Talking, Endlessly Talking; or, Something I Presented Somewhere before Many People

(Painstakingly crafted by hand on a train from D.C. to Philadelphia and revised in Notepad on a cramped flight from Philadelphia to Houston.)

Below you'll find in situ the corpse of my lively talk. As will quickly become apparent, the word "talk" is no euphemism.  I talked a talk.  But I almost didn't.  Like most panelists, I arrived in Philadelphia toting a paper to be read.  Mine concerned the role blogs could play as virtual parlors devoted to the professionalization of sharp minds with rodential social instincts.  The first two panels I attended reminded me of my own base nature.

The original version of my "talk" betrayed both the conventional insecurities of an MLA panelist—the first-year fear of imposture, father to outbursts profound only in oblivious pretension—and those specific to a graduate student addressing an "unserious" topic.  Legitimacy being the motivation behind the panel, why not describe it in a style with impeccable credentials?  Why not partake of the inflated rhetoric of the scholar?  Two panels into my MLA-crawl, I remembered what my insecurities had obscured:  barking fifteen-to-twenty minutes of academic prose may impress the three people in the room who've never encountered it before, but it alienates and infuriates those who have.

Those articles written to be read at conferences?  They sound like articles, written to be read, at conferences.  They are difficult to follow because their content hardly suits their form and the medium flatters neither, the equivalent of a novelization of a film based upon an interpretation of a novel. 

Novelty aside, who would a book whose front covered declared it to be "based on Huck in Love, the Independent Spirit award-winning adaptation of Leslie Fiedler's seminal analysis of Mark Twain's Huck Finn in Love and Death in the American Novel"?  Yet here we are, fidgeting through strings of words and accumulations of arguments best parsed in the privacy of one's own mind.

Exceed the limits of the audience's ability to track an argument and a talk will become difficult, yes, but so too does this sentence:

Tina told Mark that John thought Pauline knew what Sam had planned for Justine, but Pauline insisted she had no idea John believed that, nor whether the look Justine exchanged wth Mark at work yesterday meant that Tina had inadvertatly revealed Sam's trap before John and his brother Adam could spring it.

That sentence could be parsed, but not easily, not on the fly.  Perhaps if acceptance packets included an audio edition of The Golden Bowl—or, better yet, Kant's Third Critique—and threats of dire consequences, of career suicide, if they did not become the soundtrack of the initiate's summer, perhaps then we could disentangle complex social relations and order subtle argumentation whilst inadequately-caffeinated in a dimly lit conference hall far from home.  Given that academics should be skilled in this mode of communication, the incentive to cultivate such a specialized skill-set is slight.  A well-trained audience would solve the problem, but so would a properly trained speaker.

All of which is only to justify the hours and hours I spent transforming my "talk" into one which could be understood when read aloud.  On paper, the result of these revisions is less-than-impressive: it contains few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination.  Instead, it presents, elaborates, then returns to a few key points.  I pepper it with the "spontaneous" interjections and digressions which came to me as I delivered it, repeatedly, to the walls of my empty hotel room.  Each read-through brought something to my attention, be it a wrinkled locution, an unpronounceable sequence of words, sentences larded with infelicitous alliteration and assonance, an appropriate occasion for a "spontaneous," witty aside, &c.

Why improvise once when you can round out your talk with a greatest hits culled from multiple improvisations?  One final note: some of the things written below may not correspond, date-wise, to when things appeared on the site.  That's because I based it on the date I wrote them as opposed to the one on which I hit publish.  Also, the paragraph breaks don't work according to their normal logic so much as they represent me reminding myself to breathe. 

On with the show:

I'll open with a quick passage from Deleuze:

Academics' lives are seldom interesting. They travel of course, but they travel by hot air, by taking part in things like conferences and discussions, by talking, endlessly talking. (Deleuze, Negotiations)

Two lines of thought follow: the first is that academics make for terrible bloggers because their lives aren't that interesting. The second, that since all they're doing is talking, endlessly talking, there's no reason not to extend the conversation online.

