I keep trying to discuss this question with people who know me in person, and they burst out laughing, tell I’m being stupid, and won’t discuss the issue further. Perhaps I’ll have greater success trying to discuss the issue here. Perhaps not. But I can at least try to take advantage of the captive audience dimension of writing to try to express more clearly what I mean, before laughter interrupts. I take it that, when I try to discuss this locally, people are hearing my question as having something to do with some bizarre personal insecurity – as though I’m asking whether I’m intelligent enough to be an academic or something similar. But that sort of self-doubt isn’t what provokes this line of questioning for me. The question derives more from uncertainty about whether my strategic orientation to my work – what I’m trying to achieve, what motivates me to do the sort of work I’m trying to do, and, in particular, how I go about communicating my work – “belongs” in an academic space. I don’t particularly want the answer to this question to be “no”, but I periodically run into situations that provoke a level of uncertainty around this issue.
At the moment, as I’ve mentioned, I’m attending a conference. And conferences, although not the only dimension of academic life that raise this question for me, do always and consistently raise it, because they are a situation saturated with examples of academic modes of self-presentation, and they tend to confront me particularly strongly with how differently I experience myself presenting. I’ve just attended an excellent presentation and discussion session, the context of which I might blog about later, when I have time to do more than blurt. The presentation sits fairly square in the centre of my theoretical expertise, I had no trouble following it, I enjoyed it, and I admired the skill with which it was presented and the quality of the discussion that followed. But I was also distracted, as I sat listening, with the recognition that – at least from my point of view, in terms of how I experience my own work – I simply neither write nor present in this style. What I want to do here is just sketch the sorts of things I was thinking, without making any claim that these are generalised reactions to “academic presentations” as such – just situational reactions to one singular piece.
On one level, the paper covered an enormous amount of ground – made a much larger number of distinct and important points than I would try to cover in a single piece: I tend to drill down and do one or two very specific things in some detail, and I spend a lot of time thinking (more, say, than I do for a blog post) about whether I’m covering more ground than can meaningfully be absorbed by a group of people, listening to, rather than reading, a text. I should note, again, that I am not at all suggesting the paper I’m reacting to was unclear – it was well organised, foregrounded and signposted its points well, and offered a structured argument that moved through all of these points in detail. I followed the paper personally, and the subsequent excellent discussion suggested that many others did, as well, and I therefore have no reason to assume that the paper was too ambitious for verbal presentation – and yet, I still reacted to it at the time as though it covered more ground than it should.
Perhaps I could rationalise my reaction by saying that the paper covered far too much ground for a comprehensive discussion of its claims? Perhaps I could rationalise it by saying that I then spent much of the morning tea period breaking the paper down for other people who don’t have the same degree of theoretical background, who often actually had excellent and relevant questions, but who were too intimidated by the scope of the paper to speak and obtain answers from the presenter during the session itself. But is this the “point” of a presentation to an academic conference: to enable a very thorough discussion of the points presented? To function, in a sense, pedagogically, such that listeners who are not yet fully on top of the material can still somehow be enabled, by the presentation itself, to participate in the discussion? I suspect that I probably do think about presentations in this sort of “pedagogical” frame – but does this make sense? It would seem at least to make equal sense to unfold a complex and demanding argument, and take questions only from those equipped to engage at a fairly specialised level: a conference isn’t the classroom, and it also isn’t a reading group… And I don’t actually object to this use of the conference as a medium – but, and here’s the issue, can’t quite see intentionally using a conference in this way in my personal work.
On another level, I found myself paying close attention to how the paper engaged its literature. This engagement was beautifully, masterfully done – each point unfolded through a discussion of elements from the work of a major figure or body of thought. And yet. It’s particularly difficult for me to express what I’m reacting to here, as I also obviously engage with major theoretical figures and unfold my points through my conversation with their work. But not in “this way”, which I find so difficult to describe, but which I recognise, and which troubles me, much more than the points I was making above, when wrestling with the question of whether I am doing something, producing something, that is recognisably academic work. I think it’s an issue of where the focus is in a paper – whether the focus – the drive that motivates the presentation – centres on commentary, or whether it sits somewhere else, on a problem on which a certain kind of commentary can cast light. I need to be very very clear here: I have no problem with the notion that commentary is meaningful and valuable work, and I think that there is also very little “pure” commentary written – much commentary-style work intends to have a broader cash value beyond a clearer explication of someone’s work. And I spend (obviously) an enormous amount of time writing commentary myself.
