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Dr James Dutton is a literary theory researcher, Proust connoisseur and Maitland High alumni. His trajectory into academia has been one of opportunity and also challenges imposed by “shifting goalposts”. Read on to discover why he feels “a bit foreign to academic culture” and his thoughts on the central importance of teaching within the practice of research.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I work in literary theory, though I try to think about this as broadly as possible. My PhD was in the English department in School of the Arts & Media and looked at Marcel Proust’s novel (his life’s work) to think about what writing can do. Since then, I’ve tried to translate that to the spectre of “information” in contemporary culture, as it continues to shape what the university does.

I worked full time at Opera Bar at the Sydney Opera House throughout my PhD, which I did without a stipend. This experience showed me how valuable the insights gained from humanities research can be, especially in terms of looking at the world from different angles. I was lucky to pick up some regular casual teaching just after completing my PhD, which allowed me to escape some of the late nights of bar work.

After that, I worked for seven years as a casual teacher, researching outside of my paid teaching hours. During this time, it felt disheartening to see the ladder to a stable career taken away just when I thought I was making progress. The shifting goalposts for what exactly constitutes “the transition from PhD to academia” has had some debilitating effects on me but we live in a world that increasingly charges rent on passion. I think there is scope, particularly within the university as an ideal, to forge the meaningful desires often absent in professional culture — and this is how I’ve come to interpret the transition from completing a PhD (as naïve as that may sound!). 

What or who sparked your interest in this area of research?

I’m a bit foreign to academic culture which I think is important to note. I’m very grateful for the ongoing expansion of the liberal-humanist university, to which I owe everything. It wouldn’t have been possible for me (someone from Maitland High writing a PhD on Proust!) to have the intellectual opportunities I’ve had without it.

But in saying that, I think being faithful to that tradition also requires maintaining an active and healthy critical-mindedness to the university as an institution, and I hold that as central to my academic practice: the uncertainty of my position frames how I’ve seen my fledgling place in professional scholarship. Without being too metacritical, the fact that I’ve never been able to assume, or expect, my place in this work means that what motivates my research is to ask, unrelentingly, why it matters—and to try to profess answers to those questions. I have a strong belief that those answers can reside in the tangles of writing and critical research.

In saying this, I’ve also been enormously lucky to have been supported by truly world-leading, inspiring colleagues within SAM and ADA. In the face of some of the issues I’ve touched on above, I’ve been encouraged by mentors who uphold and lay out a future for the potential of humanist inquiry.

What are you working on right now?

I’m thinking now about automatic society and the ubiquity of information. Information is not knowledge, as I see it: knowledge intersects the body, languages, the unconscious, and individual subjects. Whereas information is a compression and alienation of knowledge into machines, divorcing the worker’s or thinker’s know-how from their practice. It’s the assembly line. And we see this in the patterning and (non)politics of algorithmic control, especially through social media, drive-based marketing, and populist politics, where we are alienated from the scope and surprises of our knowledge—especially as that knowledge is ours, shared ����ٷɱ�����members of the political community.

That's why I find it particularly valuable to establish a critical approach of care, centred in a version of the university open to inquiry and inventive knowledges. Students generally respond really well to that: knowing why�����Ի���what for—not just how—is not just a luxury for aesthetes, but crucial for our political reality. In a time where automation is met with fear and uncertainty because it might take our jobs (rather than joy and collaboration because it might take our jobs), the need for dialogue, care, and knowledge in the world seems really apparent to me.

What do you find most rewarding about being a researcher?

The relation between research and teaching. Research is the greenhouse of knowledge. It can be isolating and results, at times, in a lot of silence or terse misreadings. But dialogue with experts is such a privilege of academic discourse, something that truly alters and advances our understanding.

This knowledge should be “professed” through conversations in teaching. I’m a very firm believer in never simplifying ideas in teaching, just diversifying them. I think knowledge in the humanities should always resist quantification, meaning there is no specific prerequisite for a particular idea, just a manifold of different ones. As a researcher-teacher, the challenge lies in conveying the insights you’ve uncovered during your research—whether it’s just a thought-provoking snippet—to others, particularly students.

What advice would you give to someone who is considering or about to transition into academia?

I am always struck by how the intellectual atmosphere of universities can slip into resembling a bank or corporate headquarters.

My advice to young researchers would be to protect what is unique about a university against the ‘informationalisation’ of culture. The performances of bureaucracy are entertaining, and I think for that reason enticing—it’s always fun to sound important in a meeting—but they’re hollow, disfiguring those opportunities for reflection and alteration by seeing oneself as mastering language, discourse, and overlaps with the other’s outlook.

We have a confusion where mastery—which closes off possibility and the invention in uncertainty—is understood as “leadership”. A leader should guide others into the future, not foreclose it. I would encourage all future researchers (myself included!) to avoid seeing leadership as control, in the narrow sense.

This is why it’s been such a great honour for me to have had a relationship with ADA. I’m very proud to be able to continue in that spirit, to learn that knowledge is embodied. There can be no piece of advice that matters beyond taking in the change that will exemplify what it all meant.

To learn more about Dr James Dutton's research, projects and achievements, visit his Researcher Profile.