The former assumes that academic bloggers belong to the legion of online diarists venting splenetic about the minutiae of daily life; the latter, that academics participate in a unique—if outwardly dull—culture of intellectual exchange. Only, few people feel as if such an exchange takes place anymore. To make this point, let me draw a few examples from the most recent minnesota review.

Interviewing Toril Moi, Jeffrey Williams follows her remarks about the atomization of feminist literary theory by saying "now it does seem an age of dispersion, into micro-fields or specific 'studies.' It does seem that, in the 80s, theory was much more, if not unified, a general discourse everydoby knew the terms of." Later in the same interview, he notes that his students "might have read [Judith] Butler, but have no idea who Paul de Man is."

In another interview, William Spanos observes that his "students haven't the foggiest idea about the history of literary criticism prior to the contemporary moment. Not simply the hegemony of New Criticism, but also the emergent struggle of the early postructuralists to revolutionize that earlier tradition. They don't know who Cleanth Brooks is, they haven't read Cooper's Last of the Mohicans or Twain's Pudd'enhead Wilson or Faulkner's The Bear."

This ignorance is the result of systemic disciplinary failures, not easily rectified, not likely to change anytime soon. But they are also failures of engagement, of exchange, a breakdown in the increasingly Beckettian formulation of talking, endlessly talking. Why isn't the average graduate student familiar with Cleanth Brooks or Paul de Man? Because no one talks about them anymore. (Although, as someone who went from LSU to UCI, the idea that people don't talk about Brooks or De Man baffles me.)

So what are we to do? How are we to restart these conversations, reinvest ourselves in our disciplinary history? One way, I want to argue, a little paradoxically, is to open our discipline up, dethrone the little despots and tear down the walls between their tiny kingdoms. How best to do that? Allow outsiders in, let them remind us that we have more in common —methodologically, theoretically, and topically—than we've allowed ourselves to believe these past two decades.

As I prepared for this talk, I realized how little I knew about the reach of the phenomenon—blogging—we've come here to describe. Presupposing its importance isn't the best way to convince people who don't blog, and don't read blogs, that they have a function, much less an important one, in academic life. The possibility that academic bloggers are talking to a small, self-selected group of computer literate scholars who spend time tossing words into a void instead of with their family, exercising, or, God Forbid, even watching t.v.—is very real. On October 29th I polled my readership at Acephalous—polled it to see, first, how many of them there really were and, second, to learn a little more about them.

As of December 26th, 782 people had commented or emailed me their information. 211 were graduate students in English; another 172 of them were professors; 164 were historians, most of whom were professors; after that the disciplines begin to break down. 42 philosophers, 27 sociologists, 24 neurosciencists, 18 students of religious studies, 11 political scientists, 7 physicists, 3 classicists, and 1 self-described "freelance librarian" named Rich.

My list isn't meant to be exhaustive, merely suggestive of the intellectual community an unspectacular graduate student can create when he spends an hour or two writing for someone other than himself, his committee and the lucky eleven people who 'll skim his work, if, by some miracle, it lands in a flagship journal. My ideas are out there, circulating, in way not often seen outside of conferences and seminar rooms, but the diversity of the crowd forces me to find some way to communicate with my readers in terms they'll all be able to understand. This doesn't mean, as some would have it, that I'm simplifying my ideas for a general audience.

My audience—and that of my more illustrious co-panelists—is highly educated, consisting of a group best described as "the unusually literate." The disciplinary diversity here is key: we only define ourselves as literary scholars against an interdisciplinary backdrop, one in which historians and historicists recognize and, ideally, respect the methodological and topical differences the -ian and -ist entail. It's no coincidence, then, that almost 30 percent of my readership has a background in History: as a self-identifying historicist, what I write is, I hope, of intrinsic interest to historians.

Initially, this interest took the form of interdisciplinary sniping. But over time, that sniping, what Nicole Pepperell calls "Ph.d. performance art: the methodology slam," died down. That is to say, the terrorial shadow cast upon all interdisciplinary work—including one as routinized as "historicism"—has, in this instance, passed, lighting the way to a new kind of inter- and intra-disiplinary interaction predicated on enthusiasm.

