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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

not like the others « Previous | |Next »
February 12, 2008

Mel Gregg's description of her response to a night out with friends is a good example of the academic experience of the otherwise mundane. Surely a move and a Chinese meal don't trigger this kind of contemplation and confusion in "normal" people? Or maybe non-scholars do have similar experiences but are just too polite to talk about them?

Gregg says:

"I’m still feeling unhinged by the whole thing.

But it did help me appreciate the complicated, chaotic, compromised world we live in, and how regularly it seems to involve being constantly buffetted by the most incongruent trivia just to make sure we don’t ever remain completely comfortable in our response to something. This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance."


This resonates. Contrary to the popular notion of ivory tower academics enjoying a privileged position in some cocooned Neverland, the ordinary can be painfully confusing. You can't escape into the latest issue of Womans Day or enjoy the spectacle of Britney Spears' meltdown without complicating the whole thing, or reflecting on your own role in perpetuating damage.

The scholarly temperament is not the sole preserve of the credentialed of course, and I'm grateful for the analytical toolkit that makes "incongruent trivia" a solvable puzzle rather than the source of frustration it used to be. The mundane was never reassuring, but at least now I don't feel the need to acquire brain damage to fit in.

Loss of access to academia is the worst thing about the possibility that I'll end up working at Target. I'd rather give up a limb than my library card. So this from dana boyd is welcome. As Catharine Lumby said, the barbarians are no longer at the gate - they're inside the castle redecorating.

boyd has decided to boycott the academic lock down and publish only in open access journals. She calls on others to do the same, which is fine by me.

| Posted by Lyn at 1:17 PM | | Comments (14)
Comments

Comments

Lyn,
re your comment "I'd rather give up a limb than my library card."

I gave up my uni library card years age when I finished uni. I haven't ended up in Target. Nor have I become one of the barbarians. I get by without the library books. I don't miss them as much as I thought.

What I do detest is academic publishers locking down their journals, authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. Public access is effectively denied. So I am glad that the economy around academic journals is crumbling--- no one else is buying the journals because they are god-awful expensive and no one outside of a niche market knows what's in them. Nor wants to know.

Consequently, academics are publishing to increasingly narrow audiences who will never read their material purely so that they can get the right credentials to keep their job.

Lyn,
what would you expect if you ate dinner backing on to a carpark in Chinatown during Chinese New Year. It should be no suprise to find a restaurateur celebrating the New Year by singing personal interpretations of John Denver mixed with Christmas carols and dedicated to the hundreds of diners smoking and drinking under a temporary marquee.

This is our post modern popular culture.

The other point I find strange is this:

This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance.

'Having a scholarly temperament.' Presumably the scholarly bit differentiates the academic knowledge workers from say other knowledge workers --eg., economists working in Treasury, Reserve Bank or the Productivity Commission , or researchers in think tanks etc.

So is it the 'scholarly temperament' that prevents one from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance? Or is it being a knowledge worker? Or is it having a doctorate? If the first one, then what is it that distinguishes the scholarly temperament of the academic from the temperament of other knowledge workers?

Pam,
When I said I'd rather give up a limb than my library card I meant I don't know how I'd function without access. It's reassuring to know you don't miss them as much as you thought. The Target thing was about the slim likelihood of getting academic work which would allow that access. The barbarians thing was about new academics challenging the tradition of locked down journals, the barbarians challenging privilege.

You may be right when you say nobody wants to know what's in these journals, but I'd argue that the public have a right to know. Public money supports it and "the public" is often the subject. The public has as much right to access as it does to the census, at least until copyright becomes involved.

You're right I think. We're coming to a point when credentialism via the old models will be questioned, which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Gary,
You must have come up against situations that demand you move from one head space to another. I'm making this up, but imagine you sit in a cinema for a couple of hours watching a sympathetic documentary on Che Guevara, then go somewhere afterward where you expect to discuss what you've just seen but find yourself surrounded by people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and berets selling you food at inflated prices which they can do because Che Guevara is a fashion statement.

This is indeed our postmodern culture, but it's difficult to accommodate if you know about Che Guevara and that the figure on the T-shirt is Che Guevara and not some east coast rapper or Adelaide hip hop artist. The mess is not always comfortable.

On the second point, I have problems with the 'scholarly temperament' too. The way Gregg describes it I know I had one long before I met the scholarly. Refering to it that way suggests that it's the preserve of scholars, which it's clearly not. I don't think you have to be a knowledge worker to have one either. To be fair she does say it's 'closely tied', but even that pushes the friendship too far I think.

Perhaps it's just an unfortunate choice of words? Could it just as easily be called a sociological understanding or worldview? Perhaps it's a cultural sensitivity or Hannerz' take on cosmopolitanism, which deals with cultural competence? Maybe it boils down to Pels' "Privileged Nomads: On the strangeness of intellectuals and intellectuals of strangeness" which I'd link to if privileged intellectual gatekeepers allowed public access.

Whatever, if people have the capacity to understand the disconnect between Che Guevara and the T-shirt and the inclination to think about that disconnect they're going to find themselves in the unhinged state Gregg describes on a fairly regular basis. Thus 'looking for something firm in a world of chaotic flux'.

