academic self-publicity

Music: Stereolab: ABC Music: Radio One Sessions (1992)

As one learns to become a scholar, s/he quickly figures out there are a number of strategies he or she can use to publicize one's work. One of them is self-citation, or citing your own work in your work. I've done this---and more frequently in my earlier work than my later work---although I prefer to think I do so because something else I've published has a more detailed elaboration of a point I'm making. Heck, I've often cited myself because I'm the only one I know of making a certain point. Even so, I don't doubt that part of my self-citation is part of a semi-unconscious desire to promote my work; you can't be a teacher or scholar without some degree of narcissism. There are mirrors in the endnotes, to be sure.

Another strategy is, of course, to pick a fight with another scholar and hope that it leads to an actual publication melee. I first became aware of this approach by having my work attacked. My first publication in The Quarterly Journal of Speech attempted to rehabilitate an approach in rhetorical criticism titled "fantasy theme analysis." I was trying to update the approach for criticism in the present, since the theory was first developed in the 1970s. Unfortunately, a number of scholars deeply identified with that approach thought I was trying to pick a fight and came after me. I remember when the editor first told me she was going to publish their "rebuttal" I got sick to my stomach; I thought they completely misunderstood what I was really trying to do, that I was "on their side." Yet, a mentor soon explained that my essay was a handy way to get an older agenda back on the radar, and perhaps what I really argued was not the ultimate motive of my critics. That make me feel a bit better. And as another trusted mentor told me on his front porch shortly after the controversy hit print, "it's not about being right; it's about being noticed." "It," in this case, was one's academic profile.

Not too long after that, someone took me to task in print. This time, however, that someone had good points to make, and it resulted in a fairly civil exchange in which I learned something and actually made a friend. We subsequently co-authored something. My and Chris Lundberg's exchange over Lacanian psychoanalysis really did advance a line of inquiry---or it did, at least, for us.

These two experiences led me to conclude that there were two kinds of publication debates: those that are solely for publicity, and then, those that are truly about advancing thinking. As much as it initially hurts to get critiqued, I confess I think that a scholarly debate can really advance lines of inquiry. My field---rhetorical studies---has had a number of highly polemical debates and print that do a great job of putting issues on the table. Part of the reason these debates are productive is that my field teaches debate, and many of the scholars arguing back and forth in print are former debaters (including yours truly)---we know the practice. In our graduate seminars we frequently assign such debates because they're so helpful for teaching issues and getting to major fault-lines quickly. For this reason, my colleague Dana and I have issued a polemical critique of some scholars we admire in the hope it furthers discussion. For us it is not about publicity; it's about the issues we're debating.

All of this is to preface my thoughts about the third attack on my work in print by Chris Miles, an assistant professor of Communication and Media studies at a newer university in Turkey. I first learned of Miles from a 2007 review of my book he printed in an academic journal that addresses esoteric topics. To my knowledge, it's the only negative review. Many of the points he makes about the book's shortcomings are fair. A few, however, seemed a bit cheap, especially the one calling me out for not citing works that were not available or published during the time I was writing mine. I emailed Miles to tell him so, but he never responded.

At least not immediately. A year later Miles published a peer reviewed attack in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. I reckon this was his response to my private email. I don't know. What bothered me about this essay was that (a) it takes a whole group of scholars to task for arguments that I make, when clearly the other scholars are making different arguments toward different ends; and (b) the major claim is just fallacious. Miles argues, basically, this: my reading of modern occult rhetoric ignores the influence of Agrippa's Renaissance-era occultism, and because Agrippa was so influential, my arguments about the Platonic character of modern (19th and 20th century) occultism are fatally flawed. That is a classic exception fallacy, of course.

What's more bothersome to me, however, is the tone of his critique, which seemed unnecessarily combative. I can understand, for example, the fantasy theme folks being angry with me, because they thought I was trying to undermine their enterprise (I wasn't, and y'all should know I am now on very friendly terms with them). But what is to account for the nasty tone and recourse to questionable arguments with Miles' attack? I just didn't get it.

I was visiting Purdue University and having dinner with David Blakesley, a very well regarded Burke scholar (as well as an incredibly generous guy). Miles had yoked my perspective with Burke, so I told Dave about this, and that I was thinking about responding in print. Dave said he'd like to join if I decided to respond, since he thought Miles was misreading Burke. Morgan Reitmeyer, a doctoral student at Purdue, was also privy to these conversations. She's well read in Agrippa, and so I thought if I went forward with a response I'd ask her to join too.

After my visit at Purdue, I asked the editor of the journal if a response was possible, and she said it was. Then, it occurred to me that William A. Covino and Brian Vickers might want to join in the response, since their work was also attacked. Sir Vickers declined, but Bill said he was game. And so, a response was written and bandied back and forth among us and submitted. Here it is.

Our response is really about trying to discern Miles' submerged motive or the true warrant of his critique: why, exactly, is he being polemical? What's at stake here? Is it conceptual confusion? Bad history? Miles' major claim about our motives is that we want to make occultism our "ghostly other," that we're grinding occultism's bones to make our own bread---and that Agrippa's bones are just ungrindable. Of course, neither Burke, Covino, Vickers, nor I have written about occultism to dismiss it, as Miles claims. I'll tell you, I didn't read that stuff for two years because I thought it was dismissible prattle!

So, we conjectured that Miles, perhaps, thinks that our secularist stance perhaps is to blame, that our academic approaches are too closed off to spiritual insight, or thinking that about magic in a more spiritual way yields better insights, or something like that. It's not clear what is at stake, because none of us are interested in dismissing the occult out of hand (in fact, I see it as central to all language games, as does Bill and Kenny B). Why, exactly, are we "missing the boat" according to Miles?

He never answers this question of motive, or supplies a good reason for why he is attacking the extant rhetorical literature on the occult. That we have ignored or failed to read Agrippa closely just seems . . . well, silly. I'm afraid his response to our response is rather telling: titled "A Quick Game of Rho-Sham-Bo With the Four Horsemen of the Apophasis," the tone is immediately ugly. I had to look up "Rho-Sham-Bo." This refers to a game of men kicking each other in the balls. [Later edit: apparently it's a reference to rock-paper-scissors; much less aggro, but still, the "apocalypse" and "horsemen" would invite the masculinist aggro interpretation . . . . ]

So, at least, we have Miles' self-perception of what this attack is all about. Fight Club is about psychosis---a deep narcissism that has nothing to do with the community, but self-knowing through the infliction of pain. A masculinity ritual, to be sure.

In the end of the response to the response Miles claims (albeit not very clearly) he is attacking the model-centered approach of rhetorical scholars ("grand unified theory of X"); that would be a great critique if it were fully developed, and one for which I think there are many sympathies in the field. It's too bad, however, the nastiness gets in the way of making that critique.

So I'm publicizing a scholars work that I don't think deserves to be publicized, because it is, in a term, "dirty academics." My only hope is that the dirt is as easy to see by the disinterested; that is, of course, my faith.