As Peter Brooks argues in Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena:

Most of us who continue to write and publish literary criticism don't particularly enjoy reading it any more—not most of it, anyway. We continue to do so (if we do) out of a sense of duty, because we continue to think it important to learn what's new in the discourse. But most of the fun is gone, since the stakes appear to be diminished, and there isn't much sense of real dialogue about our understandings of texts and issues that matter—that matter in a way on which there is some consensus.

Now, I disagree with his trajectory—importance shouldn't be bound to consensus the way he imagines it—but the general point stands: most literary scholars don't read literary scholarship for pleasure anyone, but out of a sense of professional obligation. Why? Because the majority of it isn't written with an awareness of a larger audience, aiming instead for an academic minyan, if you will.

Most write to impress, and not their audience either; no, they write to impress their committees, the tenure review boards, the functionaries of the literary-academic bureaucracy, and they do so at a speed which precludes revision. Advancement demands it. Their lives, our lives increasingly depend on the production of works we will know won't be read. "Professionalization" becomes code for the manufacture of unread and unreadable works superficially invested in a dialogue of diminishing stakes.

But I'm not here to praise the genteel critics of yore or side with those whose polemics necessitated Brooks, that's Peter, and Jonathan Culler to write their defense of difficulty.

Many people misunderstand what, exactly, one does on an academic blog—what John and I are trying to do with the Valve.  Reading over the recent issue of Reconstruction devoted to academic blogging, I couldn't help but feel that many bloggers don't understand what academic blogging is either. That is to say, they're bloggers first, academics second. For example, in "Blogadamia"—just one of the many awkward neologisms used to describe the academic blogosphere, "blogosphere" being another—Craig Saper quotes one academic blogger who said

I just password-protected my blog for the period of my job search after reading [the infamous Ivan Tribble] article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, I actually got in trouble with my senior colleagues last semester for making a posting about a faculty meeting.

Now, I don't want to dictate—not that I could—what should and shouldn't count as an academic blog, but posting about faculty meetings doesn’t strike me as a uniquely academic topic, nor a uniquely academic breach of decorum.

Sure, it falls under the general rubric of "academic life," but we don't share everything about our lives with our friends and colleagues in other departments, so the idea that we ought to be able to break that decorum online seems odd to me. Internal department politics are the traditional stuff of academic the gossip, be it online or off—but do it online, and Google archives it. So for the departmental gossip who wants to ply his trade online, danger abounds. But why are we talking about gossip?

It is, in equal parts, the fault and cause of aforementioned Ivan Tribble article, "Bloggers Need Not Apply." The cause, as many have discussed, is a general technophobia. Web-only journals lack the prestige of their paper equivalents—a prestige conferred by the transubstantiation of ink to word—but this isn't the place to discuss why so many people fear electronic publication, only to note that they do.

The central objection, to my mind, would be that time spent blogging is time that could be spent thinking, writing deep thoughts about serious issues. This complaint dovetails with the common perception of blogs as diaries—or, in the more sophisticated version of that argument, blogging as a medium able to transform mere gossip into a new form of knowledge, documentation of what the aforementioned Capers calls "the social processes of knowledge production"—and to some extent, that's correct, all blogs are diaristic, do produce new knowledge.

But the best of them—or, since I'm about to include my own, the most careerist of them—are professional diaries. To draw from my own archives—the week of December 3rd through the 10th—anyone who read Acephalous could tease from my posts that I'd:

1. consolidated my thought on the American reception and appropriation of English Romanticism,
2. thought long and hard, for the fifth time in as many months, about how to frame my argument historically,
3. considered the influence of certain exceedingly popular English characters on the American literary marketplace, and
4. shored up my argument about the significance of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War to the average Progressive Era American’s daily life.