What I’m reacting to is – I find this very difficult to describe, in a way that hits my target – a mode of presentation in which, unless your interlocutors are incredibly deeply steeped in a particular tradition, the cash value of the commentary – the point that motivates you to comment on these texts and in this way – comes to be effaced by (what is often a very beautiful and impressive) movement of the commentary itself. Again, I “got” the cash value of the paper that is provoking this reaction – and I frankly admired the style in which the paper made its points – I think in did so in a way considerably more skilful than I suspect I will ever do. But I also thought, the entire way through, that the “point” of the piece really was backgrounded – as though this could be taken for granted, such that what needed to be at the centre of attention was the way this point was made (and this was not the sort of paper where “the way the point was made” was the point, else I would be having a different reaction). And, from the subsequent discussion, the “point” clearly was understood by people who had the right mix of theoretical background. But I spent the gap between presentations trying to express the “point” to people who didn’t have that background… But I’m not sure that this is a problem – again, there is the issue of what a conference is “for”, and the question of whether I think about such things, and their purposes, from too “pedagogical” a stance…
Roiling around with all of this is a feeling that the style in which I express what I do – and perhaps the motivations for doing it, and for trying to communicate to other people – might simply not be well-suited to an academic space: that, if this is a space I intend to occupy, I need to think about my writing and presentation in a different strategic context, or else risk looking… looking what, I suppose is my question? And with what consequences? Does it matter, in any adverse sense, if I focus presentations or papers around a more constrained set of points? Does it matter, in any negative way, if I bracket most of my engagements with the literature to the apparatus of published texts that can be read at leisure, and try to keep the core line of sight in my writing on a more linear central narrative?
No real time to develop these points, or express them more clearly and precisely – and I’m not sure they merit sustained reflection. Before I leave this: again, I strongly hope this will not be read as a critique of any particular kind of academic production, or of academic production per se – that is not the standpoint or direction for these kinds of questions for me. My target is much more internal, much more bound together with trying to understand more clearly what it is that I do, and how I can create a space where such things can be done. I don’t regard my work as any kind of model for anyone else. I am just wrestling with issues of understanding how this work connects with the academic space in which I am currently trying to place it.
NP,
This is interesting. Can you expand on the two modes of presentation or conversation that you’re contrasting, and on what you mean by ‘academic’? It’s hard not to read your characterization here as a sort of form vs substance: the masterfully done paper was formally masterful and substantively rich but the form was only appreciable to those who already had a grasp of the subject matter.
I can say for myself I generally like conversations that are as inclusive as possible (analogous to you, I also don’t mean this as a criticism though it’s hard not to feel like I’m making one) – I try to explain my terms and explain who the people are that I’m talking about, and argue my points in a way that’s as clear as possible to as many people as possible (I also often adopt a sort of “aww shucks” persona in presenting, for a variety of reasons, instead of an “I’m very smart and knowledgable” persona). This feels to me something like what you’re calling a ‘pedagogical’ stance. Is that right? I know for me I’ve occasionally worried that this will come off as light-weight, because this approach doesn’t leave people as likely to go “wow, this person is so smart and knowledgable, I want to be like them” as often, even when it goes well – I feel like it’s more likely to leave people going “hmm, what an interesting set of questions” when it works well.
Anyhow, I hope all’s well and I’d love to hear more on all this and sorry I haven’t been able to comment on all the great Marx stuff. Life since early September has been kind of break-neck in pace, leaving me w/ little time for things like blogs and sleep. Someday I shall return properly, probly when you’ve wrapped up the current line of Marx thought and my questions are irrelevant. :)
take care,
Nate
Hey Nate – no need to apologise for not being able to comment – I’ve been there :-) And I very much doubt your questions would be irrelevant, whenever you have time to ask them.
Part of the problem for me is that I’m not sure myself what I mean by “academic” – I’m sort of trying to fumble toward something that I experience, when I’m attending a conference or reading certain kinds of work, and it suddenly snaps into view that I’m meant to be doing that kind of writing or presenting myself – it’s a sort of quick shift of perspective that has the effect of making my own style of writing and working look very alien to me…
Some of it does have to do with a difference in form – although not with any sense that form has substituted for content. I think it has to do with forms of writing or speaking that presuppose that the audience shares a very, very specific background with you – an assumption that, not only will you have read the same things, but pretty much in the same way, with a highly-matched and interlocking set of mutual associations that arise when a particular author or body of literature is invoked. The writing isn’t necessarily inaccessible in the sense of being convoluted in style (although this can also happen, I regard it as a separable thing) – the style can be pristinely clear and “accessible” on the level of, say, how the words are put together: it just… constructs its audience? as much more similar to itself than I construct my audience to be with me.
