love bubble 2008: pubaddconfy in review

At the conclusion of the public address conference at the Saturday evening banquet in honor of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, after two moving "encomiums" by Bonnie Dow and Mari Tonn, and after a masterful series of remarks by Karlyn, which concluded in a feat of devastating graciousness, chair of the Department of Communication Arts Sue Zaeske announced the conference was inside a "love bubble." That remark summed up the loving and good humored character of the conference, which was remarkable to me. I really enjoyed the public address conference, and I hope to return again. A lot of interesting, intellectual work was accomplished. Others have and will blog about that. I want to blog about love.

Unquestionably it was an intense weekend, and my energetic blogging on day one, you'll notice, fell off by day three. This conference wears you out. But it doesn't wear you out only because your brain is made to work so hard hour after hour; it also wears you out because of your heart. You are frequently laughing, at times tearing up. I found myself saying to others that one thing I did not expect about this conference was its emotional intensity. I cried on more than one occasion at something particularly moving (Murph's opening shout-out to Karlyn; the banquet). I think I could explain why this conference was such an affect vortex, but I'm not sure that I care to explain it all away, as some wonderful things should be left undelievered to the signifier.

I will say this, though. First, the conference was emotional to me because of the honoree, Karlyn. It was clear she is the matriarch, and we, the children who long for her recognition, were assembled there in her honor. You can argue that the student/teacher or mentee/mentor relationship is not familial, but you'd be an idiot. Of course it is, and the tranferential power of that relationship can be fairly intensive. Our mentors/advisors and teachers are among the most important people in an academic's life. If you dedicate your life to this kind of career, you tend to do so because you had support and a role model. Karlyn was both for of a lot of us. I know I was invited to the conference for a number of reasons, but the most important was that I consider myself one of the children; it did feel like family reunion. Part of me knew this, but when I got there it was still very, unexpectedly touching. I came to this conference feeling something like a toad in the garden; once I got there, however, that immediately evaporated. What we had was a family of self-indentified black sheep.

And this is related to the second reason: many years ago responding to James Darsey's marvelous book The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America, Karlyn titled her remarks "a toad in the garden." It was mentioned at the banquet that Karlyn was the first woman to be recognized in twenty years. The conference was momentous, then, because it served as the recognition for a new kind of arrival: the Other was admitted. Of course, the admission is never really done, and had been in process for some forty years---but this conference was an articulation of the admission. Such a gesture was also deliberately reflected in the attempt to bring "new voices" to the program. Karlyn's voice was one that never shut-up and that wouldn't go away, regardless of the cruel, misogynistic obstacles thrown repeatedly in her way. Many people spoke about how she was their "steel" when trying to make their respective routes as an academic in a field that was (and in some sense remains, as do all academic fields) sexist. So the conference was emotional because it recognized Karlyn almost single-handedly changing the course of thought and scholarship.

Finally, for me, the conference was an emotional experience because I got to share the program with my friend Angela Ray. Angela and I went to graduate school together, beginning in 1996, and we bonded closely then and have been best friends ever since. Seeing her give her talk made it hard for me to swallow, I was so proud and moved to see my friend make one of the most risky and brazen statements at the conference; she dared to confront what is (IMHO) the most difficult pickle and say to a particular audience who didn't "get it" that they, in fact, didn't "get it" (there were many audiences in the room, of course). It was impressive to see, keenly subtle, and something of a zinger for a number of us. And then when I got to speak I got to see Angela's approving face and upturned thumbs. It was just cool to me that our class had two spots on the program, that what we were doing in the late 90s has been recognized as in keeping with the Campobellian tradition.

Sue's characterization of the conference as a "love bubble," then, was very apt. The word "bubble" because of the sense of comfort (bubble bath), childhood joy (blowing bubbles) and protection and safety (boy in a bubble) it connotes for me. And "love," because at root we can understand love as affect, concern, and appreciation for someone else, as well as the gesture of recognition. One of the things I've learned from Lacan (and then Hegel), is that the gesture of love is one of recognition, that someone---a parent, a lover, a teacher---says, in effect, "I'm proud of you." I got that statement from Karlyn this weekend, and it’s the kind of sentence any student longs to hear from her cherished teacher. Similarly, this conference was one of those rare instances when the students/children get to say it back to the parent: we're proud of you!