Now, the posts themselves didn't directly address those issues: instead, I

1. summarized a series of close-readings on John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," which I'd originally written with an eye to how they influenced the aesthetic theory of Silas Weir Mitchell—the subject of my current chapter
2. discussed the concept of periodization and its institutional history in literature departments via Thomas Pynchon, Kant's theory of genius and the place of Romanticism in the long eighteenth century
3. considered why an Americanist would quote unironically Sherlock Holmes as saying "There is nothing new under the sun, it has all been done before" and
4. created a multiple-choice question concerning the proper name of the Spanish-American War after reading the first footnote of Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire

For the record, the other two posts for that week weren't exactly unprofessional either: the first was a discussion of the all the panels I wanted to attend at the MLA; the second, the results of a test I'd run on Turnitin.com with my Keats posts—results which made me wonder why Turnitin.com doesn't include Google in its searches, but that's the subject another talk. So to those who would say that I would've better spent the time wasted blogging working on my dissertation, my response would be:

Conceptually, I was working on my dissertation. I know we're not hired on the basis of what we know, but what we produce—but what we know, what we've considered, what we've debated, it affects the quality of what we produce. This goes without saying. To focus on one of the previous examples—the question of periodization—thinking not only about the creation of boundaries within my own area of specialization—the late 19th century—but of the act generally, led me to read Orrin Wang's "Kant's Strange Light: Romanticism and the Catachresis of Genius." Perhaps reading academic journals at 8 p.m., after having worked since on my dissertation since 8 a.m., strikes some as indulgent (insane, even); and perhaps trying to reformulate that into something a genuinely educated audience can understand, strikes some as a waste—but to me, the former indicates that I list "literary theory" among my hobbies, the latter that I'm interested in processing it Cornell-style and communicating it to those outside not only my increasingly specialized sub-discipline but my profession, so that I might better understand it myself. Consolidating what I've learned and rethinking what I've written occupy large chunks of my evening and are, I believe, essential to my intellectual and professional development.

Thank you.

Comments

[Jesse]

Rethinking and processing are indeed an important part of the academic's job, and a blog is a great forum for this kind of work. More importantly, this task - rearticulation - is one of the most important lost arts of academia these days. You touch on this problem a few times in this post, though you never attack it directly: in specialized academia, there's such a dependence upon a body of theorists and terminology, both popular and arcane, that it's becoming profoundly inaccessible, and therefore more and more fragmented, and perhaps even irrelevant.

It's good to ask why students these days haven't read de Man, or why they don't recognize Cleanth Brooks. Then again, it's also relevant to ask: why should they need to know names like de Man, or Butler, or Wimsatt and Beardsley, in order to join the discourse? Because of the phenomenon you're talking about... the mass-production of critical literature in service of requirements and credentials... our critical vocabulary now consists almost entirely of names and jargon. That's what separates academia from any relevant political or ideological community.

And blogging might be a solution to this. It's not subject exclusively to institutional criteria, and it's not restricted to tiny audiences and obscure publications. It's a place where we can reformulate the ideas of the important theorists, but where, more importantly, we can start working with IDEAS again, rather than just names and -isms.

[Karl Steel]

Jesse, I'm unconvinced there was ever a time when academia was "accessible" to hoi polloi, when academia wasn't thought pointlessly recondite by same, when 'ordinary speech' was the predominate form of academic discourse. Let's take two examples (how many do I need?).

1: Early 14th-century discussions of free will, even reproduced, as they are now, in relatively cheap editions printed in regular (that is, non-specialized) typefaces, in (more or less) the vernacular, and (generally) with well-considered indexes--this work, and other late medieval academic discussion (let alone the discussion of Christian and quasi-Christian and pre-Christian neoplatonism: Plotinus certainly wasn't writing columns for the Times) still doesn't make much sense to me. If it doesn't speak easily to a medievalist, it certainly isn't exactly aiming to effect a rapprochement between the Ivory Tower and "any relevant [authentic?--ed.] political or ideological community." But this is the typical academic discussion of the period: sort of muddles your dystopian narrative, since the present day sins appear with equal vigor in the past. If you want engagement with a political community, I suppose you could look to political handbooks like the Secretum Secretorum: but, really, that kind of material is really the medieval equivalent of Dr. Phil: I hardly think it's what you want us to emulate.

2: There's also Ball of Fire. Can we suggest that the academics in this film, dating to (let's say) the excellent past that present-day academics have abandoned, are representative? If so, they're nerdy; unappreciated; arcane (also think of the early Kinsey in the movie Kinsey). We don't want to go back to that. (suggested narcissist article: changing perception of academics. When did academics go from being nerdy to being too avant garde? Socrates? Abalard? Wyclif?)

