I'm going to go over the berlin wall!!

Admittedly, this is another re-posting from a class blog, but I thought it was general enough to land here as well:


Why are some many in cultural studies worried that Theory might eat up cultural studies? Why does Angela McRobbie say, “Cultural Studies itself can thus be deconstructed to show how postructuralist work has occupied a position of authority as ‘theory’. . .?” Why does she need to justify her call back to experience through the authority of two of the most densely post-structural feminists?

I just want to suggest a few reasons for the enticement of theory in the academia. Please, don’t read this as an anti-theoretical rant. I certainly don’t believe any work is unmediated by theory whether explicated or not. I just want to suggest some reasons a theoretical orientation might have a comparative advantage in valorization among intellectuals versus other methods.

1. Theory is relatively safe from political persecution. I agree that theory might do important political work (given the right sort of conjuncture), but as of now theory is one of the safest ways to claim radicalism without institutional backlash. Even if it is political, it is generally so hard to for anyone without immersion in it to comprehend that it is not seen as a threat. Butler and Spivak, for instance, did not make David Horowitz’s list of 100 Most Dangerous Professors despite their fame. (This of course could also be a strategic advantage of working theoretically in oppressive times).

2. Theory promises the ultimate intellectual capital. To the extent that everything meaningful happening in the world is reduced to a structural or post-structural process (it really doesn’t matter whether or not signifiers slip, all that matters is whether you recognize the process of that slippage), significations or articulations may change but it’s the derivative of that change that underlies everything. The intellectuals who have accumulated the most knowledge of those processes are best positioned to understand the world. Structuralism/Post-structuralism is the string theory of the humanities. Once semiotic processes are all that really matters, knowing the nature of semiotics process relieves one from having to deal with the messy world of actual historical contingencies and experiences.

3. Theoretical writing is hard to understand, thus it enchants us with its mystery. I feel this all the time myself. Having an understanding of writing is usually a pre-requisite to being able to evaluate it, criticize it and see its limits. When you can’t understand what Derrida or Lacan is saying, and yet you have invested faith in the institutions/communities that seem to affirm the dire importance of what they are saying, their writings offer an almost religious mystique. The bible, Torah, the Vedas, etc. are all enigmatic, not just by coincidence. (However, this is not to say the only value of difficult writing is its mystery- the cryptic is valued in the first place because at times it can indeed lead to profound epistemic breakthroughs)

4. Theory insulates the intellectual from all criticism from outside the academy. Theory forms a specialized knowledge that can only be critiqued by specialized knowledge of the same kind. Once the “political claims” made by a theorist are all staked on the sophistication of their semiotic analysis, the intellectual is safe from challenges by others based on their experiences or memories (which are of course thought to be constituted by these very semiotic rules that they can’t recognize them). For instance, when a theorist talks about battles of signification over words like “queer” from a purely semiotic standpoint, the experiences and testimonies of “everyday people” (i.e. people who do not articulate their experience through the grid of poststructural analysis) have no way to enter the debate. Thus the rigor of theory is channeled and managed by making it accountable only to peers who have been similarly trained. Only 6 people in the room of a hundred can begin to challenge Homi Bhabha, the rest better keep quiet.

Academic Reading I Like

Just as critics of "mass culture" have described one of the debilitating effects of TV to be its relentless flow outpacing the viewers capacity for judgment, as a graduate student I often feel my critical faculties struggling to tread water in a deluge of words. One tactic for dealing this may be to suspend judgment and evaluation for the duration of the flood, and assume my student position to be one from which I should not put a stake in evaluating what I read but just collect a map of what others for thought. This way I could build an excellent citational dexterity and maybe think things out later. More realistically, however, it seems grad school encourages us to organize the onslaught of readings by developing a taxonomy of intellectual trends and positions, then pick one of those positions from which we can arm ourselves with general approaches towards critiquing the other positions (i.e. semiotics is too formalism, enthographic work erases political context, etc).

