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.