Graduate work in Freudo-Marxism

June 10, 2008 5:22 PM

Where can I do graduate work in Freudo-Marxism? Is it even in fashion anymore?

Also, how difficult/practical are these programs in terms of getting a professorship? I have an undergrad background in Political Science...theory mostly.

I'd also like avoid jumping on Zizek bandwagon, so any thoughts on that would be welcomed as well.

posted by jne1813 to education (16 comments total)

Oh, and I think the can in my question really means should to a certain degree.
posted by jne1813 at 5:26 PM on June 10, 2008

First, read this essay and take it very seriously.

Freudo-Marxism in what discipline? Your question is too general to really be answerable without this information. You can train as a clinical psychoanalyst or a Freudian psychologist, of course, but apart from that neither psychoanalysis nor Marxism are generally Ph.D. subjects unto themselves. There are continental philosophy programs, literature departments, and any number of social sciences in which you could make these part of your graduate training, but you have to do a Ph.D. in a discipline and be a professor in a discipline (mostly; there are scattered exceptions, interdisciplinary doctoral programs, but they can make it even harder for you to get a job than it will be). There are some campuses and fields that are exceptions, but in general Marxist thought as a whole is not at the height of its popularity, to say the least.

Read through some of the older AskMe threads about graduate school decisions; this isn't something you should enter into lightly, nor with any illusions about what it means.
posted by RogerB at 5:54 PM on June 10, 2008

Brown's Modern Culture and Media program?
posted by puffin at 6:00 PM on June 10, 2008

To study ONLY Freud and Marx might mean you'd like to study/teach history and become a specialist in a historical period. But because someone like Zizek is popular now, and that his ideas grew from your favorite thinkers, you might do well (and later become interested in) why he is so provocative today.

Conversely, how about studying Freud and Marx as a hobby?
posted by Jason and Laszlo at 6:07 PM on June 10, 2008

I've no idea where you would go to do this.

I do know that in political science, getting a political philosophy/theory job is quite difficult.
Applying to programs is cheap, so you might as well. Then, I would look at the results. Unless I got into at least 5 or 6 top-10 departments and at least three were actively wooing me, I would not bother wasting 5--8 years.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:11 PM on June 10, 2008

If you intend to teach history, perhaps. If you want to take it in the political science direction, I would advise highly against. As others suggested, study it as a hobby. There is no future in Marx, Freud, or any blend of the two.

Everything I encountered in college and personal investigation indicated the solutions proposed by both Marx and Freud were fundamentally flawed. In fact they stick out in my mind as the two paradigmatic examples of famous thinkers with wide public recognition, but universally dismissed as nonsense theory by serious modern practitioners. I know that Freud's explanations have been entirely discredited in psychology, at least from everyone I studied under and read, and it seems clear from the lessons of history and modern economics that Marxism is the same boat.
posted by sophist at 6:17 PM on June 10, 2008

If you're looking for a philosophy appointment, I think the word on the street is that if you're hoping to get a job, you're basically waiting for someone to die. All PhDs have a specialization and schools are only looking for someone with a specialization in some particular line of work. So you'll be, with your PhD in Fruedian theory and Marxism, for some political theory position, and probably something even more specific than that.

Here's the American Philosophical Society's Job Postings. Looks pretty grim to me (look at the places you'll (be wishing to) be getting a job!

Here are some philosophy grad students who're keeping a blog about getting a job.
posted by zpousman at 6:21 PM on June 10, 2008

I agree with all of the above: it sounds like you need to learn a little more about how the academic career track works.

I'm pretty sure there are no programs in Freudo-Marxism--not because it isn't in fashion anymore, but because: a. there are no Freudo-Marxism departments in universities, hence no reason to train in the (non-existent) field and, b. I don't know that there is such a thing as "Freudo-Marxism." There are plenty of scholars--such as Zizek--whose theoretical outlooks are informed by a synthesis of Freudian and Marxian work. But, as far as I know, it's not anything as as unified as a discipline.

All that being said...

If you're coming from a Political Science background, and have a theoretical bent, there are places that you might find congenial. Cornell's Government Department is worth looking at. Particularly Susan Buck-Morss, whose work might be right up your alley. (She's a great writer and a wonderful teacher.)

At this point, I think you should read, read, read. If you find someone whose work thrills you, find out where he/she teaches, and then decide if studying with them would be worth all the many, many sacrifices and heartaches an academic career entails.

Good luck.
posted by neroli at 6:28 PM on June 10, 2008

Freud is to psychology what Aristotle is to physics....interesting for those who are interested in it but otherwise destined for obscurity (i.e. severely limited career options)

Marxism is out of fashion now but it remains to be seen whether its heading for permanent obscurity or not. I wouldn't be surprised if a modified form emerges out of the depths of the next recession/depression.
posted by storybored at 8:23 PM on June 10, 2008

Cosign on that essay in post one.

AFAIK in most any field.. these two are raaaaaather waaaayyy out of fashion, unless you can find a really clever way to make the out-of-fashion different, vital, and fashionable again. For Freud, at least, if you're in the humanities and interested in him as an artist of sorts, who created new concepts.. I got nothin' on Marxism but it's kind of been done to death hasn't it?

The MCM program at Brown is a relatively new graduate program and you could do lots of cool theoretical stuff and I know there's definitely a Marxist professor who is part of the department, though a lot of places like that (interdisciplinary, eg comparative literature) have many professors who belong to two departments and have a primary allegiance to their first one that isn't interdisciplinary, so.. you wouldn't have as much conviviality and it could be harder to get face time, not as many events for your department, etc. And if you do an interdisciplinary PhD program it's even harder to get a job because there are so few of these departments..

