we were talking in class today, about how work needs to be populist, and accessible, and this annoyed me in some ways .
1) that there has to be room to do the esoteric, the theoretical, the thinking for thinking sakes--that not everything is for everyone, and one of the goals of humanities is trying to figure out the world and our places in it--some of that figuring out is higher level shit.
2) That when it comes to science or tech, we are not upset when we don't understand what is going on. in humanities and liberal arts, we assume technical language automatically assumes people are scamming you--the way that academia should work, is thru a kind of lapidary, slow building of knowledge upon knowledge, metareading--and today in class someone was like, being well read is an insult--but that's yr fucking job, doing this kind of small technical work.
3) There is activism and there is research, sometimes they overlap, but I think that people who are doing the weird small work, assume that it is the same kind of direct intervention as other acts--theory doesn't feed your kids, theory doesn't keep the cops from your doors, but not everything has to be immediate, not everything has to be on fire
(From WCW: “It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.)
I am more and more convinced of the small, the local, and the modest, in matters of work and the cities. Let's be honest about the shit we are doing, let's assume that occasionally a collection of smart people in a room being smart, and slow, has it's own kind of resistance. No one is going to read your PhD thesis, but it's a political act to be allowed to sit and write, however, let's not pretend that the sitting and the writing is ever going to be for any wide audience.
4) I think on a more personal level--it does a disservice, it assumes poor folks or working class folks cannot do the high level work, that they will always have to be talked down to, and that the work they do to access those spaces is invalid.
5) I don't think that academic discourse is better than anyone else, i think that there are a lot of ways of speaking, a lot of ways of talking, a lot of ways of presenting information, and i think most of those ways are equally valid, but the forms of discourse have their own shape, their own space, and their own traditions, and rhetorical systems. Discourse is not Lego. I don't know how to reconcile the two instincts, and I also want to recognize that there are a lot of ways of talking about things. I also think that academia has a tendency of thinking itself better than other forms of discourse, and when it talks about low forms and populist forms, it discards the rhetorical form that it is borrowing, stooping to conquer. When I write about country music as an academic, I am not doing populist work, and claiming I am so doing does a disservice to the other kinds of discourses that occur in country.
6) I want more ways to read, and not less ways of reading----i want more ways of talking and not less ways of talking, and i want more ways of listening or talking or reading, or analysing texts to be honest about who the audience is and how the audience is constructed. I don't want to treat the academic seminar space as a therapeutic milieu, I want it to be to talk about Derrida more than my generic sadness about the fallenness of the world. I actually think theology is useful here--i think the separation between church land and theology land in Anglican spaces may model a way forward. Though academic theology is also dying.
6) I don't think that experts are a bad thing, and i think there are a lot of ways to be an expert, but I also think that we do a disservice to this kind of tradition of learning, if we assume that everything again has to be accessible to everyone.