There is an intrinsic issue to this – the questions I’m asking tend to cut across disciplines, and I also seem to appropriate traditions or works in idiosyncratic ways (the cross-blog discussion on “self-reflexivity” perhaps demonstrated this most clearly, but it comes up in more micrological ways all the time). So I’m sort of always writing as though I need to provide a basic set of background and clarifications and similar things, in order then to begin to get to whatever I’m trying to say. I don’t mind this – but I don’t really see this happening much in formal academic work – it reminds me of the sort of thing you see when you’re reading either texts that are trying to carve out a new discipline (and therefore have to set out in a very basic way what they’re trying to do), *or* the sort of thing you see in a pedagogical context, where the writing is self-consciously directed to people who don’t have the necessary touchstones in the discipline.
At my previous university, I drew a certain amount of criticism for writing this way – mainly on the grounds that it came across to some readers as arrogant (”who are you to think that you can redefine how questions are asked”, etc.). While I’m trying to keep those particular voices from echoing around in my head while I’m writing ;-P, there is nevertheless an issue that I do have this tendency to write somewhat pedagogically – to write as though I’m writing to “strangers” – to deal with literature as though my readers won’t have heard of it, or won’t read it in the same way that I do. And there’s somehow something about the way that I write that feels… unsocialised? to me – as though it’s very visible in the writing itself that I don’t have a particular disciplinary home. And, on one level, this doesn’t bother me: I have the questions I have, in practice I do seem to use terms idiosyncratically and I do seem to read texts in somewhat unusual ways, and so I need, to some degree, to write the way I’m writing. But, on another level, I think I’m not sure whether this “counts” as academic writing – whether I’m not quite demonstrating a certain socialisation that is valued for many good reasons. I sort of feel like I’m perpetually engaging with academic traditions from the outside…
I don’t know if this makes things any clearer. It’s difficult for me to express what troubles me – much of it comes from experiencing a certain difference myself, but being very uncertain whether this is a difference other people also note – and, if they note it, whether they regard it as a problem. If other people are okay with how I write and how I tackle my material, then I’m fine with how I write. I just can’t help but wondering whether, when I speak or write, people are feeling like I’m trying to lead a tutorial session – trying to “teach” them what I’m doing, rather than just diving into the conversation, in the assumption that there is a conversation, in which we are all already engaged…
Apologies for the lack of clarity…
Hey Nate,
Broader questions aside, for what it’s worth, I really like the tone you take on your blog, and the ‘what in the hell…’ mode that makes your posts and the comments more about collective learning than teaching. It’s a great way to work and quite liberating in terms of what you can do on a blog. That’s one reason I decided to start using my blog for working through Keynes (for example); previously I only felt able to write when I had something definite to argue.
So do you quack like a duck or not? Because it seems like you walk like a duck (teaching, marking papers, going to conferences, etc). Leaving aside the things that you say, aren’t the things that you do the same things that academics do?
I’m not really sure how unacademic your writing really is (keeping in mind that I’ve only ever read your blogposts). I’m at a point where I’m moving further away from the academy and every time I look at your feed in my RSS reader it’s like a kick in the face from academia. It’s so unlike everything else that I’m reading right now that your posts scream “academy” at me.
Also, hi again. I seem to have a habit of disappearing from the Internet every few months.
I just saw this right now: Why is anthropological writing so boring?
NP – That’s totally clear, thanks for explaining. I wonder if this is in part related to where you’ve taught? I’m not sure, though, as I’m not totally sure I have a sense of the type of institution your at and stuff. I get the idea of writing to a specialist audience vs not, that makes sense. I’ve not read any of your non-blog writing (be interested to do so, though, if you don’t mind emailing me links and stufff!) so I can’t comment on this re: your work. I’m doubly or triply biased because I like you, I’ve had bad experiences with what feels to me like illegitimate adoptions of specialist (or claims to specialist) vocabulary/poses (where the speaker adopts a position from which any utterance at all like “I disagree…” can be answered “no, you misunderstand”), and I think I sometimes take a similar tone to what you describe, trying to give all the background, being a bit pedagogical or “let’s all think through this together” kind of thing.
