Product Place This

One reason I decided to go to communication studies program instead of another home for cultural studies is because I thought more comm academics would be in touch with conversations about media and culture going on outside of academic journals. I thought there'd be a lot of people with backgrounds in journalism, filmmaking, may even TV writers in comm programs. I'm not sure if that was a correct assumption in general or not, but one of my classmates is just the kind of student I had in mind. Pam Nettleton has really enriched our program through bring knowledge from her many years in journalism.

Pam just wielded her writerly skills in an op-ed piece to portray commericial saturation of TV shows through product placements. She evisions what Dickens would sound like as a TV writer: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Luckily, I could easily tell time because I was wearing my Citizen 200 Meter Chronograph watch with titanium case and bracelet, only $400 online"
Pam' op-ed is funny and incisive: http://www.startribune.com/562/story/1073509.html

Bad Blog Changes

Hopefully only temporary, but I just lot all the links as I tried to "upgrade" the template for this blog.

As expected . . .

Yep, the new Star Trib owners have been making rampant cutbacks in news staff. A City Pages article details the cutbacks: http://citypages.com/databank/28/1372/article15245.asp

When the City Pages run an article talking about their new ownership regime?

Another Writer's Block

I'm devoting most of my spring break to writing a paper analyzing how sixties rock critics helped to imbue rock with a sense of political importance. I had been really looking forward to writing this paper, but alas, it's eeking out all too slowly and uncomfortably. Alice has poked fun at me for my tendency to have more breakthroughs in terms of reflecting on general writing principles while I'm trying to write than actually getting anything on the screen (probably a more apt metonymy these days).

Lots of my reflection dwells on one of the most mysterious and fickle qualities of writing - flow. Flow is just as relevant to good academic writing as it can be to more literary genres, especially when you want academic writing to share at least some of the qualities of literary prose. I think the major factors that determine whether academic writing will seem just academic or move closer to a literary work has to do with "evocation." I take this ideas from Michael Hyde, tho perhaps I've distorted it a bit. But by evocation, I mean whether the writing calls forth something vivid - an image, a feeling, a tone. A perfectly logical argument or one that is backed by "good" (as in difficult to refute) evidence is not necessarily evocative in itself.

At first I was thinking that evocative writing is much more difficult than just writing good arguments, but I've come to think that assumption is flawed. One of the situations in which I write with the most ease is when I get to a section in my paper where I can write a narrative. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in the structure of human consciousness that makes narratives feel more natural. Narrative writing tends to be evocative and relatively easier to write than other modes that require careful planning to lay out a synthetic exposition of interlocking ideas. The hard part in writing academic papers can be finding narratives that actually fit in well with what you're trying to say. One reason I tend to like to read cultural history more than other forms of cultural studies is because historians rely more heavily on narrative. But it ain't easy to find the right narratives for good cultural history, as I'm finding out now trying to write about sixties rock critics.

Radio KAOS

I had thought I was on a blogging momentum that wasn't going to let up, obviously not. It's not so much been a matter of having too much to do, just failure to really integrate blogging into my day-to-day routines.

A couple days ago, Radioactive Gavin from Evergreen College interviewed me for his Digital Crossroads program on Radio KAOS out of Olympia, Washington. I met him at the National Media Reform Conference in January, and I was surprised that he was interested in a paper I presented on applying anti-trust measurements to media markets for FCC regulation. It was a rather technical piece I wrote this summer while serving as a research fellow at the Free Press.

But I thought I'd be able to talk about the basic idea and give some descriptions of problems with ownership regulations at the FCC to an audience who might not be too enthralled about the details of adapting the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index to media markets. It was tougher than I thought, however, to be able to speak well for a recorded interview. Being "on the record" made me realize how much I typically allow myself room to skirt around details I don't know. But aside from calling Michael Powell Colin's brother (instead of son), I think I got by well enough for Gavin to be able to make something coherent and accurate through chopping up the interview tape. The interview should air around noon pacific (2pm Central) time today on Radio KAOS (http://kaos.evergreen.edu/).

