That thing about academia
Tuesday, 02 February, 2010 - 20:38
So I've been trying to work out how to develop the theme I started a week or two ago about how academia seems always to avoid, escape and devalue "practice" even as it strives to be the only institution that might legitimise that "practice". It was a long-winded post about complicated academic language, written with complicated academic language.
I enjoyed the response I got to a subsequent post - a thought experiment inspired by real events - in which I tried to write some powerful ideas down in a more direct, earthy way. One such response was - "Joe, are you in love?". And I thought - that's how we should write!
Sod the technical jargon: when we write, we should try to be understood as lovers, as wells of passion for what we do - our action in the world should be the force that drives the green fuse through the veil of symbols with which we obscure the world when we write in academic language. If I write about my work, why would I not want my reader to wonder - "is he in love?"
The dream of not thinking
Tuesday, 26 January, 2010 - 21:14
The river of sounds tumbling from a mouth into ears, spilt in ink on rough paper, splashed on solid light, a hope forced through the straits of sense.
The nerves of a lion leaping on its prey, the giant mammal calving, the fish tensed on the rod, the tree that is, the world that pulses over time, whole, not parted. The journey.
To be strong as an ox when another's iron will at last gives, surrendering a weakness to chance, and in reply, to bow a proud neck till it bends like a reed. A lover's touch.
Hearts that power arms, hands grasping through the thin film of the thick air, breath that meets in the mess of a kiss, lips that overload with more than can be heard.
The brush of a limb barely sensible but by the faint flesh of the other that craves it, the dusting glance of a fingertip that sparks against the body, the feathered skin goose-pimpled, the silence snapping, the fear hunted by safety, the eyes speaking.
The dream of not thinking.
Academia vs Practice
Wednesday, 13 January, 2010 - 22:28
A thought experiment around practice-led research in academia.
A practice-led PhD is normally assessed on a body of evidence which consists of an artefact - the product of the 'practice' in question - accompanied by an extended piece of writing in which the questions, world-views, investigative approaches and methods, disciplinary concerns and interim self-diagnoses are made explicit. So for example we might see paired materials such as: a piece of sculpture, accompanied by an articulation of the traditions within and against which the process of making the object has worked; a film, along with an essay exploring the disciplinary innovations and concessions that were revealed in its making; a networked set of documents, and some accompanying long-form text drawing attention to the conventions of mediation and aesthetics which are either challenged and rejected or accepted and extended in the pursuit of innovation in the production of such works.
So I wonder aloud what would such a submission look like if my practice were poetry? I write some words (in the form of poetry) and I write another set of words (in the form of academic explication). On the surface, it might seem that an assessment of the value of either of these sets of words is dependent upon the other. So, it is not enough to write poetry: in order to be judged expert enough for doctoral status you must translate the importance of your poetic output into academic language - the purpose of which is of course to ensure that you can articulate in a suitably neutral language what your non-neutral, poetic language has achieved. But note that the reverse is not the case: one may be recognised as doctorally qualified, wholly on the basis of an academically articulated thesis. Thus the primacy of academic language is established.
This primacy is predicated upon a number of assumptions:
- that academic language is neutral enough that audiences from disparate fields of expertise, and less expert in relevant fields than the author of such texts, can understand it
- that perseverant newcomers might interpret and understand academic texts without being expert in the areas of practice with which those texts are concerned
- that academic language is thus independent of the practices which it claims to be adequate to describe and analyse
- that therefore expertise in practices can be translated into neutral language and thus be encompassed by non-experts in the fields of such practice
I hope that the logical sequence as I have described it here demonstrates well enough the shortcomings in such assumptions. Certainly, if, like me, you are persuaded by the Latourian and/or Deleuzian notion that translation is transformation and production, then you will quickly concede that neutral articulations which permit mediation between two discrete fields of practice without distortion, problematisation and transmogrification are impossible and illusory. If you are not persuaded, then at least consider the possibility that academic language, rather like the poetic language produced by practice, has no claim to being anything other than a genre of writing, any more than other accepted genres such as journalism, prose fiction or drama. Academic writing is a non-neutral genre of language, constituted by a set of arbitrary conventions, no less than drama is convened through dialogue and performance, prose fiction is enacted through narratorially organised text, and journalism is constructed through the signs of format, voice and a reference to some convenient form of accepted reality.