If it makes you feel any better, sometimes your non-Marx posts feel to me like you have specialty knowledge I don’t, sort of like what you identify as academic writing. :)
Mike – thanks.
take care,
Nate
It’s weird, actually… I’m not sure if this is quite what you mean, but I’m often astonished at the difference between a postgrad (or grad for you crazy Yanks ;-) paper and a ‘proper’ academic paper. The former tends to be very careful about laying out the development of ideas, clearly marking its investments, readings, influences and so on, whilst the latter often has a kind of weird… carelessness? A focus more on the thought than on the audience, in some sense.
That said, I find giving papers quite difficult, primarily because the work I’m doing is, whilst engaged with a particular set of questions and practices, really pretty theoretical. Most audiences, at least at conference where I give short papers (the one long paper I’ve given had a unanimously positive response, for which I will always love Edmonton;-)) wind up bemused, bored, *strongly* engaged, or focused on the ‘application’ I provide. I usually end up trying to work out how to give my audience enough, say, Merleau-Ponty that they’ll get the quite specific sense of how processes of embodiment work, even if what I’m really talking about is how disability is bound to suffering, or something. Educating them, as if they were extremely bright students, so that they can understand the point I want to make. Recently, for example, I gave a paper that took as its ‘case study’ intersex ‘corrective’ surgery, but was pretty much about the archival nature of embodiment—see, and we’re already into ‘technical language’ or rather, the language that relates to my specialisation, I guess—and whilst I’d taken care to demonstrate how and why I was characterising it in this way by giving background about embodiment, corporeal generosity and archives, in the questions it became clear that half the audience were deeply engaged with that side of things, and the other half of the audience had just not really grasped it, and so were focused on the forms of intersex surgery and the question of eugenics…
I guess what I’m saying is that I suspect that you’re more specialised than you might think, NP (remember ‘determinate negation’? ;-)) but also that the kind of pedagogical style may be partly that you want to engage your audience rather than just have a space to say what you’ve actually been working on. Established academics don’t need to be developing networks in the same way that postgrads do; could this be part of it? Personally I find it hard as I delve deeper into the area I’m working on to make it all comprehensible… but that’s probably because I want to present something substantive and I have the usual paranoia that someone will attack me for having holes all through my argument if I don’t explain *this* and *that* and *that other thing*… a paranoia that most tenured academics seem to be quite happy and perfectly able to give away (unsurprisingly!)
Hey all,
Your question, N, strikes me as similar to the one that’s been hounding institutionalized (in both senses of the term, I think) philosophy for decades. I’m thinking, of course, about the distinction between so called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy.
Now, without getting into the details of a totally different debate, the current modus vivendi between the those who self-identify as either ‘continental’ or ‘analytic’ (and then apply the label to others), is that the difference between the two kinds of philosophy is actually a matter of style. It’s a matter of presentation, rather than of substantive content. More forcefully put, since no one can really identify a core set of concerns that are peculiar to either ‘analytic’ or ‘continental’ philosophy, the difference that makes a difference can only be what counts as ‘proper presentation.’ The mode of argumentation is thus seen as extrinsic to the subject-matter. It seems to me that your question, and the way that you’ve presented it, is motivated by precisely such a distinction: there’s something that counts as ‘proper,’ and it is to be identified, or at least distinguished form the substance of a discussion.
The problem, however — and being a reader of Hegel and Marx, this is a real problem — is that such a differentiation, as neutral as it may seem, is predicated on a Form-Content distinction (I realize that you alluded to this in your response to Nate, and tried to distinguish your position from a naive separation; I’ll return to this below). Content matters. Form is a contingent, unessential and arbitrary concern. But if that’s true, then the differentiation between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy, between ‘academic’ and ‘non-acedemic’ pursuits, is an unhelpful confabulation. It’s Semblance, Ideology. Indeed, if the notion of style is contingent and arbitrary, if it is unessential, if only the cash value of the independent content being purveyed — as opposed to produced in and through its presentation (!) — is important, then style is indicative of a difference that makes no difference. If the matter of being “an academic” (or, more specifically, a philosopher of some stripe) is merely a matter of style, of ‘constructing a reader by appealing to a series of ‘proprietary techniques,’ then the ‘approach’ — or, what amounts to the same: ambient considerations underwriting style — are inconsequential. And hence, to follow the inferential series down to its logical conclusion, the style of academic presentation doesn’t matter; you are, in short, no less an academic than the academic who has an ‘academic presentation.’
Surely this can’t be right, since you intensely feel a difference.