The Inevitability of Billboards

Let me admit right away to feeling ambivilence about sweeping categorizations of "the cultural logic" of our times. Making big claims about cultural trends on the level of postmodernism, neoliberalism, empire, etc is of course lifeblood of many academic critics, especially those of the 'theory' bent. Even trends such as fragmentation or "suspecion of grand narratives" often appear more interesting to critics as pangea-like formations rather than in their fragmented particularities. It can be a bit too tempting to reduce what's going on in the world at any one time to a set of understood principles. Maybe there's not other ways of writing effectively about such trends without a good dose of overgeneralization.

With that half-hearted qualification, let me attempt to squeeze some culture into some overgeneralized boxes myself. The box is a big one, a very popular one these days among cultural theory folks - neoliberalism. The cultural fragment I'd like to place in the box is a story by America Public Radio's Future Tense (http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/2007/02/05.shtml#009646).

The story's lead: ClearChannel Outdoor is suing the muncipality of Minnetonka for cutting off power to two digit billboards. Minnetonka is one many communities around the country who have passed laws prohibiting moving billboards due to the risk of distracting drivers. So how do you think this story would be structured - maybe some opposing views on whether billboards with moving images distract drivers? Maybe some interviews of people's opinions of moving billboards? No, while about a 10 seconds is given to a county attorney explaining the way Minnetonka defines "flashing billboards" in their ordinance, the arc of the story follows the inevitibility of this technology.

First, comes testimony that "the new technology [digital billboards] is the way world we're living in." According a ClearChannel Outdoor VP, "advertisers are demaning a proper forum to display their messages . . . it is an evolution of media. . . it is somewhat inevitable."

I guess there's no messing with advertizers' demands. Future Tense certainly doesn't suggest that option. After the ClearChannel interview, the story shifts over to Carnegie Mellon "Professor of Design" Ben Fry. He starts by describing another kind of evolution, that of the human's natural response of a attentiveness towards motion. The inexonerable evolution of marketing sophistication has caught up with human evolution. Whereas our "long-ago ancestors who would be eaten or killed" without an instinctual response to motion, today the utility of this instinct might go to waste if it wasn't for modern innovators, like advertisers.

Reflections on National Media Reform Conference

As my friend Bill pointed out to me, I really drop the ball on what makes live blogging interesting -- a sense of continuity and something approximating real-time excitement. One posting doesn't cut it.

With that admission, I want to go back and angle in on the NMR Conference from a different angle. Overall, I felt very encouraged. Much of my positive impression is owed to the fact that I had the chance to work with some very great people - Free Press staff and volunteers. Despite all the stress of pulling off such a huge event like this, everyone I worked with exceptionally friendly, positive and cooperative. I don't just throw out these compliments ceremonially. This is a truly exceptional bunch of people. From having worked with many organizations, the only times I've seen teamwork equal to what I saw in Memphis were during my best moments with NCCC teams. I think there are many reasons the Free Press is thriving to the extent that it is, from picking the right issue at the right time to some very smart organizing strategies. But my summer at the Free Press's DC office and now this opportunity to meet most of the staff from both offices proved to me that the wonderful people who work for Free Press and their spirit of cooperation are certainly a big key to their success. If nothing else, it just felt good for me to feel part of a team again.

Aside from the enclosure, the NMR conference felt much different from the only major academic conference I've attended - the National Communications Association. As McChesney said, they only have one academic session per conference to prevent it from being any sort of vitae-padder. But the SSRC's Media Policy Research Pre-conference might have served that purpose. Most presenters were advocates or media folks. I can’t generalize much about the attendees who were not presenters, seemed to be a mix of age, some different styles, many occupations and passions. It was mostly white, though not as disproportionately so as NCA. During the sessions I saw, there were always some vocal and sometimes challenging audience members. A couple of ranters. The 9/11 truth forces were there, of course, tho I did not see them being disruptive. A disability-rights groups staged a protest in the middle of the conference center. It didn’t seem like this protest was directed against the conference organizers, just a good opportunity for media publicity. No one stopped them.

Here and there I picked up on an undercurrent of discontent among some of the participants. The issue was whether the Free Press was getting too comfortable with, let’s just call it, “the liberal establishment.” Had the constituents of the conference basically just become upper-middle class whites who don’t like corporations? The attendence might have reflected that, tho at least a significant chunk of the panels explicitly had to do with race and immigration issues, and many of the main speakers had come from marginalized communities. Another complaint had to do with lack of transnational perspective. Interestingly, Robert McChesney seemed to acknowledge this fault during his introduction at the SSRC pre-conference, telling us all that we wouldn’t see much from an international perspective this NMR Conference but that would be a priority for the next one.