3. Bonus: Perhaps we're already there? Some academics do participate in public fora. Zizek and Negri and Singer have published editorials in the NY Times, right?, and is it my imagination, or isn't the French mass media (including television) well-known forgiving a venue to people like Foucault, Deleuze, and, er, so forth (that is, academics, not dead people)?

All this is a long way of saying: I agree that engagement with the non-academic public is desirable, especially if we believe our scholarship is doing political or ethical work, but we should aim for this engagement without an eye to the past, whatever that is, since, to my mind, nostalgia's an essentially conservative mode of thought.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Since the discussion here has turned to "hoi polloi", it might be helpful to discuss who is meant by that in this context. If I haven't just mis-subtracted the numbers, Scott's 782 identified readers include 103 in the "other" category -- 13%. I suspect that a good number of these are a sort of new class or class fragment of non-academic, non-legal symbolic analysts.

Of course I'm predisposed to this interpretation, being the free-lance librarian mentioned. But, in order to make this about more than just myself, I suspect that people like John Emerson, Bill Benzon, and Ray Davis might be considered. (No insult is intended to these people, if they would find this to be insulting -- I know that Bill Benzon publishes in academic journals, and so do John and Ray for all I know, but I don't think that any of them currently work as academics or consider themselves to primarily be academics; I'm not sure about Dan Green.) The archetype is that of the person working currently in something computer-related who has a humanities background, possibly a Ph.D. I'm an outlier since I have no humanities background. The group that I've mentioned is, of course, itself an outlier, as it is composed of the most locally visible people, generally those with their own blogs. There are also autodidacts; people like Noah Cicero.

In general, I think that this type of educational / occupational displacement is getting more common, and people like this form a significant part of the audience of more or less intellectual blogs. It's probably an ideal audience for the academic who wants his or her work to be better read; a non-captive audience who is actually interested, has the basic tools needed for understanding, yet who doesn't generally keep up with the journals. (Again, no disrespect intended to Bill, etc. above, many of whom do seem to still read journals in their (prior?) fields.)

Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don't think that academic blogs, in which academics write about their work, really do reach hoi polloi as that phrase is generally used, to mean lower-class, working-class, or perhaps the kind of middle-class audience stereotyped as "middlebrow". They reach non-academics, and academics outside the writer's field, but the First World, or at least the U.S., has what I think is a growing class of symbolic analysts who have a strange voluntarist, half-producer, half-consumer relationship to intellectual production.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I forgot to mention the "Luther Blissett" who comments in these environs, who last I'd heard said that he or she was leaving academia after dissertation (which would be academia's loss). LB is pretty clearly going to be a long-term ideal academic blog reader, despite having who knows what in their occupational check box.

[eb]

It's not clear to me that I would have applied to grad school had academic blogging been widely available at the time, or if, having applied, I'd have gone for anything beyond a terminal MA. I probably will fall into that group of nonacademic blog readers reading academic blogs.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Jesse:

Then again, it's also relevant to ask: why should they need to know names like de Man, or Butler, or Wimsatt and Beardsley, in order to join the discourse?

I've written about this before, but it bears repeating—despite not being a science, or even scientistic, literary studies has so rich a critical past that anyone unfamiliar with it is bound to relive it somehow. It may be, as per Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, that queer theorists in the '80s "discover" the immanent homosexuality Fiedler described in detail in the '50s. There's nothing wrong with that—in fact, I don't buy into the model of scholarly progress I suggest—but we ought to be careful not to claim as our own the insights of others. Not for reasons of intellectual honesty, mind you, but because it demonstrates a commitment to the discipline as a discipline. Sure, physicists don't read Newton anymore, but they don't need to in order to understand their work. The same can't be said of something with the institutional history of English departments.

Karl:

I'm unconvinced there was ever a time when academia was "accessible" to hoi polloi, when academia wasn't thought pointlessly recondite by same, when 'ordinary speech' was the predominate form of academic discourse.