But you have to ask yourself, are there jobs in teaching what you're interested in? Are you prepared to spend a number of years broke, and stressed, and spending long hours in the library and cranking out papers and in the company of others who are broke, and stressed.. and then have hardly any jobs available to you when it's all said and done?

Please, please, if you're thinking about this you need to do serious work - defining what you want to do, investigating where you could do it, and how much that would cost you (time, lost income), and what the end goal would be. If you don't know what's in fashion or not, talk to professors at your former undergrad, look at journals in the field, visit the Chronicle of Higher Education site and forums.
posted by citron at 8:35 PM on June 10, 2008

Note to people who are saying Freud and Marx are, like, SO over...

While current clinical practice in psychology doesn't have much to do with Freud, and practical economists think Marx is yesterdays's news...

...there are lots and lots and lots of really smart people in the humanities/soft-ish social sciences (literature, art history, cultural studies, edgy Poli Sci) who are finding really useful ways of thinking in these supposedly "disproved" models of the world.

Freud and Marx are not "out of fashion"--any more than Darwin is.

You may disagree with them, but they ain't going nowhere.
posted by neroli at 9:01 PM on June 10, 2008

...there are lots and lots and lots of really smart people in the humanities/soft-ish social sciences (literature, art history, cultural studies, edgy Poli Sci) who are finding really useful ways of thinking in these supposedly "disproved" models of the world.

Not so much in political science, and where it appears outside of political theory it's generally very, very, very far from "edgy." I'd associate it more with doddering old comparativists who haven't learned anything in 20 years than with anything edgy.

Unless you mean that anything that controls for economic demographics is "Marxist" because Marx thought that class was important too.

I gather you must have gone to Cornell, but Cornell's department is highly unrepresentative of the larger discipline.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:13 PM on June 10, 2008

neroll, they are not the be all to end all. F & M are usually stepping stones to other writers and ideas.
posted by Jason and Laszlo at 3:55 AM on June 11, 2008

You could consider the PhD in anthropology; you can read all the same stuff, but then apply it (and see how far it actually takes you) in real world ethnographic research, and test some of the more out there literary theory against more testable bodies of social thought that does not assume all the world's a text.

You will soon realize that the world of actual human practice and cognition is far more complex than anything Ziszek ever wrote, and that "Freudo-Marxism" is no more a Theory of Everything That Matters than Darwino-Lacanism or Behaviorism any other theoretical banner that happens to be this decade's hot stuff.

As an anthropology PhD student, however, you will read more widely across more diverse social theoretic literatures than you will in most philosophy or critical theory PhD programs, and you might even have a *chance* of getting a decent academic job (might, I said).

The problem with isolating "critical theory" itself as the subject of the PhD is that it produces a hermetically sealed conversation -- one that has become (rightly) the object of parody and ridicule even within the academy (where a vigorous commitment to relevance is at last strongly re-emergent in the humanities in this decade, even, slowly, in philosophy and literary studies) -- let alone beyond it.

The "triumph" of (mostly European) critical theory in the US in the late 70s through the late 90s was actually commensurate with the decline of academic interest in the real world, and a decline of academic relevance or authority with respect to many real world issues and discourses, or put another way, it was a long era of wankery in response to the anxiety of irrelevance. We're still getting past the vicious circle of spiraling irrelevance it engendered.

Neither Freud nor Marx nor Zizek nor the other usual suspects of theory-cultism (Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Derrida -- when I was in grad school -- were the Zizeks of their day ) will help you change the world if you don't go out into it and do something besides read philosophy about how the world is supposed to look or work.

Mind you, I have nothing against critical theory: I teach it, and I soaked in it as a young scholar. Heck, I read Derrida in French.

But if a prospective grad student told me they were interested in "theory" as such, to the exclusion of the things "theory" is supposed to explain, I'd rarely be interested in working with that student; I want to see people interested in something out there in the world -- an actual community, a real problem, a political conundrum, something people who don't read theory care about and are trying to deal with practically, and then interrogate theory for what it can tell us about how people think, act, and feel in particular circumstances.

I say this as a reformed theory jock, and I mean it as sincerely as a reformed alcoholic warning you not to take up drinking for a hobby. If you want to sit in the cafe and debate the end of ideology and the mimesis of the colonial subject in the fragmented discourses of cosmopolitan self formation, enjoy the coffee and conversation.

But please note: both Freud and Marx were activists and practitioners, not theorists, first. Their theoretical accounts of modernity were tailored to address specific problems of modernity (neurosis, class conflict). They had plenty of interesting company in their day, but I suspect if either showed up in a modern English or Philosophy department they'd be appalled to see how abstract the interpretations of their ideas had become in the ensuing century.

As for Zizek, I've read him, and ... meh

/soapbox rant
posted by fourcheesemac at 3:55 AM on June 11, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

fourcheesemac, that is a great answer!

I remember taking my first economics class in University, many years ago. The instructor was a Marxist. And I came out of the class thinking wow, this theory explains everything! I knew squat about the world but thought I was hot stuff. The danger is exactly what you say, when you go to theory first to interpret reality rather than diving into the complex world and using theory as an always-flawed framework to think about your experiences.
posted by storybored at 9:31 AM on June 13, 2008

Thanks, 4cheese, for making me regret becoming a lawyer instead of an anthropologist, again!
posted by footnote at 7:08 PM on June 13, 2008