One Confused Blessay

Before I continue answering Mike's questions, I want to thank all thirty-six of you who emailed me last night for the sole purpose of informing me that my academic career can survive the occasional infelicitous sentence.  Why you chose to email me instead of leaving your logic in the comment box is something I could think about, but Bill Pannapacker captures, if not the fact (as some have argued), then at least the mind-set that would compel people to console my idiotic fears privately:

Blogs are a useful tool for people on the margins of the profession. They help to break up the control of editorial boards and conference committees over the acceptable range of professional discourse. But it will be a long time before they are regarded as a legitimate venue for scholarly discussion; participation in them is not likely to help, and it could do a lot to harm one's career, if that is what matters most.

Let me be the first to admit that I think the nerve Pannapacker touched is raw for a reason: we really don't know what we're doing.  We are on the margins of academia (or, in Ray's case, beyond them), and we are inclined to dance when someone questions the validity and viability of what we're doing.  (Not that Pannapacker said or implied that; any consideration of what we are or aren't doing strikes the same nerve.  It's not his fault we're so jumpy.)  By "we are on the margins of the academy," I don't mean to imply that we're all on the same margins.  McCann's a force in the field and Holbo and the Miriams are internet celebrities.  Jonathan, um, Jonathan's Jonathan.  His position's so cryptic as to defy description.  (But I suspect he too is an internet celebrity.  Only incognito.)  And then there's me.  I'm writing a dissertation.  I've never been published.  I'm not on the margins so much as the testing grounds.  Will I succeed?  Who knows.  I don't anticipate ticker-tape parades, but I clench my fists in futile prayer that I'll land a job somewhere someday.

But who knows.  Maybe someday people like Walter Benn Michaels won't be objects of discussions on blogs but authors of position-blogs about their work.  (Am I auguring a rigged prophecy?  Wouldn't you like to know.)  My point is only that the status of what we write on our blogs is subject to changes beyond our ability to predict.  Maybe what I'm writing need only adhere to the casual constraints which govern the lion's share of blogs out there.  Then again, maybe it ought to adhere to far more rigorous standards, as I thought when I posted my contribution to the Theory's Empire event.  I included 29 footnotes.  The next highest number?  None.  That's not a criticism but an admission of confusion.  I wrote a Frankenstein "blessay."  The reason there's more "essay" than "blog" in that neologism is because there was more essay than blog in my contribution.  I didn't know quite what I was writing but, and this is something Pannapacker nails, I knew I was writing something different.

Different from my dissertation.

Different from my blog.

And that's precisely the point of Pannapacker's essay.  I think the response of my fellow Valveteers is as much a reaction to our own anxiety about what exactly it is we're producing as Pannapacker's generous and flattering article. 

Comments

[Jonathan]

I'm not jumpy. My positions aren't cryptic. Claiming that participating in a blog such as ours makes you "marginal" strikes me as a little paranoid. People like Berube and McGowan are as centrally located in the profession as any.

Pannapacker's column seemed more about his personal sensibility than anything else. I wish that he had noticed that whatever the ASLC's position is about literary theory, etc., it's not shared by the Valve in toto and emphatically not by me. My posts about TE were clear and critical.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Jonathan, I know you don't share the ASLC's position. Everytime I look around technorati to see what people are saying about the Valve, I find your footprints and a comment to that effect. While I realize that you have a valid concern that people will learn of your association with it and judge you accordingly, I believe those who would do that without taking the time to actually read anything you've written on the Valve are the problem.

As for your posts not being cryptic, well, you're right about your TE posts, but you've said yourself that "I have many obscure interests, and one of my favorite forms of humor is to pretend that they’re not obscure." That's the damn near the definition of cryptic.

[Miriam (B)]

I've achieved celebrity status?

*rushes off to primp self for Entertainment Weekly cover story*

[nnyhav]

Think of it as "the unfinished furniture of the mind" ...