So, what disquiets you, N, or so it would seem to me, isn’t simply ’style,’ or how it constructs a readership. It has to be deeper than that. Indeed, your response to Nate seems to suggest this. You wrote,
I point this out because it seems that, though you are careful not to claim that style qua form becomes a substitute for content, content nevertheless remains distinct from style in the sense that ’style’ amounts to little more than a reshaping of pre-existing material, which is being drawn upon, to elicit a response from like-minded (or similarly interpolated) individuals. It’s the same problem with analytic and continental philosophy. But this presupposes a strong separation between form and content, I think, as I’ve outlined it above. It presupposes, in a sense, that content is not produced through style.
and, so I’m wondering, Is style the latest transformation of the emancipatory struggle. a politics by other means? Might your reaction indicate a certain, for lack of a better word, political allegiance? A certain view of the Acedeme — its potentials, roles, and responsibilities — as a whole? Might the issue be one of dissemination, and of relevance? Just a few quick thoughts — sorry if they’re not a coherent as they should be.
Sarapen! Good to hear from you – been wondering what you’ve been up to! I suppose I’m a bit worried that I might offer a convincing waddle, but chirp rather than quack… ;-P More on this in my response to Nate!
Nate – The weird thing, I think, is that what provokes this reaction most intensely in me is not actually the experience that someone possesses background I don’t have: the paper that triggered this post covered ground with which I’m fairly intimately familiar – and that familiarity was actually what made the experience so unnerving, as I was sitting there listening, thinking “I would never write something like this”. I tend to be weirdly unphased by people demonstrating background I don’t have, because I actually think everyone does that to everyone else – I sort of assume that we’re all sitting around going, “Shit! They know more than I do!” – because that’s the impact slightly different specialisations and backgrounds are going to have… (I can, though, get extremely worried that I don’t have background that I should have, given the issues central to my work – but that’s a more internal thing, about intrinsic requirements of the project, rather than about a comparison between what I do, and what other people do…)
I know this reaction has a great deal to do with my experiences at my previous university, where I had enormous and ongoing problems around the disciplinary location of my work. My current situation is much much better – but I still occasionally get feedback that echoes back to the sorts of things I heard in my previous program: I’ve had several people, for example, tell me specifically that my work reminds them of “something from the 19th century” (and these are not reactions offered in relation to my work on Marx, where the subject matter might generate this association, but rather reactions offered to writings I’ve done on contemporary theory). I’ve also had several people express a kind of… tolerant amusement, would probably be the best way to describe it – a sort of ?indulgent? reaction – to the scope or scale of the theoretical questions I tend to ask – and, again, people frequently comment that it strikes them as antiquated – not in the sense that I strike them as personally not being up on the current literature, but in the sense that I strike them as doing sorts of things that people simply no longer do. So I get a kind of tolerant-amused “you’re trying to do that, are you?” I should note that this tends to happen more from people who haven’t seen my writing – it’s a reaction to how I talk about my project, rather than a reaction to my formal work. So it may be something I don’t really need to worry about all that strongly…
In terms of seeing other writing of mine: there are actually bits and pieces of formal writing scattered around on the blog, under the “drafts” category for the most part. To be honest, I hate pretty much all of this… I go through periodic struggles over whether I can handle keeping the blog material online – this material is some of the reason – mainly because it was written in weirdly ?compromised? circumstances, where I was trying to shoehorn things I was trying to think about, into events and excuses for writing that didn’t really fit… I find it fairly embarrassing… This is true of much of the earlier blog material, as well – but somehow it’s more manageable for me, because I wasn’t trying to write it formally in the first place…
The Marx material being serialised on the blog at the moment is intended as the backbone of a chapter (and a conference paper, although that’s more incidental): I’ll post this, once it’s done (should be soon – famous last words and all). With LMagee’s permission, I’ll also put up the joint-written Brandom-Habermas piece once that’s done. I’ll be serialising some material on Hegel – and more material on Marx – over the summer (er… our summer – coming up soon now) – those will also feed into chapters, which I’ll also most likely post… So there will be plenty of opportunities to see more formal material over the next several months…
Then maybe it will be easier for people to tell me that I’m not an academic… ;-P
Hey Alexei! We were writing at the same time, I think – I hadn’t seen your post when I was writing my previous response. I’m wavering a bit between trying to respond to your general point – which I think is worth discussing in its own right – and trying to grope a bit more clearly toward what worries me on a personal level. I’ll start with the personal, and then see where I end up…
Personally, my worry concerns whether the sorts of questions, and the sorts of things I want to “do” with the answers to those questions, can be positioned within an academic space. My response to Nate above – where I mentioned the not uncommon teasing that I’m channelling someone from the 19th century – may articulate a little more clearly than what I’ve written earlier, the sort of thing I’m worrying about. (With, again, the caveat that I don’t believe I’ve been all that clear throughout this discussion, because I don’t feel I have a clear sense myself of what’s tugging at me about this issue.)