I don’t want everyone to think I'm being belligerent today, but I have to disagree. In the late 1890s, before boundaries had been formed and canons began codifying, when the literate public could understand academic discourse. I've told this anecdote before, but William James' course on Spencer migrated from department to department—biology to philosophy to medicine to psychology to sociology—despite remaining, for the most part, the same introduction to Spencerian thought it'd always been. Now, I know the denizens of Harvard ain't the hoi polloi, but they can communicate in a "common" if not "ordinary" tongue.

Also, nice to meet you. Wish we'd had more of a chance to talk at the MLA. As you might imagine, things were a wee hectic.

Rich:

I don't think that academic blogs, in which academics write about their work, really do reach hoi polloi as that phrase is generally used, to mean lower-class, working-class, or perhaps the kind of middle-class audience stereotyped as "middlebrow". They reach non-academics, and academics outside the writer's field, but the First World, or at least the U.S., has what I think is a growing class of symbolic analysts who have a strange voluntarist, half-producer, half-consumer relationship to intellectual production.

I agree with the first half—although I think you may underestimate the importance of access, or the lack thereof, in many communities, and what may happen when it increases—but for now, I consider the current crop of volunteers victory enough. More on this later, however, as I've a long-winded, half-composed post on the topic to finish.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Thanks for sharing this. I think you're absolutely right that there's a difference between being an academic who blogs, and being an academic blogger. What you do here and especially at The Valve is very different from what I do, generally. (I realize there's lots more going on in your talk, but that's what I wanted to comment on.)

(Sidenote: that "Blogademia" article really annoys me because there are some fundamental errors in its understanding of just the mechanics of blogs. The author makes a point about my blog based on an incorrect understanding of my URL, misrepresents The Little Professor's blog by linking its title with another's, and assumes that a former blogger is unemployed because s/he stopped blogging, when I happen to know that s/he's happily tenured at an R1 university. So those things make me less inclined to buy the article's arguments overall.)

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Ooops, there should be no apostrophe in "another's" - sorry!

[Adam Kotsko]

You spend an inordinate amount of time defending your decision to use a conversational tone, and you also seem to gratuitously insult everyone who chose not to do so (i.e., according to you, virtually everyone else at the MLA). I think that showing more respect for the fact of oral delivery would generally be good at conferences -- but certainly the hard-to-follow conference presentation has its place. We are academics, right? Why be self-hating about it?

[Anthony Paul Smith]

I'm a total hater. Whenever people talk about this conversational tone and a general sense of commonsensical gee-shucks kind of delivery I think, "If they had their way we'd never have Husserl's Cartesian Meditations!" Anyone who has every read through the book should recognize how difficult of a read it is, to think that, in a slighter different form, these were a serious of talks is simply mind blowing. The academics who attended must not have been too turned off as the French translation was demanded immediately and inaugurated the phenomenological tradition in France. Of course, I don’t think you or I are on the level of Husserl, but I’d hate to create a mediocre environment where someone like Husserl would be discouraged from giving such a talk. And besides, there should be some punishment for going to conferences for the free drunken orgies.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Reading over my post, I realize that my point may not have been clear:

The first two panels I attended were also conversational in tone, keyed to oral delivery, whereas the "talk" I'd arrived with most certainly wasn't. (I'll write about those panels shortly, as I've a paralyzing over-log of posts to write.)

That said, I don't believe difficult-to-follow presentations have a place. If they're difficult for the sake of being difficult, they're performance; if they're difficult because they're articles read aloud, they're profoundly disrespectful of their audience; if they're difficult because they address subtle topics but the speaker recognizes the genre and medium and does his/her best, I don't mind. Some topics will be more difficult to discuss than others; but all topics, when read aloud from a text designed to be read silently, become difficult.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Anthony:

Whenever people talk about this conversational tone and a general sense of commonsensical gee-shucks kind of delivery I think, "If they had their way we'd never have Husserl's Cartesian Meditations!" Anyone who has every read through the book should recognize how difficult of a read it is, to think that, in a slighter different form, these were a serious of talks is simply mind blowing.

This strikes me as another question of genre, this time of different types of talks. Husserl's Cartesian Meditations were not, I take it, 15 minute presentations, but lectures—part of a lecture series, no doubt, that he knew would one day be collected in book form. That said, one of the reasons some of the attendees demanded an immediate translation was because they thought "Holy shit! That sounded smart! Too bad I can't remember any of its subtle, hairpin turns! Would that there were a printed text before me!"

