You can't take it personally

Discussion on FB of this post at Leiter Reports about rejection led me to remark: 

I hesitate to say this, since I made it through the wars by dint of being married to the right person, but here goes. My wife likes to say "you can't take rejection personally; there are too many factors involved that have nothing to do with your qualifications. [Wait two beats.] In fact, you can't even take acceptance personally, for exactly the same reason."

Further reflections below the fold, taken from a talk on inclusivity in conference organizing (points which hold, mutatis mutandis, for hiring decisions) at the APA Eastern, 2013. (See also this post, on why we should change our frame away from "job market".)

Merit ranking seems to me to involve a questionable metaphysics in which "merit" is seen as a property inherent in individuals that can be discerned, extracted, and then compared to others on a single scale. You could simply express this as an attribution error: you're making network position into a property of a person. 

That is, there are complex relations among folks – position in hiring and citation networks and so on – that account for perception of merit, and it's a mistake to make those positions into properties of people. As my wife would say, "You can't take rejection personally; there are too many variables at work. [Wait two beats.] In fact, you can't even take acceptance personally!"

Or you could adopt Deleuzean language and talk about multiplicities and individuations. That is to say, there is a multi-dimensional matrix of philosophical qualities that each person individuates. A "multiplicity" is a Deleuzean technical term that I'm loosely adopting here; let's say that here it refers to the multiple dimensions of philosophical quality each of us condenses in our teaching, chit-chat, talks, essays, books, and so on. For instance,

1. Rigor and clarity of expression; 
2. Breadth and depth of the field coverage;
3. Historical awareness of predecessors / analogues;
4. Originality: fine slices of an established field or establishment of a new field?
5. Etc …

Okay, why the ellipses? This is what Judith Butler, at the end of Gender Trouble, calls "the embarrassed 'etc' ": it indicates the inability to ever completely list the dimensions of a multiplicity. (We're going to come up against the embarrassed etc later on.) 

For now, let me offer an image whose benefits – and limits – show why I think a one-dimensional ranking is bound to do violence to the radical perspectivism or irreducible plurality or real multiplicity of philosophical quality. 

Imagine philosophical quality is like a multi-faceted prism: turn it one way and look down one axis of sight and you'll see all the other dimensions seen from the perspective of that aspect; turn it another way and you'll see the other dimensions from that perspective. (If I knew music better, I could probably come up with a musical analogue here, something about a tune in multiple keys, maybe.) 

Before anyone objects about holograms being exactly that which produces a single image condensing multiple perspectives, the limit of the prism image for our purposes here is that a hologram will put equal weight on each perspective [I think! I'm no expert on holography, so bear with me if the details are off], whereas there's no way to turn "scores" along all the dimensions of philosophical quality into a single ranking without making some judgment as to the importance of each dimension, and that's going to stack the deck for the ranking. 

Merit is a very emotional subject. Even abstracting from the uni-dimensional vs multi-dimensional problem, we have lots of raw feelings here. Let's say, for the sake of argument that, notwithstanding some exceptions, merit is a necessary condition for placement and advancement in university philosophy programs (so, pace my wife, you can take acceptance personally). But it doesn't follow from that that merit is a sufficient condition; there are many talented people who end up in precarious academic labor. But this injection of sheer luck into placement and advancement is hard to accept for some people; they want to think that those who end up in precarious labor deserved it somehow; the reason they didn't make it was some lack of merit on their part. In other words, some folks just don't want to accept that we have a tragic job system where bad things happen to good people. 

There's a wrinkle here: if you don't win the early TT job lottery [this is a strong way to put the anti-"merit as sufficient condition" position, but what the hell, let's go with it], your work conditions are going to be such that your productivity will suffer and it will look, retrospectively, like you always lacked the merit that would have warranted your getting a TT job. But this lack of productivity is produced by external circumstance as much as – or better, more than – it is an exhibition of some inherent quality of the person. So we're back to our critique of the attribution error. Or, my final invocation of Deleuze: for him, the above critique of the attribution error of making network position into the property of a person rests on the externality of relations to their terms. 

In other words, there's nothing about you, Asst Prof X, that would let you show your merit in a precarious labor position. (Again, this is an extreme formulation, and probably should be reworked along population thinking lines – the odds of any one randomly selected early TT hire placed into a precarious labor position being able to gain the publications and citations that would allow a "merit" perception would be much lower than that of a randomly selected precarious labor person placed into a TT post getting those publications and citations.)