the academic fashion show

Music: Bats For Lashes: Two Suns (2009)

A moment of synchronicity: I have been reading Lynne Huffer's Mad for Foucault today, which has been rubbing me the wrong way (mostly for stylistic stupidity, not the actual research), and then I read my colleague and friend's blog about enduring graduate school, which led me to a blog about "100 Reasons Not to Go to Graduate School." The 40th reason listed for not going to graduate school is that "faddishness prevails," and the example is the work of Michel Foucault:

If you have any doubts about academic faddishness, consider the French intellectual Michel Foucault (1926-1984), whose name and ideas have proven wildly popular in academic circles. To see just how popular he is, try a little experiment. Google the name “Foucault.” Now Google the name “Aristotle.” This is an imperfect experiment, given that there is more than one Foucault, etc., but the results should surprise you. Is it even remotely possible to consider the influence of Foucault in the same league as that of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)? You can almost be forgiven for thinking so after a few years in graduate school.

Of course, the statement is exaggerated to make a play at humor, but having just read a book that forges a false binary between Foucault and my chosen faddish theorist, Jacques Lacan, the blog drew more than a chuckle from my bloated, holiday belly.

The truth is, of course, that those of us anchored in the theoretical humanities do tend to pick and choose this or that theorist to follow and read more deeply. This tendency is born of two things: academic tradition and what is pragmatically possible. The force of academic tradition is from philosophy: early in your graduate education you range widely until you happen upon a thinker that makes sense to you, for whatever reason, and then you dig your heels into it, him, or her. This mid-century academic habit, however, was unrelenting: you'd pick a philosophical anchor and never did you waver for your career (let me tell y'all sometime about my epistemology professor and Quine). Thankfully, while the inertia of this impulse is still with us in the academic humanities, like the institution of marriage itself, academics are no longer forced to make life-long ideological commitments to certain lines of thought. From what I can sense, the more pragmatic rationale tends to dominate the theoretical humanities today: you read a given theorist more deeply, not only because you identify with the thinking, but simply because you cannot read them all. This is to say, as a graduate student you don't glom onto a particular perspective or theorist because you are deeply convicted in their thinking and are prepared to follow that line of thought for your career, but rather because you simply can't read and digest everyone.

During my graduate study, after reading and trying to digest all the theorists I encountered, I felt most at home with Kenneth Burke and, by extension, Fredric Jameson. Those are the folks I read most often and deeply. I thought of myself as a Marxist. My dissertation reflects this orientation, as does my first book. After taking my first job, in a reading group I was introduced to Slavoj Zizek, and I became enamored with psychoanalysis, not because I thought it was "cool," but because it made me think and it seemed to resonate with my experience. As a graduate student I was always into Freud, don't get me wrong, I just didn't identify as a Freudian and didn't understand it. Today, however, I think my work is most associated with psychoanalysis, and it's quite interesting to see how my first book is "read" through that lens by reviewers (because there's very little psychoanalytic anything in it). More than one reviewer describes my largely Jameson-inspired read of occult rhetoric as "psychoanalytic," and that is telling. A-hem.

I think most of us in the theoretical humanities, early in our career, find a thinker that inspires us to think, and we're so exhilarated by that "oh, wow" factor that we cotton to their writing, and then before we know it, we're thinking along their tracks. My advisor, Robert Scott, always warned me about getting trapped by the "tracks" laid by others: "You are not a Burkean," he would say, "you are a Joshian." And while I knew what he meant, at the same time I recognized that there are levels of insight. Some people are more creative and insightful than others. Some people are more creative and insightful than me. As a scholar, do I need to be as creative and insightful as the theorists that inspire me?

Frankly, to be an academic there is only one tenable answer: No.

The charge of "academic faddishness" is premised on the notion that scholars must be individually brilliant, that all of us must somehow be gifted with unforeseen insights that spring from genius, like magic. The more realistic and honest and ethical academic disposition is that an interesting and insightful idea, no matter who advances it, should be acknowledged and pursued and developed.

I admit I am sometimes irked by colleagues that urge me to read this-or-that new theorist (currently it's Ranciere) because it's what's everyone's reading. A dear friend sometimes asks me, "what are you reading these days?" often probing for the next exciting thinker that she's yet to hear of. I admit I sometimes feel weird saying, "er, Freud." But if I track her correctly, the question is not so much born of fashion than it is active thinking: so-called "academic faddishness" is really about restless thinking, about thinking actively and anew, about a restlessness of settled assumptions. In other words, while I certainly identify with the need and comfort to settle on and know a certain terrain of thought, at the same time I recognize and value the ever-changing interest in the "next theorist" of our time.

Some call it "faddishness," while others might celebrate the roving interest in this or that thinker as "restless thought." I think it's a little of column A and B, and as much as I know it makes more work for me, at the moment I favor value column B. And so I order the Ranciere books . . . .