I heard some criticism of the race angle voiced in a constructive way, and some not so constructively. I want to explore this a bit, acknowledging my own perspect comes from a particular place. One group, privileged in their own way, mocked the Free Press as “the White Man’s Free Press” even while Free Pressers had gone out of their way to set up some studio space for them. From my perspective, this was hard to not see as a form of snotty arrogance because this group seemed to see themselves as particularly sophisticated. That said, this media movement needs make sure it does not only respond to the white middle class. To say that the movement is only “white progressives” now is inaccurate and only marginalizes the contributions of those who do not fit that category. Still white progressives, as I said, do have a disproportionate amount of influence on the media reform movement right now. Unless that change, the media justice goals are bound to be shortchanged. I know the Free Press is trying to build greater connections with groups whose primary constituencies are not white or middle class, but this is certainly a crucial area where more work needs to be done. As Deepa Fernandez said into her microphone in the big ballroom, “Disenfranchised communities don’t just want to be invited in, and we don’t just want a mic put in our hands. We want to own the mic and own the station.” The challenge is not only “reaching out” to the most oppressed communities, but either really breaking down divisions or working in solidarity with leaders and groups putting the concerns of the most oppressed communities at the forefront.

Letter from the FCC

I'm not sure what petition this must be responding to, but today I received an email from the FCC. I had thought they were a government agency, but apparently they are a big-box retailer:

Dear Consumer,


Thank you for contacting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). We are reviewing your correspondence to determine how we can best serve you.

The FCC regulates interstate (between states) and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in all of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions. The FCC is charged with ensuring that communications service providers promote the public interest. Further information is available on the Commissions web site at http://www.fcc.gov.

Again, thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. Your views and comments are important to us.


The Federal Communications Commission

National Media Reform Conference

My first live blogging experiment.

I'm at the National Media Reform Conference in Memphis, more on this generally later. Right now at I'm at a session on new media and citizen journalism with Chris Nolan, Chris Rabb, Jay Rosen and Dan Gilmore. The most interesting presentation was Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen who discussed his accidental rise in the blogosphere that brought him to be one of the few bloggers of color at the DNC in 2004. One of his main points was that if we think of blogging as revolutionizing who's creating the news we've got to make sure that it's not the same sorts of elite who gain attention in the blogging world as in the MSM world. What made his speech particularly powerful was that he acknowledged his position as a black person speaking to a primarly white audience, yet he also discussed his own privileges (such as his ability to call up "a buddy" on Capital Hill, access to the latest computer, etc) that had made it possible for him to become a prominent blogger. His point was not blogging is too mired in privilege to ever have a value, only that enthusiasts needed to be conscious of the ongoing segregation, classism, racism, etc that carries over from land to the cyberspace. He urged us to not to have faith in blogging solving all these problems. The meaning I took from him was that bloggers shouldn't simple swagger forward against Big Media waving the name-tag of the underdog, but must attempt expand their social networks and strive for greater inclusion outside of their own privileged circles.

Best MSM Media Criticism of the Year

There's a downside and an upside to this post. On the pessimistic hand, the sale of the Star Tribune to the seductively-named Avista Capital Partners most likely means more divestment in local news reporting. Already this year, Twin Cities news staff cutbacks have been felt as one consequence of the recent sale of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The upshot is that Star Trib columnist Nick Coleman has written the most trenchant critique of media economics I've ever seen published in a mainstream news source. It's particularly rare because he mocks both the old and new owners of his own paper. While Coleman is a bit too nostalgic about the erstwhile patriarchal rule of McClatchy's founder, he pointedly describes the greedy grubbing for minute increases in profit margin that led to the sale of the Star Tribune, which had been McClatchy's "flagship" newspaper. He gets right to the heart of the newspaper business's suicidal short-term run for profits and the neoliberal ethos that makes this possible by suspending all value considerations aside from immediate profit.