I do see a linkage between content and style – or motivation, content and style – in my work – and I assume that such things are linked in others’ works, as well. The style of presentation that I use has to do with the theoretical work I’m trying to do, with a desire to be able to construct spaces for conversations that I think are fairly difficult to have, with the sense that such difficult conversations are both important and necessary. I’m just not completely sure why the academy should “care”, per se, that I want to have these sorts of conversations and should orient my work around them…
On your broader point: I do have a specific… ideal of the academy – I’m much more conscious of this in relation to teaching than in relation to my own research. I don’t have a specific ideal that academic research must produce something that is, say, accessible, or practical, or political – although my own work (as abstract as it is, and as strange as this might sound given how I write and what I write about) does try to be accessible, and parts of my work might have practical or political implications in a more everyday sense. But I don’t see any of this as “picking out” my work in any way that differentiates it necessarily from other academic work – I’m not sure I can create a fault-line here that captures my unease or sense of discomfort.
I suspect I need to tug on the thread about people reacting to my work as anachronistic – somewhere along that line, I think, I can hit closer to what might cause my sense that I might be doing something that might somehow fall “out of bounds”.
This may hit on some of your broad questions from a different direction: do we have something like a “normal science” in philosophy or the social sciences? Are the disciplines defined in terms of operation within established parameters? Does my work strike people as somehow regressing behind an established “paradigm”? And therefore, perhaps, as reopening issues that have been closed off for good reason…
Very tired tonight – long week, and I’ve just gotten back into town. Apologies if this is completely unclear… I can try to make more sense tomorrow… :-)
Ack!! WP – somehow your post got caught in moderation, and so I didn’t see it when I was replying to either Nate or Alexei… *sigh* Sorry about that… Now there’ll be lots of me, all in a row…
I think the audience engagement issue hits closer (for me personally) than the specialisation issue per se: specialisation doesn’t necessarily worry me – I think it’s generally necessary, and my position (in discussions about, say, the disciplinary positioning of my own work) is that it simply specialises in a way that doesn’t fall into existing disciplinary lines particularly well. Technical terms or jargon don’t necessarily bother me, either – these can often be in aide of thought and they can be useful for presentation – sometimes, even the “alienness” and difficulty of jargon can be useful, in slowing down reception and flagging that “here there be tygers” and such…
I do, though, worry about the possibility of opening up for a discussion – one that can shock me out of established patterns of thought, as well as open up some of what I’m doing to people who might not overlap strongly. The point about postgrads having a particular incentive to take a “pedagogical” approach to their presentations is a good one – I would add that this orientation could be extended beyond postgraduate work, when someone is trying to have ideas picked up in a broader sense than might be required just for disciplinary communications within a well-defined field. There were papers at the recent conference that didn’t strike me as “academic” in the sense I’ve written about above (a fact which may obviate elements of this thread – if they can get away with this, I probably can too… ;-P – but there is still something I’m trying to understand here about how people sometimes react to my work): they were often quite complex and technical in their own way – what differentiated them was a concerted effort to break this complexity down, to situation themselves in a broader intellectual history that enabled at least some connections from other traditions, and similar steps that opened the paper in various ways to discussion.
But I’ll have to let this fade off for the night – exhausted… Apologies that I’m a bit all over the place – I’m trying to understand something, essentially so that I can decide whether I need to deal with it in some direct way when I write. But my sense of what I’m trying to understand is extremely fuzzy, which means that I’m not as able to useful to the discussion (in spite of having started it ;-P), as I should be…
hey again NP,
I thought I got it and now I’m not sure I do again. The paper you discuss in the post, the really good one, was a paper that doesn’t provide for non-specialist readers on the subject the paper addresses, and engaged very closely with the literature in that specialist field. That all sounds like something you’re capable of! Hmm.
