faking it... and maybe never making it...
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“Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.”
-- Jeremy Bentham
-- Jeremy Bentham
a few weeks ago, Martha Stewart fired one of the wanna-be apprentices for uttering something totally inane on the show: "I'm just gonna fake it until I make it"... suffice it to say, after the somewhat shocking discovery of how many blogs by law students are floating around, i somewhat hesitate to utter the same phrase, lest someone discover this little secret that i've been harboring... then again, who cares? who really reads this anyway?
i spent the day at the inaugural annual -- they hope, anyway -- CLPE Workshop, on the topic of "The Corporate Governance Matrix: Unfolding the New Agenda"... this year's conference brings together academics and practitioners for two days of discussions in comparative and interdisciplinary corporate governance, gathering critical insights from securities regulation, labour law, history and political science.... to pretend that i know anything substantial about any of these subject matters would be laughable... although i suppose that was a reason to have attended in itself, if only to learn from the so-called experts in the field...
nevertheless, pretend i did... and will do again tomorrow...
the most poignant part of the day was confessing to this pretension with someone who admitted to being as equally lost in the esotericism of the discussion... it seemed to us both that we simply were not in the same "box" as all these apparently brilliant scholars... as i've written about elsewhere, this is akin to "the notion of fields as a domain relevant arena of discourse which is built into the process of establishing warrants and backings of claims put forward in argument"... in other words, since i had very little idea about the paramaters of the debate or even the basic fundamental concepts, i had little chance of actually engaging in any substantial depth with the material being presented...
which seems to describe a significant aspect of my academic experience...
this is not to say that i'm totally ignorant or -- even worse -- haven't learned anything despite graduating cum laude as a philosophy major and having survived the first year of law school with an above-the-curve GPA... i think it's more to do with the inevitable intellectual penis envy that accompanies an inherently competitive discipline like law... sometimes, i'm hard-pressed to find a good reason to feel like i belong here, given the variety of academic pedigrees and sheer life experience that surround me... i feel like i'm just treading water or donning the mask of inquisitiveness and intellectual curiousity so as not to reveal the difficulty i have comprehending certain issues... and not just certain issues, but a lot of issues... i'm certainly no expert in law or philosophy, even on a relative scale...
all i've seemed to learn is how to BS, albeit in a very eloquent way...
i'm not sure if i'm shortchanging myself or overstating other people's sophistication (which may simply be a matter of perception)... perhaps this feeling of inadequacy isn't entirely solipsistic... i mean, it's not like i never actually "get" anything... it just seems like there's always someone else to compare myself to that gets it -- whatever "it" may be -- a lot more quickly than i do... when you're faced with the dreaded grading curve, this isn't the most comfortable discovery to be making...
of course, the trite answer would be to consider things simply from the perspective of self-emendation and leave the intellectual navel-gazing to the uninitiated... i mean, i did get this far in academia and in my career after all, right? or is that the very epitome of "faking it until you make it"?
--------------------
i spent the day at the inaugural annual -- they hope, anyway -- CLPE Workshop, on the topic of "The Corporate Governance Matrix: Unfolding the New Agenda"... this year's conference brings together academics and practitioners for two days of discussions in comparative and interdisciplinary corporate governance, gathering critical insights from securities regulation, labour law, history and political science.... to pretend that i know anything substantial about any of these subject matters would be laughable... although i suppose that was a reason to have attended in itself, if only to learn from the so-called experts in the field...
nevertheless, pretend i did... and will do again tomorrow...
the most poignant part of the day was confessing to this pretension with someone who admitted to being as equally lost in the esotericism of the discussion... it seemed to us both that we simply were not in the same "box" as all these apparently brilliant scholars... as i've written about elsewhere, this is akin to "the notion of fields as a domain relevant arena of discourse which is built into the process of establishing warrants and backings of claims put forward in argument"... in other words, since i had very little idea about the paramaters of the debate or even the basic fundamental concepts, i had little chance of actually engaging in any substantial depth with the material being presented...
which seems to describe a significant aspect of my academic experience...
this is not to say that i'm totally ignorant or -- even worse -- haven't learned anything despite graduating cum laude as a philosophy major and having survived the first year of law school with an above-the-curve GPA... i think it's more to do with the inevitable intellectual penis envy that accompanies an inherently competitive discipline like law... sometimes, i'm hard-pressed to find a good reason to feel like i belong here, given the variety of academic pedigrees and sheer life experience that surround me... i feel like i'm just treading water or donning the mask of inquisitiveness and intellectual curiousity so as not to reveal the difficulty i have comprehending certain issues... and not just certain issues, but a lot of issues... i'm certainly no expert in law or philosophy, even on a relative scale...
all i've seemed to learn is how to BS, albeit in a very eloquent way...
i'm not sure if i'm shortchanging myself or overstating other people's sophistication (which may simply be a matter of perception)... perhaps this feeling of inadequacy isn't entirely solipsistic... i mean, it's not like i never actually "get" anything... it just seems like there's always someone else to compare myself to that gets it -- whatever "it" may be -- a lot more quickly than i do... when you're faced with the dreaded grading curve, this isn't the most comfortable discovery to be making...
of course, the trite answer would be to consider things simply from the perspective of self-emendation and leave the intellectual navel-gazing to the uninitiated... i mean, i did get this far in academia and in my career after all, right? or is that the very epitome of "faking it until you make it"?
--------------------
posted by þΛųL jØŋαŦhΛŋ @ 01:00
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