Check Coleman's column out at: http://www.startribune.com/357/story/903516.html

Schooling Thought

During my break between semesters, I get to read a more diverse range of books than I would get to taking classes that fit into my degree. I've picked up break reading somewhat randomly. A good friend sent me Nancy Chodorow's "The Power of Feeling." Browsing through library shelves, I came across a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories set in St. Paul (edited by Patricia Hampl, who I had a great class with last year). I've also grabbed some essay collections.

Being able to read in this way has particularly brought into a focus a way of thinking/reading/educating I've found rampant in graduate school, what I’m calling developing a school of thought. Again, I'm going to take the easy way out an not put much effort into really describing this phenomenon very well, but I'm guessing most grad students and academic types will know what I'm talking about. It's the attempt to develop a somewhat fixed, somewhat flexible, perspective. Situating yourself within a school of thought helps determine what kind of questions you ask as much as how you will answer them. It leads you to read certain people, ignore others, and usually fixate on a cluster of concepts and keyterms. Schools tend to validate particular ways of knowing (textual analysis, ethnography, therapeutic experience, etc) and discard others. While contemporary schools of thought attempt to avoid pinning themselves down too much as grand theories or narratives, they still work enormously to restrict curiosity. Not having many external demands right now gives me a chance to breath new life into that undisciplined curiosity.

There are great advantages to developing a school of thought. Once you've laid the foundation, you are able to address new issues through your established framework, or by making rhetorical moves that have become easier with practice. Schools of thought go hand in hand with professionalization and academic legitimacy. Academics authority and credibility comes from peer (or descendent) validation. I am pretty thoroughly convinced that not much academic writing would be compelling without such regimes of validation. Anyone who picks up a book by Larry Grossberg, Derrida, or Nancy Chodorow would probably not find it at all interesting without already being somewhat drawn to their established credibility. This is not to say the contextual situatedness of each of these writers within respect to their discourses makes their work less worthwhile. I'm just trying to point out the dependency on interpretive communities or regimes of legitimacy and validation.

As a student, it takes a certain disciplining to be able to think in the school of thought sort of way. It requires an internalization of the impulse to suppress certain kinds of questions and the productive power to create others that adhere to rules of the school. There's no way out of this. Without developing some kind of adherence to a school of thought, it might be impossible to develop a voice or write in a way that can escape schizophrenic illegibility. Yet, I do believe there's room for negotiation as to how disciplined you allow yourself to become. At least, I hope that is so. I try to keep asking questions of cultural studies, of critical theory, etc, even when I'm pretty cognizant that my questions aren't going to "fit" very well within the trajectories of the discourses I'm working within. My reference point for determining what is compelling (perhaps the most crucial question of all intellectual orientation) is usually to consider what I can talk about with a generally educated and engaged group of people rather than what a group of disciplinary specialists would consider compelling. Of course, my own "generally educated and engaged group" is a historically and socially specific; sometimes I think of the public that reads Harpers, sometimes a group of my own friends. Clearly, this is no universal category.

Structurally, a school of thought mentality could be characterized as "modernist," even though the structure is repeated often by schools of thought that claim postmodern positions. The structure I'm referring to has to do with how knowledge and insight accumulate. School of thought-ers tend to construct intellectual lineages that map progressions of insight. A parody: Husserl figured this out, Hiedegaar then made this advance, then Foucault gave us this concept, etc. This accumulation tends to occur among a group of people who are taught by or at least influenced by each other (as opposed to, let’s say, an intellectual bricoleur who pieces together ways of thinking from people who do not have much to do with each other). Now it doesn’t always work in such a straightforward linear way. It’s often most fashionable to find the roots of an idea in a neglected forefather (i.e. Bahktin, Benjamin, etc.). The point is that understanding comes from intellectual mastery of this lineage with the emergent critique in mind.

This route towards knowledge differs greatly from the path of the poet, literary writer or the everyday philosopher. Like many students, I’m trying to find a way to preserve my curiosity, uncertainty and respect for many different ways of knowing, while being able to produce writing that can make a contribution to an ongoing conversation.