Yesterday at a concert I talked with an old friend of mine who just started a grad program in geography. He described the ways of certain well-performing students in one of his classes as conforming to pattern that appeared familiar to me. These students, he said, would pick a position then defend it very well. They talked in a language difficult to comprehend outside of their theoretical circles, a language with a forcefulness to it that seemed to foreclosed other perspectives. (Perhaps this is the kind of "theoretical fluency" that Stuart Hall observed proliferating among American cultural theorists). Among these students there was little room for ruminating or playing with indeterminate judgments; they would usually launch right into full-throttle criticism. My friend's image reminded me of the theory I had formed while living in Cambridge that so many Ivy students were not driven by intellectual curiosity but rather by a sense of competition that had pervaded throughout their lives. They had always been really good with at least one thing in their live, and often this thing would change (dance, a sport, a collectors knowledge of 30's jazz, etc). I thought many of them might have just well have been lawyers because debating and arguing seemed to be their game much more than the activity I in my own taste valorize as the intellectual in the most profound form, "grappling."

Perhaps most of the writing I read now is the product of such a drive. Competition might morph into a drive towards mastery, for unlike a lawyer who must continually reshuffle rhetoric as she is forced into new circumstances, the academic can steep themselves in a domain from which it is very hard for others to challenge them. They become unrivaled experts about a certain topic. A cultural studies orientation might work against the comfort of mastery, but may just leave us in the sphere of competition.

With this disaffected view of how the academy might work, my pleasure comes in encounters with writers who seem to retain that spirit of grappling. For all the countless pages consume of writers pounding out the flow of their narratives to conform to a structure of unilateral support for their theses, I delight in the few moments where I come across a pausing, wavering, uncertain voice that indicates a moment of real thinking.

A footnote:
Now as I write this I wonder if I've caught this same forensic disease, all too certain of my own categories. Yet for me the topography of academics that I'm evoking feels as if it is just a suggestion, one possible frame that makes sense with some of my experience but not necessarily one I want to hold onto. Perhaps this attitude, though, is shared by all of my fellow debates who I have chastised here, just they do not have the opportunity for such a footnote. For even with the footnote, the language I used above is still all too sure of itself.

Reading without Reading

This weekend I talked with Julia and Joe, a couple who are in my cultural studies class, about work scheduling. Both have been in grad school for a couple more years than me, and I'm always impressed by how well prepared they come to class - appearing to have good notes on the readings, often having articulated positions on what they think are the key themes for the week, etc. Therefore, I was quite surprised when they both said they would usually end school work by 5 or 6 each night! I haven't even been able to attain my goal of ending work at 9 on weeknight.

How was this possible? Were they both just extraordinary quick readers? I think I found part of the answer as Joe explained to me his approach to reading: don't read every word! At least that was his take on most reading assignments. He said that he reads things quickly, somewhere between skimming and reading, marking the pages up a good bit, then he goes back at least a day later and reconstructs the arguments through an outline.

This approach might not work with philosophical work where the meaning of key terms and turns will be lost without very careful sensitive reading (and probably still will be in that case). But as regards most of the cultural studies academic articles I've been assigned lately, this seems like a perfect approach. Not just for its time efficiency, but because I think I'll actually end up remembering and taking more away from the articles choosing to put more time into constructing my own outlines of them rather than giving them more sentence-caressing readings. On a later post, I'll talk about how I differentiate the educational goals of knowledge, understanding and voice. Joe's approach I think will get me towards "voice," which is the goal I care about most.

Routines, Rituals and Schedules

For the past several years when I've felt that I haven't been making progress towards my most important goals, I've blamed it largely on my tendency to designate time more to the tune of "external" pressures (work demands, friends' requests, family obligations) than internal ones (in this case, referring to my ideal long-term aspirations). Further, I thought this tendency had a pretty logical basis, the external pressures tended have a certain time urgency; whereas, the steps to take towards long-term goals could always be deferred. To the extent I was making decisions about how to spend time on a moment-to-moment basis, those more timely external demands would always trump the long-term goals, which may have a had a higher priority overall but were never punctuated by urgency.

So the solution, I thought, must be to stop making decisions about how to spend my time always in the moment. I needed to make allocations in a more reflective mode that could plan longer-term strategies. I needed a schedule.

Since then I've had a faith that just creating the right schedule and sticking to it would be the answer to all these woes. But I have yet to create a schedule that's really caught on for me. I've tried different techniques, from low-intensity to-do lists to more elaborate hour-by-hour scheduling with the aid of a palm pilot (given to me by my pal Bobby). Failure after failure. This weekend I made another attempt and realized just how incapable I was of estimating how long certain tasks would take, and more damning to the scheduling enterprise, I realize by now that it is not time but energy that matters most to productivity, something a linear schedule cannot capture. But I am trying a new technique - creating rituals. My first scheduled ritual: spending a half hour Monday and Friday mornings on this blog.