Are there any works you know of that are online that you could point to as examples that feel roughly like what you’re talking about here – one that feels like what you want to do (or find yourself doing) and one that feels like the paper you saw at the conference? I very much want to get it, as your comments are suggestive and occasionally I have a moment of “I think I’ve had this experience” but then I lose that moment again.
take care,
Nate
lol! Sorry for being so unclear – it’s because I’m trying to capture something I’m not very clear on myself. I’m not so much worrying about capability, as about tendency or a sort of default orientation that I take to my work, and then about the comments other people at times make to my work (more harshly at my previous university, more amused at the current one) that suggest that I strike them as doing something weird.
I do of course have the periodic experience of wondering whether I “can” do something, or whether I’m not following something, or things like that – it’s just not what causes this particular reaction for me. So I’m not so much worrying about whether I have the ability to write specialist papers that are primarily oriented to people in a similar specialist place, as thinking through why my tendency is not to do this – for two opposing reasons, in a way: I both tend to be passably aware of discussions going on in other specialisations, which keep me from making certain kinds of claims when I know that these are contentious in other literatures, and I tend to struggle to “frame” my own work in terms of, say, some current discussion or debate going on in a particular discipline – I’m often not engaged with the… micrological level? of discussion in a particular field? I think? So I have some of the left-field tendencies of a non-specialist – I think I often don’t hit on things that interest specialists, but sometimes write things that get enthusiastic responses from non-specialists – and I’m wondering a bit whether this might be placing me in a non-academic space in some way – whether there’s an issue of disciplinary socialisation that I’m not meeting…
So, in terms of this conference, for example, I kept a running tally of the times various speakers went, “As we all know, Marx does [x]” (at this conference, Marx was a functionalist economic theorist – this seemed to be a sort of noncontentious consensus for both the pro- and anti-Marx commentaries). Now of course I’m not going to say, “As we all know” about Marx, because I’ve got a specific reading of Marx – I’m not going to present my own reading as something “we all know” or as though it’s self-evident and obvious, because it just ain’t… This is a “specialisation” of mine, in a way, although it doesn’t specifically align with disciplinary boundaries, and so of course I’m going to be more attentive to issues around readings of Marx. But I don’t have any reason to assume anyone else in the room would share this “specialisation”, so I can’t speak as though they share some common default orientation (or, I can speak this way, but I think it would probably cause confusion and buy problems…)
I experience something similar around, not only the way that theorists are mobilised in discussion, but also the way in which empirical problems are proposed, or research evidence mobilised – I’m just often aware that there is some dispute, some contention, and therefore wouldn’t feel comfortable casually appealing to a shared understanding of such things. But shared understandings often do exist within disciplinary boundaries – I run into the “hard” version of this occasionally when I’m co-teaching with someone, and they will propose covering a particular topic, and I’ll mention that it could be interesting to include reading materials over what I take to be some key debate over the issue – and I’ll often get back a blank look, and a “there is no debate” response. This will be because I read outside their particular field, and am aware of some other way the issue comes to problematised somewhere else, but this other problematisation or the sort of work done in the other field will be sort of… systematically devalued? by the person with whom I’m trying to design a course.
And the issue is that there may be a good reason for this kind of systematic devaluation – there may be some methodological issue that, as a non-specialist glancing into each discipline essentially from the outside, I basically don’t have the background to “get”. And even where this doesn’t apply – in, say, appealing to a consensus reading of Marx – there still may be a good reason to rely on a consensus reading: it abbreviates discussion in a useful way, so that people who do share a particular set of assumptions can then build on those to discuss a higher-level set of issues. Since my own “higher level” issues tend to require a set of assumptions that I don’t expect most other people to share, they aren’t really discussable, for me, in a one-off interaction – I need a much more cumulative interaction for that to possible – and, as a consequence, sort of feel like, when I do present in one-off contexts, I might be coming across as spending a lot of time on basic background, and not getting around to saying much else… ;-P
At any rate… I suppose I’m wondering if some (or all…) of my work might look pre-professional in a disciplinary sense. I tend to spend a lot of time reading works that were in some sense constitutive of disciplines, and much less time reading works that play out within the subsequent disciplinary space – and that sort of… rubs off… I’m reluctant to cite examples of papers that cause me to react – on the one hand, because the reaction is a fairly general one for me – skimming through most journals, attending most conferences, will cause me to feel this way – on the other hand, I’m trying to be clear that I’m not critical of the things that provide the excuses, so to speak, for me to have this reaction: I’m not critical of this kind of work, and I’m also not necessarily critical of the notion that my own work might differ – just curious whether this difference means anything significant, in terms of my current attempt to position myself in some academic space.