Florida Holiday

Last winter while I was visiting my folks in Georgia, Wendy's restaurant and Airtran airlines run an irresistible promotion – buy 32 sodas from Wendy’s and get a free one-way ticket. Feeling the tug of both my grad student financial situation and a thriving travel-bug, I blitzed Wendy's during my week with my parents, hitting up chain location from Warner Robins (where my parents live) and throughout central Georgia on our short trip to Savannah. At first, I'd go in with my folks, order five sodas, and we'd attempt to drink them. But soon enough, we dropped all pretence of indulging in the beverage and just ordered straight-up cups, no soda necessary. The servers knew what I was up to, and of course, they couldn’t have cared less. However, others apparently had the same idea as me, as I noticed other patrons leaving the counter with tell-tale stacks of cups. Soon every location was strictly enforcing the 5-cup limit per order. Still, I accumulated enough cups for two round trip tickets.

But the Wendy’s tickets were only good for a one-year. Having one ticket left that I had to use before February, Alice and I decided to take a winter vacation. The restrictions on the promotional tickets, as to be expected, were pretty severe and annoying. We almost booked a flight to New York, but a little hesitation left the ideal times unavailable once we decided to go for it. Since we had only a few days open for our trip, spending 8 + hours (with connecting flights) out to LA or other destinations west didn’t appeal to us. So we randomly choose the one warm place the ticket would take us - Fort Meyers Beach, Florida.

It appears as if the hotel we booked on priceline caters to the Northern snowbird, especially, according to the cheers of their websites, those who are Packers or Steelers fans. It also features an “exotic” tiki bar. So stay tuned for reports from FMB coming the first week of January . . .

Tuneless Chairs

While I typically buzz around different coffee shops throughout the Twin Cities, for the past couple months, I’ve buried myself in the blossom of Cahoots almost every day. Cahoots has the most perfect atmosphere for serious study - from chairs to temperature to people - Cahoots is wonderful! But I’ve started to feel I’ve been spending too much time there, probably averaging 4 or more hours each day.

So today I’ve come back to my long-lost Wedge neighborhood favorite, Caffetto. It’s a lovely day in here, sunny, not crowed, a cascade of rhythms flowing from the speakers at just the right level. But something's missing. The flower chairs are gone!! One reason I use to come here so often is because they had very cozy yet upright chairs. True, these chairs would not win any points for pleasing the eye. The chairs were covered with a flower patterned plastic upholstery. The pattern consisted of early 80’s- era dull puke colors – avocado green, a light brown and a pastel pink, all sullied with the years of gook that had accumulated on the sticky surface. Most of these chairs had ripped at some point during their tenure, and out of their gashes spewed tangled masses of a crunchy filling that looked like Spanish moss. So yes, the flower chairs were ugly, ugly as hell. More grimy, even, than the dilapidated chairs of the erstwhile Someday Cafe in Sommerville. But something about them just fit me so well. For the way I sit, they were some of the most comfortable working chairs I’ve found in the Twin Cities. Even more comfortable than Cahoot’s legendary orange cradlers.

The new chairs don’t have any personality yet. Hard wood backs, a bit too low and too curved for me. Red vinyl-covered seats, no gashes. No flowers.

What I like in an essay (1 . . . or is it 2?)

Finally, I'm able to take a bit of a breather from some frantic paper writing and cramming other loose ends at the end of a semester. Every semester, I tell myself that I will not wait to start writing papers until the last few weeks. I know its a bad tactic for me. I've heard some of my peers talk about how they need the pressure to catalyze their academic muse, and admittedly a sudden burst of inspiration hit me near the middle of my two week paper. But for the most part I think writing a longer non-fiction work during a concentrated period encourages me to look for short cuts (i.e. coming to conclusions too easily) more than it serves to light my fire for any sort of thoughtful inspiration. I want to build my papers more gradually throughout the semester, writing whenever the inspirations comes, which is usually just after I read something provocative or having a good conversation.

