuming that “man” is ideally self-possessed and autonomous, overlooks the shaping influence of the market and of social relationships. Yet antiliberalism has many variants. In its cool variant, it denies the value of human individuality and self-boundaries—an attitude arguably remote from Marx’s own.

She suggests that at the core is an attack on the self:

Let us assume a proposition that most American psychoanalysts would find uncontroversial, namely that human beings have inner lives—ideally rich ones—and a degree of self-cohesion.* As students are brought into our profession, they typically learn to see this view as that of “mainstream psychology,” which in turn is fraught with bourgeois ideology. Their theoretical training, as a rule, gives them scant exposure to the many contemporary theories that validate the human potential for inwardness and psychic integrity. Instead, they are assigned theories arguing, at an extreme, that the very border between inner and outer worlds is (as Judith Butler has argued) “maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control.” They will also occasionally encounter work that uses the profession’s radical critique of interiority and autonomy to make the shattering of selves look edgy and progressive. I nowhere mean to suggest that the profession does not offer good criticisms of U.S. ideology. The problem is the scorn for self-cohesion that has wound itself in with the project of social critique.

As I have already intimated, an intellectual regime so designed discourages initiates from identifying with their own capacity for centered, integrated selfhood. Some will identify instead with the aggressor, turning against the soft “interiority” that the profession belittles. As a more moderate option, scholars can adopt a neutral historicist voice that allows them to handle the inner life—someone else’s—as a historical curiosity, without attributing value to it. (As one of my interviewees ruefully remarked, “You can write about anything so long as it is dead.”) Either way, the distanced attitude toward inwardness takes a toll.

…when a scholar traffics in antihumanist theories for purposes of professional advancement, his or her private self stands in the doorway, listening in. When it hears things that make it feel unwanted—for example, that it is a “Kantian” or “bourgeois” fantasy—it can go mute. I have spoken with many young academics who say that their theoretical training has left them benumbed.…It is as if their souls have gone into hiding, to await tenure or some other deliverance.

This is all encouraged by the profession, she thinks, for the sociologically powerful group cohesion it promotes:

The poststructuralist critique of the self, though associated with progressive politics, has an unobserved, conservative effect on the lived world of the profession. It protects the institutional status quo by promoting the evacuation of selves into the group. In the story behind the story, the decentered subject is the practitioner who internalizes the distaste for the inner life and loses touch with the subjective reserves that could offset his or her merger with the profession. What is correspondingly strengthened is the cohesion of the collective. For our profession, alienated in various ways from the American mainstream, needs members who will band together. One way to get members to commit to the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.

…

Our profession’s devaluation of selfhood, passed from one generation to the next, softens members up for the demands the profession makes on their own selves. If it is “bourgeois” to care about your identity and your boundaries, perhaps you might throw your own identity and boundaries on the altar of your career. I am struck, too, by the fact that current scholarship reflects a strong bias toward noncommittal sex. Our journals offer scant encouragement either for communion with oneself or for abiding connection to a partner—both experiences that could offer leverage against the encompassing group.

She frames this as centrally, for her, a suspicion of love:

it is clear that our profession—for purposes of print—has a bias against one-on-one attachment. This attitude springs, of course, from a perceived need to question the privileging of the married couple within modern societies. But one possible real-world outcome of the steady stream of “depersonalizing intimacies” in our publications is to depress readers’ faith in the loving attachments that might give them some distance on their professional identities.

…the profession’s cynical attitude toward love is just one small aspect of its drive to flatten anything (except politics) that might nourish a human being with its aliveness. Our journals subtly discourage readers from believing that the world offers them a range of “integral objects”—a term the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas uses to describe any entity or experience whose unique form and vitality enrich our inner world.

…

while I have focused on the academic devaluation of love, I could as easily have considered the ways in which current criticism discourages readers from experiencing poems as integral objects, the ways in which it occludes the author’s mind as a potential integral object, and the ways in which it discounts the invaluable human capacity to experience life itself as an integral object.

The greedy institution has a stake, altogether, in impoverishing its members’ object worlds. It promotes a hollowness, which can then be compensated with the satisfactions of status and affiliation within the group. Perhaps this is a tendency of all professional life. But when, as has happened in English, the soul-sapping quality of professional collectives finds an alibi in the anti-individualist ideology of left postmodernism, we have the conditions for quite a bit of mystification and malaise.

What might Ruddick be seeking? Here’s an example of another way of "encountering aesthetic works," a practice which I take to be at least near the core of the conundrum Ruddick describes.  It's a small piece by Karl Ole Knausgaard, what he calls “the slowness of literature,” by which I think he actually means something other than slowness in English, something more like perdurance.  This is what he says:

I’m not thinking of how long it takes to read a book but of how long its effects can be felt, and of the strange phenomenon that even literature written in other times, on the basis of assumptions radically different to our own and, occasionally, hugely alien to us, can continue to speak to us—and, not only that, but can tell us something about who we are, something that we would not have seen otherwise, or would have seen differently.

Furthermore, he says,

Literature works slowly not just in history but also in the individual reader.

This seems right to me.  The practice of repeated listening to songs or albums, the re-watching of movies, the re-reading of books, all have unfolded to me meanings and significances, in myself as well as in those objects, that I hadn't realized before.  (In several different senses of "realized," in fact.) There are poems I have lived with for thirty or so years, now, long enough to have real relationships with them, so that their meanings have changed--sometimes even "unfolded"--over the decades, and I feel a certain obligation to them, to not letting them down, in a way.  Same with books: We understand each other now, maybe not completely, but in a deeper way than we used to.  Maybe it's true about my teaching, as well.

What do we call this ideal of the core phenomenon of the humanities?  I think something like "a just and loving attention" works pretty well for me.  Recently I've found some consolation in thinking about how to affirm the value of what we do in itself, as a core good thing--not to rest in that, but to be rejuvenated by it, revived by it, to return to the fray of the everyday grind once again.  In the university this seems to be an issue larger than simply teaching and scholarship.  Here, for instance, is a review of an academic proposal for “generous thinking,” which seems possibly to be connected to this aesthetic practice, but also larger than it.  The contrast between "generous" and "competitive" thinking seems useful for me.

Anyway, just some thoughts.  Even if you don't like them, at least read the pieces herein linked--they're all very insightful.