[Adam Kotsko]

I think I understand where the conflict is coming from here. You MLAites apparently only get 15 minutes -- at the AAR, we are normally allotted 20.

[Karl Steel]

First off, I should say that I was unfair to Jesse. I objected to the nostalgia of his post, and that--I'd like to say--sent my logic off the rails.

Second (off?), thanks Rich for the considered response. I'm not sure what I meant by hoi polloi except as a stand in for 'not Ivory Tower,' the placeholder for "authentic" in too many deplorable discourses. I meant it sarcastically, in other words: not cute on my part.

Third, SEK, yes, if it hadn't been the MLA, I wouldn't have been able to introduce myself; but as it was the MLA, neither of us had the time to talk, at least not this time round. More to say later, I hope, on your nice James anecdote and its relationship to scholasticism and its relationship to the specialized, hermetic discourses of present-day academia.

I still wonder about the conjunction of the 'nerdy' academic and the 'avant garde' academic...archeology anyone?

[Anthony Paul Smith]

That's probably right, but I still don't see the harm in difficult papers for conferences with other specialists.

[Jesse]

Thanks for the comments on my post; Karl, I take your criticism seriously... though I'm not 100% convinced that nostalgia for a progressive time is esentially conservative, I'm happy to entertain the observation that the current period in history doesn't necessarily deserve an admonishment. I didn't mean to present a dystopian vision for academia, because I know that blogging is just one of a million recent and not-so-recent opportunities for cross-(cultural, disciplinary, whatever) communication. If I harbor any objection, it probably has something to do with specialization of disciplines at the expense of a common forum for discourse, and it's a criticism that's still in a pretty unformed state.

[Ray Davis]

APS & AK, difficulty is good, but difficulty differs from flatfooted shoelacetangled pratfalls into the punchbowl. A challenging talk takes a different form from a challenging paper, a challenging novel, a challenging poem, a challenging group improvisation. You can reuse some riffs, some ideas -- when I've lectured, I've ended up writing something (but then my writing style is heavily swayed by the oral) -- but there's incongruency from overall structures to passing details. It seems appropriate that someone involved in rhetorical or literary studies stay aware of which form they're working in, especially if they intend to fuck shit up.

Rich, I'm not insulted at all (although, as a data point, I probably count more as an autodidact than as someone with "a humanities background, possibly a Ph.D."). Thanks for raising the question.

[Kyler Kuehn]

I'm interested in hearing more of your (and your audience's) thoughts on how technophobia adversely affects perceptions of academic bloggers in particular and online publication in general. I imagine that such feelings are quite discipline-dependent. In the sciences, for example, many prestigious journals are moving toward online publication--exclusively so, in some instances. And a recently-developed (within the last decade or so) tool that has become nearly indispensable for many scientists is the online archive, where one can post one's scholarly work and view the work of others, whether or not that work will eventually end up in an official peer-reviewed journal. That's not to say there are no Luddites working in the sciences. But I do think that the differences between the respective professional cultures reflect the fact that technology is often more integrated into the day-to-day academic life of scientists than of scholars in the humanities.

On a related note, many scientific collaborations are attempting much more "Education and Public Outreach" of late. Things like planetaria or public visitor nights at the local observatory work to communicate much of the excitement (if not the mind-numbing, back-breaking labor) that is a part of science. And participation in such activities are supposedly taken into account for tenure review or other career advancement. So the scientific community (on paper at least) values those who are seeking to communicate their findings to the general public. Are there efforts with analogous goals undertaken in the humanities? Book fairs or poetry readings come to mind, but I don't think such a format is easily translated across all disciplines. Is this, then, one of the roles that you envision for academic blogging?

P.S. Another difference between the professional cultures that struck me recently: No one ever "reads a paper" at a physics conference. Even if the presentation is derived from results that are published in a journal, the talk is always presented via graphs, tables, and plots (and occasionally text) in powerpoint or other visual format. The presenter's job is then to narrate alongside the visual presentation to make sure that the audience comprehends how slide 11 follows from slide 10.