All of which is to say that the requirements of the practice-led researcher are currently that they must make explicit in academic language what is implicit in their practice; and yet those who are not educated or indoctrinated into the conventions of academia are no more able to comprehend what is supposed to have been made explicit in that academic account, any more than competent academics with no expertise or experience in poetry might be expected to uncover the implicit value in poetic discourse. Another way of stating this is to say that if it is necessary to translate the implicit innovation and disciplinary excellence in poetry into academic language in order for it to be made explicit to a wider community of interest, there is no less need for the excellence implicit in academic language to be made explicit in yet another (meta-generic?) language for the benefit of a wider community of lay people. Indeed the irony here is perhaps that a wide community of lay audiences might be equally competent to grasp and appreciate the practical outputs and artefacts of practice-led research (if not more adequately equipped by virtue of the disinterested yet loving enthusiasm of the amateur) as is the proponent of academic discourse. This becomes especially true when one considers that the academic's livelihood increasingly depends upon a specialisation which moves ever further away from easy access by a lay audience, and further into obscurity and jargon.
At the risk of repetition I'll restate this once again: the notion that innovation and discovery in practice must be re-articulated in academic language, as though that academic language is an adequate meta-language for the communication of such innovations and discoveries, is no more or less true than the notion that academic language must be re-articulated in a third language, accessible to lay (or other) audiences who are not academics. The constant striving to establish the academic norms of language and writing over other forms is simply the will to power of the academic institution as a necessity in the social order. Excellence and sensitivity in the domains of practices can be achieved without recourse to academia.
Academic experience is not a necessity for excellence in the practices I pursue. There. I said it. It is a watershed for me, personally. I rather wish I had discovered this (in hindsight, rather obvious) truism a good deal earlier.
The Shape of Memories
Monday, 28 December, 2009 - 16:08
A magician wrote about how the natural course of healing covers over the wound as spiders' webs ultimately smother the bric-a-brac on a table in the corner of a long-locked room; yet he wished to not allow the wound to heal over, but every day pick it open and keep his pain alive, rather than allow the web of forgetfulness to conceal the rawness of his experience.
The extremity of self-knowledge is the pursuit of the only absolute foundation he could reach: "nothing is true; everything is permitted." My self-knowledge is bound to a foundation made, amongst so many influences, of my father and the unknowable depths of my psyche which are made from his history in my life. I recall my father as much to understand myself as I do to keep his memory alive.
Rowing boats, van-rides with Candy and souvenir mix-tapes; evenings in beer gardens, Neil Young in the car; yards with kids, playing action man in the street. Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick on Top of the Pops; kissing a girl on the school railings, AZED crosswords, tin of snails in the first university hamper. Sunday afternoons with 2p for the phone box; huge home-knitted jumpers with big striped colours; shopping for records on my birthday; black and white photographs of me and an old Wolseley.
Memories have shapes. Although they are recalled all at once, like frozen instants, they also unfold in time. They have a flavour and pattern whose tone and complexity seem to present themselves whole; yet they also play out their complexity, like stories retold. Each retelling allows some room for change - room to create new tastes and tones.
As I let each memory spin out I recognise a new note attach itself. It is an aftertaste of grief; there is a hint of bitterness - the reaction against tragedy; but also an intertwining of happiness and melancholy. Maybe grief imparts complexity the way a cask enriches the liquor aged within it. Perhaps the immediacy of the experience is lost; but perhaps as each year passes, there is an ever more rich emotional flavour to each recollection.
Perhaps the bitterness will round out; the joys and the sadnesses may mold themselves into familiarity; and perhaps rather than need to keep pain alive, it will be replaced by something other than the forgetfulness the magician feared. Another Christmas passes...
A Cherry Tree and Memories
Saturday, 26 December, 2009 - 18:18
I went for a walk by Pond House and Horsepool Hill in search of a cherry tree and memories of my father.
Boxing Day 2009 Walk in Shipley Country Park set on Flickr
Download the podcast (mp3, 23:53, 55MB)
Commonplace and Singular
Thursday, 24 December, 2009 - 14:53
The umber journey through bereavement reveals itself as the experience which levels everyone sooner or later. No-one is born who cannot expect to grieve a parent, except by reversing the calamity. Notwithstanding the silence we collectively smother over death in our discomfort and inability to handle one another's tragedies, grief and bereavement touch every but the most unlucky life. Mourning is a commonplace, a universal. And yet it is utterly singular, uniquely experienced and individually felt; an axis around which a life will eventually turn. Like love, it happens to us all, and when it does, we are the only lovers in the world.
It was around Easter this year that I decided to study the nature of creative expressions of grief. I knew earlier than that that I wanted to study how creative activity - whether journal writing, drawing, poetry, musical composition, anything - had a therapeutic dimension. I struggled wildly to find an ailment of the body that I felt I could talk about without feeling like a charlatan interloper from a soft science - a quack calling the advocates of hard science, "quacks". Choosing instead an ailment of the soul may have been a retreat from an anticipated "clash of civilisations" where science and hermeneutics meet, but it was an advance in terms of making the study my own.
