...that bugs me, but apparently doesn't also bug enough academics is this: it's possible to sit on a panel in a room full of media scholars, educators, and producers and say (in regards to what and how children should be learning in the classroom) 'The idea of content is dead,' and not get a single criticism or response. Similarly, one can sit in a roomful of writers and artists and say that there are no original ideas left, then go on to imply that simplistic appropriation is therefore not only an appropriate aesthetic mode but a necessary and therefore valorous stance, and not raise a single eyebrow. This isn't a criticism of the beliefs themselves, but rather of a culture of 'respectful' nonresponsiveness, the appropriately-jaded attitude that if the occasional (or not so occasional, ahem) utterance in an academic context is divorced from reality, that's the price one pays for free discussion. I get the theory and can sympathize with the urge, but am stupefied by the practice.
I've really enjoyed this weekend's MiT5 conference, which finishes up today (I'm done, too worn out to continue after a late night of pleasant catching-up and boozing at Henry's, despite wanting to see a couple of talks at the awfully early first session today). The plenary sessions have been quite strong, and the overall tone of discussion has been invigorating (maybe I've been mostly lucky in my choice of panels). People always speak well of the Media in Transition conferences, and I suspect this one will be no different, the uncooperative weather and Building 4 fire alarm testing notwithstanding. It all made me miss academia a little, weird as that might seem. (Or not weird, of course.)
[Update: You should read more about the MiT5 conference: the agenda and list of speakers are at the main site. Rundowns of certain panels here, here, and here (Prof. Jason Mittell), here and here (Prof. Nick Montfort), and here (Prof. Jill Walker). It was a great time and will likely prompt strong ongoing discussions (read especially Prof. Mittell's first entry). The plenary sessions are going online in mp3 format already (see Henry's entry here for some links). I wish the first thing I wrote about the conference was less of a piss-take, but one can't escape one's nature. The foregoing links are strong tonic; I may as well endeavour to be strong gin.]
But I keep noticing, over and over, a tendency among the (particularly younger) scholars in attendance to get animated not by the content and relative provocativeness of the ideas on offer, but rather by the threat a given claim poses to the security of their own preexisting frameworks - disciplinary, ideological, political, fashionable, or otherwise. The most heated discussion I saw all weekend was basically about reputation and industrial encroachment on academic discourse, prompted by two communications-studies types dismissing scholarly references to an apparently monolithic 'industrial process' of filmmaking as an abstraction with no basis in the actual work of, um, the work, a position that I naïvely assumed would be considered helpful but which went over badly with the assembled humanists; earlier I sat in a room full of Big Theory Types and saw only nodded agreement and minor clarificatory questions (at an excellent panel on seriality and transmedia storytelling) until the discussion turned to whether a neologism was needed to refer to the topic of the discussion.
In grad school I found the border-patrolling tendencies of academics tiring, in part because the idea of scrabbling for tenure always bored and annoyed me; because vocabulary-coinage and -definition is a central intellectual activity for scholars but also a central disciplinary maneuver, it can be exhausting and irritating to parse such discussions if one doesn't have a professional stake in their outcome. What's seen purely as 'jargon' by observers outside a field (e.g. journalists writing their annual year-end MLA-bashing puff pieces) is really a vital step in determining what evaluative and critical frameworks will be utilized in a field going forward, a step with major implications for who gets what chair in what department and so forth. I feel sympathy for scholars who have to contend with such madness.