But the title of this post refers to essays I like to read, not write, tho of course their is a emulative relationship between the two. Reading essays from different sorts of journala and book chapters lately, I've realized that there are some academic essays/articles that indeed have a certain similarity in form to the "bohemian essay" that I adore so much. The essays I like are the ones that tread along a path of thought full of switchbacks and twists. They are unpredictable. They don't exhaust their ability to provide insight or stimulation in a thesis money-shot at the beginning. Instead they are rich with the acuity of the wandering eye. I think the most graceful bohemian essays tend to render insight in an even more offhand way than good academic essays can. Baldwin, Gopnik and the like can throw out just one line or one phrase that puts an aspect of life in a completely new light, then move on to the next thought without hesitation. Academic essays rarely get away with that level of nonchalance, but maybe a stray paragraph or two, perhaps something that stretches to a far off counterexample more for an intellectual challenge rather than the demands of the economy of an argument. While these sorts of academic essays may still have a thesis, they do not move along the arborescent outline format that I teach students to do.

Workplace politics

These past two weeks have been particularly stressful for me as a paper deadline and Ph.D. applications deadlines near. So all I have to offer is a re-posting from my cultural studies class blog:

Please forgive me for the second-person voice –

I certainly agree that academic jobs/lifestyles seem to offer a lot more opportunities for many types of political activity than most job because, even if the "hours" are longer, academic demands tend to be much more flexible. After working for several years in jobs where I had to be a specific place at specific times for 40 + hr/wk, I revel in the luxery having less than 12 hours a week where I have to be a specific place at a specific time. Also, academic employment seems to offer much more flexibility in how you can appropriate your time. The time you spend researching for an intellectual project could also be part of a political project.

That said, much to my surprise, I've found myself less politically involved since I came back to grad school than while I was working. Obviously I don't mean to suggest my own pattern mirrors everyone else's. But I think a big factor that makes political involvement much more likely or less likely is whether your community is politicized, i.e. whether the people around you are involved in political projects. Not only does a general political culture help motivate people to participate in political activities, making it social and fun, but it's a lot easier to find interesting ways to get involved when you know others who are working on specific projects. It is indeed difficult to walk into to an organization cold, and say you want to work with them and find yourself doing something more interesting than canvassing, making fundraising calls, etc. Even in the case where you can go to an organization and propose a specific way to work with them, your ability to find the inspiration to make such a proposal is correlated (I think) with the degree to which your everyday life allows you some intimate knowledge of the organization or issue. When you hear your friends or coworkers talking about the cool stuff they are working on, you’re more likely to think of some way your own skills and interests might contribute to those projects.

This is all meant to bring me up to a point to say that at certain times university campuses are places where political activity thrives and other times they are not. I can only imagine that during certain times in the 60’s it would be, culturally, very difficult to identify as a Marxist scholar or critic of patriarchy, let’s say, and not be involved in any of the related political activity surrounding you. At other times, it may be difficult to be such a scholar and feel any connection to or affinity with work that’s being done outside the academy.

Hopefully this kairos is not entirely fixed. Collectively we can make it a little easier to blend academic and “extra-academic” political work.

Mariposa

This morning in the Twin Cities is bright and crisp. There's a sweet damp scent in the air. It's probably the smell, more than the weather, that triggered a strong memory for me while I was walking to the 2nd Moon Coffee Shop. It was not a particular event, but rather an old routine and place that suddenly came to mind.

The last year I spent in Boston, I worked on Massachusetts Ave several blocks south of Central Square. Central Square was usually bustling when I got there during the peak of the morning rush, throngs of people exiting and entering the T, catching the bus or rushing from their apartment doors down Mass Ave by foot. But especially on cool fall or spring morning, there would be an aura of morning calm, a paradoxical stillness, to all this movement. It was the marriage of chaos and equanimity that you can observe in a shaken snow dome. Walking from the T station to my office, I would always pass a coffee shop called Mariposa and look in longingly at its denizens reading morning papers and conversing. It wasn't an addiction to coffee or a dread of work, but the idea of the pleasure to be had spending a morning in the world of journalism or books at a coffee shop that filled me with yearning. A few mornings I would be able to rouse myself from bed early enough to spend an hour or so at Mariposa before I had to be at work. I love sleep and I always love it most just as it is ending, so it was only on the most glorious mornings when I was willing to make the trade-off of sleep for coffee shopping. But when I did, the pleasure I had fantasized about on my rushed walks to work proved to be not just an illusion. As I wrote in my journal on those special mornings, I'd be able to see, temporally, the chaos of my anxieties in that beautiful morning light, fluttering with the graceful disorder of butterflies in an atrium.

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.