I often think that people who identify as liberals have a kind of conceptual black hole in their imagination. This black hole, one that both denies criticism but enables confidence, avoids recognising that spaces are constructed to benefit some and exacerbate a lack of confidence of others. In resisting the attempts to mould people in spaces, cherishing the liberal myth of meritocracy, might a radical form of lack of confidence, or what I call anti-confidence, allow for a resistance to these demands?

Debating a liberal:

I recently had a confusing and surprising[1] debate with a PhD student who by all means lives and breathes the normative liberal political discourse, one that in turns grants him the smoothest possible existence in the UK (and in many ways globally). The debate sparked by him began with him entering the room and denouncing autoethnography as an unacademic form of knowledge production. Obviously, I have a bit of skin in the game having conducted (and continuing to conduct) autoethnographic research, but I attempted to approach his patronising tone with good faith.

The debate started around what should be considered ‘Academic Research’, and then more broadly became a discussion about what kinds of spaces universities are. Through the discussion, I watched how he struggled to consider an alternate way of thinking and was left struggling in his own contradictory arguments. I gently probed his position; I questioned his conception of what Research must consist of and therefore who or what forms of knowledge this excludes; I questioned his need to maintain ‘academic integrity’ by highlighting that his understanding of ‘academic integrity’ was laced with classed and racist assumptions that maintains academia’s monopoly over what knowledge is, how it should look, and what form it must take. He could not understand my need to highlight his afforded privileges as a straight, white, British man in a sphere that is made for him and made by people like him, and that by considering certain forms of research as ‘unacademic’ he had opened a can of worms of what Academia is and should be, and what forms of knowledge are counted as knowledge. His position, I said, means that people who are othered are structurally excluded from higher education. He returned the liberal mantra that he did in fact believe anyone can and should have access to higher education, but refused to see how separating academia from society (not that it is even possible) is already inherently exclusionary. After the debate ended (I left the room), I was struck by the sheer confidence he had to enter a space, denounce a form of research, provide a loose argument for his exclusionary beliefs, and then continue without apology or reflexivity.

The liberal imaginary of open access to higher education folds in on itself when it refuses to consider how education is steeped in an elitist history, and refuse to admit that more structural changes in the practice of education is necessary, because the liberal imaginary believes it is possible to do both at once—to make education available to all and maintain its elitist ways. The liberal wants to hold onto the elitism, have access and gain power or capital through it[2]. But doing so does more than replicate the patronising idea that those least afforded access to higher education (or anyone who falls outside of the dominant status of white, cis, straight, middle-class, able-bodied man) must strive for ‘more’, for ‘greater’, to ‘grow’ from where they began. Beyond this, it doesn’t consider how current forms of higher education needs this elitist structure to legitimate its power as a distinct sphere where the production of knowledge is housed. Because of this, will never actually allow open access for all. Alternate forms of producing knowledge, differing views and opinions, positionalities never previously considered in the academy, will remain excluded (or will become warped in co-optation) because of the need to maintain the academic ivory tower. In fact, it is the structural changes to the ways we produce knowledge, understand what education is or can do, or who is granted access to these spaces that is required to achieve what the liberal imaginary supposedly desires[3]. Meritocracy must be bought into and maintained in this narrative despite meritocracy being a myth[4].

It’s a simplistic (and perhaps a generous) way to think about the liberal imaginary, but this ignorance almost acts as a black hole in their minds where critiques are swallowed into nothingness, into absence, until they cannot conceptualise where it is they have gotten lost, and so the liberal subject finds themselves in agreement with the right-wing conservative capitalist voices. Ultimately, both are concerned with the maintenance of structural inequality, imposed and enforced hierarchies, and exclusionary practices. This black hole also affords the liberal a sense of confidence through the way it can absorb and dematerialise arguments to allow the liberal to skirt criticism, fill the position of the morally superior person, and maintain a level of confidence in spaces.

Confidence, lack of confidence, and anti-confidence:

As much as I have used this as an opportunity to challenge liberalism and a liberal’s arguments on the sanctity of higher education, I want to discuss my lack of confidence through the beginning of the PhD process. I have lost some self-confidence. Why do I struggle to write now? Am I struggling to form coherent arguments? Why am I battling against a never-ending feeling of having not read enough? Where has my confidence gone?