But the fact remains that the constant passive-aggressive jockeying for position among academics, which manifests as scholarly practice, is tied to both what's good and what's very, very bad about the present state of cultural/textual theory and criticism. It was ever so, yes. But whether or not anti-intellectual conservative critics say this too, it's true: the allegedly-analytic* frameworks that form the substance and structure of so many papers in (e.g.) media theory carry with them implied aesthetic/evaluative positions that (1) have tremendous cultural impact beyond the academy and (2) go entirely without scrutiny within the academy. Which is nowadays the thing that most tires me out when it comes to academic talk, aesthetically-serious places like The Valve and (in a less academic-professional way) The House Next Door and so forth notwithstanding. But OK listen, now you have a choice: if you skipped the footnote you can go ahead and read it now, it's a goddamn mess and bears only tangentially on this weekend's conference, which as I say was excellent and got me interested again in conversations I'd forgotten I ever loved, and which not incidentally introduced or re-introduced me to a number of scholars and students I'm really glad to have met (ivan and dkompare and sam and deb and so forth), and which (this is the most niggling thing but still) demonstrated that even though Prof. Mittell is grossly, absolutely, horrifyingly, systemically wrong about (ha ha, see footnote) whether Lost is a good text and if so why even if he's appropriately critical of Stephen Johnson's bad book Everything Bad Is Good For You, give it up: his work on copyright and fair use is awesome and his questions at the conference provocative and interesting, so I'll be less of a B-I-T-C-K in response to his writing from now on as I'm more able to credit where he's coming from with these errant, frankly fucking embarrassing aesthetic evaluations. [Insert self-deprecating emoticon here.] Yes, this is only an issue for me because I'm petty and small.
I'll do a separate post on the contents of a couple of talks, at which I took copious notes in the ol' Moleskine, Reader(s), and from which I learned a good deal, which bitcking aside is what it's all for, yeah yeah yeah.
* 'Allegedly' because I'm a jerk, and by the way this gets personal and tetchy and biographical so maybe you want to skip this footnote entirely, though I've set the important bit in boldface even if it's absolutely irrelevant to the fucking foregoing, sorry Reader(s): as I moved from computer science to literary and media studies I was stunned by the damage being done to the notion of 'analytic' thinking and expression. The word 'scientific' gets a similar drubbing in the humanities from people who've never had any experience of science in practice, in or out of the laboratory or shop, ever. Part of the reason the humanities at MIT comes in for a bad rap among students (despite the strength of the SHASS's programs) is that discursively speaking, taking humanities classes at a tech school doesn't (just) productively leaven one's technical education, it gets one hand laughing at the other. If you're told at age 18 that the productive, pragmatic modes of thinking and analysis - with their core assumption of predictive value - that you've learned in a technical class are equivalent epistemologically and functionally to the highly subjective, personal, historically (and fashionably, as any decent reflexive reflective humanistic scholar can tell you) contingent evaluative framework you're getting in Film Theory 101, that these two modes of 'analysis' are somehow equivalent at the level of algorithmicity or systematicity, you can be forgiven for calling bullshit and writing off your humanities work. Even if that's a terrible idea. One great failing of humanistic criticism of science and engineering practice is its overreach: at day's end, no matter how historically-freighted our notions of scientific expertise and so forth are, no matter how contingent and transient our technical practices and the modes of knowledge they produce, the body of knowledge and practice that can with total predictability land a small car on a ball of rock millions of miles away is not the same as the 'rigorous' theoretical framework unable to determine with finality whether (e.g.) Lost is a good TV show. Wow I'm in a bad mood, apparently. Can you blame me though? I drank a goddamn lot of wine last night at Henry's. Great reception it was - met some of the new kids, caught up with the oldbies, was reminded as ever by the presence of Professor Uricchio that baldness can be sexy, etc. But Christ I've got some resentments bubbling up here! It's almost embarrassing, and lemme tell you I'm not easily embarrassed. Let's leave it at this: as wonderful as this conference has been, as positive as my grad school experience mostly was, the suspension of disbelief required to make a go of it as a media scholar - to compete professionally with all the other PhD's in the field - would quite possibly drive me insane. I think I have it in me to do really good scholarly work; I don't know that I could do the dance necessary to be big in what was and in some vague sense ever will be 'my field.' Which realization only increases my admiration for people who (to my mind) stay creative and committed and sane in academia without uncritically buying into the enabling fantasies of the field-at-the-moment, y'all know who you are.
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Posted by: proquest digital dissertations | 26 December 2008 at 04:20 AM