Lyn,
I don't really miss the books either. From memory most of the academic stuff is fashion driven and was secondary literature around a key text--eg. Deleuze --or it was articles spun out to get creditionaled to get the job.

As I no longer need to get creditionalled, I do not need to read a lot of that literature.

Lyn,
it's the academics who have a problem here and the universities. The policy culture is digital--all the reports by the Productivity Commission, for instance, are online, as are the reports by the House of Representatives and Senate and other public bodies. They are all easily accessible so they act to encourage public debate amongst stakeholders in the public sphere.

Look at how innovative the ABC has been with limited resources in embracing a digital world and compare that to the universities.The ABC is trying to create a national conversation’ through a dialogical model.They think they are one of the primary media for orchestrating a national space, and see themselves as having this responsibility.

The universities are nowhere near this fostering this network of connectedness, creating an open, configurable system that the users can come along and do ‘anything’ with. It is not just the intellectual property of closed journals and subscription wall publishing ----it's also the academic culture including its management. This culture still bears traces of its monastic roots. It's basically a closed network based around various centres of ideas and expression.

Gary,
It's not entirely the universities. boyd talks about copyright and publishers. Some won't even let researchers post drafts on their websites.

There's a new feeling on campus this semester I've never seen before. I don't know how to describe it. Optimism? Enthusiasm? We may be about to see some change.

Lyn,
I include copyright and publishers within academic culture.For someone now outside looking at the closed walls that academic culture is broader than universities.

There is also a certain mentality within that culture----what can be called 'scholarly', as distinct from the broader 'critical thinking.' Scholars stand outside the everyday world to contemplate the nature of things. Hence the disjunction or contradiction that Gregg refers to, and starts to unpack.Critical thinking is in the everyday world---its the comportment of knowledge workers in everyday life
.
Public broadcasters understand that they have a real role to play in contemporary politics, to inform the public about world events and help activate real participatory citizenship.What has been rejected by the ABC is the old fashioned way of "we will tell you how the world is", and they have embraced an understanding of the public broadcaster providing information, providing access to viewpoints and perspectives that we may not be getting through other channels; helping us to make informed decisions about real events and issues.

This is not what the universities do---- try to give the perspectives that we're not hearing elsewhere; give us access to ideas that we may not have access to otherwise.

Gary,
You're right. It is just critical thinking isn't it? 'Scholarly temperament' is one of those linguistic devices that tells you more about the speaker than what it's describing.

Lyn,
re your comment

You must have come up against situations that demand you move from one head space to another. I'm making this up, but imagine you sit in a cinema for a couple of hours watching a sympathetic documentary on Che Guevara, then go somewhere afterward where you expect to discuss what you've just seen but find yourself surrounded by people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and berets selling you food at inflated prices which they can do because Che Guevara is a fashion statement.
This is indeed our postmodern culture, but it's difficult to accommodate if you know about Che Guevara and that the figure on the T-shirt is Che Guevara and not some east coast rapper or Adelaide hip hop artist. The mess is not always comfortable.

According to cultural studies we are still "reading texts", whether that be what is inside the cinema or the spectacle in the car park. Are the interpretive skills----what some call "literacy"-- that different in these diverse situations?

What is working its way underground, undermining the scholarly conception of literacy is the internet and digital literacy.

Lyn,
Is there panic in the scholarly mentality's response to the hybrid postmodern mass culture Gregg describes?

Is the panic because this culture is zooming along without memory & rules? Or is because of the gravitational pulls of nationalism and the transnationalisation of globalism? Or is it something else?

Gary,
One of the problems I have with debates like these is the academic distinctions. The reading of texts in the cultural studies vein is different from the same thing in a sociological sense. Do we interpret these texts in search of an appropriate behavioural response or in critical appraisal of society generally? I'd argue the distinction is pretty useless really, beyond working out which school of thought you belong to and which conferences are the most important to attend. So I'd argue that disciplinary strands also undermine both the conception of literacy and relevance beyond the academy.

Pam,
Some scholarly mentalities seem to accommodate it better than others. Academia generally has been yanked around by internal and external pressures and changes. I'd be more inclined to call it uncertainty than panic.

When it comes to postmodernity some are happy to understand culture in that sense, others are not. The threat of a collapse into relativism is a real threat to scholarly expertise itself. So you have some arguing that it's just a phase of capitalism, others that it's to do with the tensions between the local and the global, some argue that postmodernity never happened but was always just a theoretical fling, others argue that it did happen but we're over it now.

It's not a hard and fast rule, but sociology tends to reject postmodernity while cultural studies tends to accept it. In the middle you have cultural sociology which borrows from both.

A lot of these arguments revolve around positivism as well, and the last thing any academic needs is serious questioning of the Enlightenment and scientific process. It's very complex and I'm only a junior, but I suspect that the uncertainty is more subjective than anything else, which fits nicely with postmodern irony.

Lyn,
I'm not sure what academic distinctions you are referring to. Mine is the need to make shift from a narrow or rather literary conception of literacy based on reading texts to a digital and visual one.

Gary,
Sorry, I should have said disciplines rather than distinctions. But even that's fuzzy, because there are distinctions within disciplines.