on forums and polemics

Music: The Today show

Yesterday the new Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies issue arrived, and I was excited to see another neat forum section---this one on political economy vis-à-vis cultural studies---helmed by Barbara Biesecker. Forums are non-peer reviewed places where both contemporary and pressing issues can be discussed, or a debate on some disciplinary issue can happen. Owing to the fact that only the forum editor vets the short essays, they're usually pretty fun to read (that is, without the hoop-jumping and gate keeping the review process often represents).

During my graduate education, reading forums was popular in seminars because they marked one of the few places where one gets to peek behind the decorum of the scholarly essay to emotional and political agendas. Reading disagreements among scholars (over the "rhetoric as epistemic" debate, or between Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Barbara Biesecker) were often watershed moments in my education. It seems that, in the past decade there has been a steady decline in forums in all of the journals in Communication Studies (the last significant one that I can think of was in Philosophy and Rhetoric, a sparing between Marxism and Postmarxism). One reason we are seeing less forums is that a number of journals that used to feature them have gone social scientific. Another is that, as the number of publications required for tenure increases across the board, editors are choosing to reserve space for peer reviewed articles. Finally, I think forums are on the decline because of globalization: as Communication Studies journals widen their reading circulation to "the continent" (marked by the move to international publishers, increased submissions from foreign countries, and the blurring of disciplinary boundaries), there is a concern to "represent" or make sure newer audiences find the work we Communication Studies scholars do is up to par.

Regarding the latter reason, Jennifer Daryl Slack's forum essay, "Duel to the Death?" in the recent Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (in vol. 4, 2007) reflects---unquestionably in an unintentional way---the reason why forums are going the way of the Dodo: non-Speech familiar audiences misread polemics as bad scholarship. Speech communication is a discipline that had debate and agonism at the center of its pedagogy since its inception, and many people currently housed there---including myself---have been trained to engage ideas and dialogue about them argumentatively, sometimes heatedly. This approach to ideas often appears in forums. Today, however, students and folks not "reared" in Speech are sometimes shocked to learn that conversants in a forum are having drinks together at the next conference (for example, I remember a shocked graduate students' face when he saw me joking and socializing with Don Shields, a scholar who has attacked my work---with much venom—in print). Barry Brummett and Rick Cherwitz often joke that their sparring in print gave each other tenure. My point is that agonism in print is usually not personal. There's exceptions, of course, but in general Speech Communication sparring in journals is built on a certain understanding of argument as ad bellum purificandum.

Slack's essay reflects to a certain degree an ignorance about this Speech tradition. I'm not familiar with her work or her person, but I suspect she does not come from the same disciplinary background that Dana does. "Duel to the Death" is, presumably, a critique of my friend and colleague Dana Cloud's essay, "The Matrix and Critical Theory's Desertion of the Real" (also in CC/CS, vol. 3, 2006), however, it also registers anxieties about how one is to appropriately argue in journal essays, if not misplaced anger (she suggests that Dana's work is unprofessional, irresponsible, and careerist). As someone who nominated Dana's article for an award, of course, I disagree with Slack's critique, which I think misreads the essay as something that it does not announce itself to be. As the counterpoint to a polemic, an apologia is perhaps fitting: Cloud's article is an unapologetic and earnest polemic designed to promote dialogue and discussion about the relatively uncritical acceptance of certain en-vogue theories in the humanities and their implications for politics.

Again, presumably, the primary critique Slack offers is that Cloud lumps too much into terms like "cultural studies," "poststructuralism," and so on---that she equivocates among various paper tigers. Although Slack suffers from her own critique (she reduces "cultural studies" to the British tradition, among other gaffs), I think this critique is fair, and I told Dana this recently and back when the essay was in its invention stage. But this is really not what the author is up to. Rather, she begins the essay by telling a story about her graduate education: a highly regarded visiting professor instructed students that all one had to do to develop a career is attack people. She then says, "sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand to keep the raccoons out of the chicken coop. Sometimes you have to assert: the fence goes here." Next, she offers what I think is a fair critique in the section "radical decontextualization," but then moves on to argue Cloud's footnotes are designed to create the false impression of "learnedness." The upshot of the critique is that Cloud is a careerist and a charlatan uninterested in dialogue.

How does one put this? What a crock of shit!

In department colloquies, over dinner, and in numerous other places Dana and I have engaged in spirited discussion. She stands her ground and is (deliberately) stubborn, but she is also among the most kind, generous, and dialogic professors that I know. Slack's ad hominem, clothed in a (again) legitimate critique not only "misses the boat" and fails to discern the true context of Dana's argument (which cannot be squared with E.P. Thompson's battles with Raymond Williams, a very different debate), is---to use Slack's own words---"a new low."

The point: the newer, wider audience that is coming to the journals of the field that was formerly known as Speech Communication may read polemic as "personal," and respond in an inappropriately personal way. And in Slack's case, apparently, theoretical discussions should be absented of one's politics---an ironic charge when one considers the American Cultural Studies tradition, which refuses---following the program of the Birmingham School---to cleave the two.

It's funny how accusing another scholar of "careerism" will get one noticed.