Sorry to keep trundling around this issue without achieving any particular clarity. Part of the problem stems from trying to process reactions – situations in which I’ll lay out some version of what I’m working on, and get this sort of tolerant amusement – and then I’ll ask what that reaction is about, and have the person refuse to clarify, because they’re certain that I must already know, and am just joking around with them… Or situations in which I feel like I’m speaking better – coming across more clearly – to non-academic audiences, or to non-specialist academic audiences, than to the specialisations that ought to be closest to my work: this just doesn’t seem reassuring, in terms of positioning my work in an academic disciplinary space, although it may be perfectly useful for other reasons… I just don’t necessarily find it reassuring, as a statement about my academic socialisation, to have people tell me that I sound like someone from the 19th century… ;-P
Hi Nicole,
I might be way off track here but I think your feeling of being out of place or out of step might stem from the ethos of openess that you bring to your intellctual engagement and your engagment with others in whatever space that occurs – academic conference, lecture theatre, tutorial etc.
Academia has a long history of exercising power through the construction of expertise and certainty is often considered the mark of this expertise as is familiarity with the literature or a given body of theory. In this regard, foreclosure has been the key, not openess.
To acknowledge and practice openess in academia is often constructed as a threat to the foundation upon which the whole enterprise is based – the foundation that gives rise to power and privilege. It also consititues a significant part of many an academics identity. Disturbing this can make people uncomfortable. It can also make those who dont conform to academic conventions look/feel out of place – like they are an imposter.
I think a conversation and debate about some of that stuff is well overdue.
Cheers
Sharon
Hey sharon – I didn’t know you lurked around these parts! Not off track at all – although it’s very hard, on an individual level, to know… er… whether it’s “just me”, or something more structural.
(Sorry you got caught in moderation – should only happen the first time you post.)
An ethos of ‘openness’ is fine unless it translates to surviellance. ‘Openness’ also seems also very compatible with increased managerialism in all sectors of life and increasing scrutiny not from below but from above.
Increasingly managers are turning to the new technologies of communication, like MySpace or Facebook or blogs to surveil their workers. In this sense I admire N Pepperell’s courage in blogging, as many people seem to want to take such activities out of context. It does seem that some academics already are doing this.
‘Openness’ with students is also problematic, for if you are truly open with them with a range of things, take for instance if you are having a crap day within a crap year then you will likely be seen as lacking ‘professionalism’.
(I am not claiming that ‘professionalism’ is a defining characteristic of academia and unproblematic, but it is a story that can be used to discipline.)
And again other academics within the space of ‘the university’ are again likely to try and capitalise upon this in various ways.
So I feel that ‘openness’ may be one characteristic that is problematic in terms of defining an ‘academic’ (whatever claiming that particular identity may mean).
If a person was truly ‘open’ about all doubts about their own ‘expertise’ (whatever that may be) or present doubts about the ‘reliability’ of their or even all ‘knowledge’ then you pose a difficult situation in regards to (re)presenting anything to an audience.
If a person does not at some point assume some authority; in claiming a limited degree of expertise in a field of inquiry (say familiarity with a body of theory) then it is difficult to be able to (re)present any knowledge to another person.
In my view it seems a great deal of N Pepperell’s work (no, I have not viewed it all) seems to fulfill the characteristics of ‘academic work’. Perhaps claiming the title of ‘academic’ should not be done on some basis of ‘expertise’ or claim to ‘reliability’ or claim to authority to grant ‘privilege’ but on the basis of the work itself. But this seems also problematic, as then I could be interpreted as saying that ‘academic work’ is merely a genre.
This is vaguely off topic, but the openness thing might make it kinda relevant ;-) Just a quick ‘thanks’ to you, Sharon, because today I read about your great work in deploying the FOI Act over the ARC vetoes; and there’s a fair whack of people behind me. Good work.
Actually, I do wonder how far it *is* off topic, given that clearly what is ‘academic’ to governmental types clearly differs from academic self-conception…
Thanks for the thanks! It’s heartening to know that others share my concerns about the exercise of ministerial power in relation to academic activity and the lack of transparency that often goes with it.
The case continues, we have had some result through the forced consultation but the question of release of the documents remains.
Hopefully, this can be settled soon because it is coming up to two years since I first applied to access the documents. Perhaps I should send the ARC a card to acknowledge our anniversary.
I still find this whole situation quite incredible… In any event, I second the thanks – perhaps we can all chip in for that special anniversary gift…