I know that other PhD students experience similar feelings. As PhD students we are told that it is a normal part of the process, that we must trust the process, that we should develop thick skin and be constantly open to criticism whilst we are encouraged to pull things apart, criticise everything, and in many cases start from scratch. But I don’t want to develop thick skin. And I don’t think doing a PhD should necessitate that. I want to develop, question, critique, and work to liberate every person under the boot of oppression (as I think all research should do[5]). I don’t think this means I need a thick skin. Rather I think that developing a thick skin legitimates the liberal imaginary of higher education as a space that is combative, a meritocratic struggle, and buys into the need to have already had the confidence afforded by gaining more social and cultural capital. What if we embraced a lack of confidence? Or rather an anti-confidence?

The definition I find of ‘confidence’ is not complex enough because it doesn’t explain where we get this confidence from, or who is structurally (dis)allowed confidence. Nor does it explain how confidence is replicated, reinforced, and reproduced structurally.

Confidence is feeling or showing certainty in oneself, one’s ability, or about something

Perhaps, then, I might define confidence instead as:

Confidence is the performativity of certainty in oneself, one’s opinion, one’s ability, or one’s structural positionality that fluctuates in different spaces and times, guided by and reinforced through different forms of economic, social, and cultural capital.

I use performativity in the Butlerian sense—meaning, the conscious and unconscious acts that are repeated and therefore naturalised[6].

I am not saying that anti-confidence is the same as having no confidence. I think for any minoritised person to exist in spaces that puts them at danger ((trans-)misogyny and (trans-)misogynoir, racism, homophobia, ableism), otherwise alienates them, or constructs them ‘Other’[7] is perhaps some of the strongest confidence of all. Rather anti-confidence might provide a space of refuge for those who are made to feel as though they have no confidence, structurally denied confidence. It might well provide a different kind of power that embraces the not-wholeness of truth, and it might provide the resistance necessary against a structural moulding of individuals into ‘good’ and ‘proper’ higher education, PhD student subjects. In other words, I am suggesting a resistance against the reproductions of the norms of confidence in academia.

Anti-confidence is a refusal of the performativity of confidence and an embrace of our ‘lacking’ of the hegemonic confidence demanded of by university institutions.

Anti-confidence in practice:

It is not necessarily rebellious to not be confident. As I write I do not have the confidence to say this hasn’t been said before, or if I’m wrong. Maybe I am overthinking a situation. Maybe my definitions haven’t been thought through and complexified enough. But perhaps I employ an anti-confidence in the same way that Halberstam understands queer failure as “dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (2011: 2). Embracing anti-confidence with Halberstam might well “offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2011: 2-3), or in this case, higher education. Similarly, Ahmed argues that we need to trace “queer affect that does not overlook the negative, shameful and difficult feelings that have been so central to queer existence in the last century” (2010: 89). Because of this, Ahmed argues that

[r]ather than reading unhappy endings as a sign of the withholding of moral approval for queer lives, we must consider how unhappiness circulates within and around this archive, and what it allows us to do. (2010: 89, original emphasis).

Rather than attempting to ‘become’ more confident in university settings, perhaps we can consider what it is that anti-confidence affords us in our work and in our selves. Something against competitive meritocracy and towards shared knowledge-production, against individualism and towards an collectivity and cooperation.

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[1] Surprising in the sense that it caught me off guard, and for a short while I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to him other than in a shocked silence.

[2] I’m thinking of Bourdieu’s (1986) work Forms of Capital (see here: https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/Bourdieu1986.pdf). Like economic capital (access to money), social and cultural capital are amassed through education, through parenting, through who we interact with, and are gathered to be used later in life or to be employed in different spaces. Those born into privileged positions will have more access to resources, conversations, or even confidence, that helps them succeed in spaces that demand an understanding of these rules. In this discussion, liberals want to maintain the need to amass social and cultural capital in higher education.

[3] I say supposedly, because I want to demonstrate that the calls by liberals for ‘equality’ cannot be maintained when they similarly want to hold onto the characteristics of university life that perpetuate inequalities.

[4] David Gillborn’s (2008) Racism and Education: Confidence or Conspiracy? has excellently written about how education replicates racialised and classed positionalities under a guise of ‘meritocracy’. ‘Meritocracy’—that is, awarding people based on quality of work or behaviour alone—is a blinded approach that ignores students’ access to privilege (extra tuition, more money for books, parents from privately educated backgrounds) or lack thereof. Although writing under Blair’s Labour government at the time, many of Gillborn’s discussion is relevant, if not has become exacerbated, today.

[5] Of course, appreciating the fact that research’s role is limited in achieving this, and requires doing so alongside praxis in spaces outside of academia.

[6] Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) explains this, but the latest edition of the book has a preface written in 1999 where they explicitly define performativity as “the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (1999: xv).

[7] This could arguably be the majority of spaces, domestic or public, for anyone deemed inferior by capitalist patriarchy.