The vernacular ear hears words like "complex" and "syndrome" as mental illnesses - this is of course because they are wielded by doctors and psychoanalysts whom we so often call upon only when we feel sick in mind or body. But complexes and syndromes are what we all are made of. What makes you you, and makes me me, are the respective complexes through which we see the world. Far from seeing the world clearly, we all have our own individual motes in our eyes which render the glass dark. Grief is another complex, another mote; grief makes me me. If grief is an illness, then everyone who has lost someone is ill.
A friend said, a few weeks after my father died, that over time the pain of grief would die away. His mother had died when he was young. "Now I think of her occasionally," he said, "And it's sort of... 'Oh yes... Mum! She was a person, a long time ago...' you know. It'll get better." I was sure he was right, but that only made it worse. I didn't want the pain to go if it meant that the memory of those I loved also receded and lost their significance. Surely this meant that they died twice: their lives ended both in their own death and the death of their memory. If it meant that the memory of my father would dwindle to the facts and material residue of his existence, then I did not want the pain of grief to end.
Grief is something I do not want to let go; but equally I know it is a phenomenon with its own logic and evolution which, if not allowed to take its course, will become more than a complex: a neurosis, a pathology. I try to write again, and each time I summon spirits of grief as though the words are a magic rite which revives memories, enriches them and brings my father closer. There is an interplay between letting go and holding on; between inarticulacy and making meaning; between forgetting and remembering; between pain and solace.
Christmas, Grief and Shadowplay
Wednesday, 23 December, 2009 - 22:47
Christmas is a hard time in my family. My father died eight years ago on Christmas day, after a few short months of living with a terminal diagnosis. It is still hard to summon words to trace the contours of the experience and its wake. Each thought rushes back; memories and meanings impossibly offer themselves for articulation; words flinch from the responsibility of bearing the burden.
It is easier to write of the difficulty of voicing the experience than of the experience itself. How do I select from the galaxy of emotions that I recall; how order the candidate sentences; where do I even start? Do I begin with the way he lived; the way he died; the way we go on; or what no longer goes on, now that he is gone? A few years ago, I wrote about several of my memories of christmas, culminating in the christmas of his death and the scattering of ashes; only such an oblique method seemed possible, since a direct approach was less surmountable than a sheer cliff.
If I talk about the way he dignified his illness with a grace I can't imagine anyone exceeding; or the pang of pain at his death that no anticipation could deaden; or the way that time, which so many said would heal, is for that reason, the very enemy of grief; if I put into words any of these or other countless confessions, then it is only as a laboratory scientist handles toxic germs or radioactive metals with gloved and levered tongs through reinforced glass and platinum barriers.
Only by pushing away the significance of experience can it be diminished enough to be compressed inside words. An eclipse cannot be viewed directly, but projected as a phantom through a pinhole. Or perhaps it is more like the everyday landscape when inverted in the darkness of the camera obscura. Perhaps it may be like the shadows on the wall of the cave: perhaps the direct experience reveals less than its shadowplay, since the hands working the spectacle disappear off the stage.
The facts and experiences are no less mundane, bleak and irredeemable for bearing such volatile emotions: but maybe the alienated handling of them with ever new words, the constant renewing of the bare events with repeated efforts to give them voice, are what produces new meaning and new significance each time, and create some sort of sense out of the senselessness of brutal reality.
Image - World - Image
Friday, 06 November, 2009 - 20:39
The pinned stars in the sky are the reflections. The genuine stellar light shines and glints on the water.
The immaterial face in the mirror is the true identity. The flesh and blood before the glass is the hallucination.
The imaginary world is the only authentic experience. The material facts of existence are merely the simulacrum.
The Paradoxical Academic
Monday, 02 November, 2009 - 21:28
The most impressive management skill is to be able to hold and argue in favour of two contrary, exclusive and irreconcilable positions at the same time.
For instance in a university an academic should be passionate about research and strive to minimise teaching time in order to concentrate on research; at the same time, one should not concern oneself with the conflicting pressures on time and energy that the seemingly different requirements of research and teaching exert, since really research and teaching are essentially both just instances of the same thing: your passion for your subject.
Or: of course an academic does not necessarily have to have a doctorate in order to execute their job; but equally obviously, anyone serious about being an academic should of course do a doctorate - why would they not, if they are passionate about their subject?
Or: no academic should seriously be considering the amount of time they devote to different activities such as research and teaching, because they should all be part of the same process which is geared towards output. Meanwhile, the outputs which those academics are measured upon are produced as part of a working timetable which most human beings experience as occurring in, occupying and taking up time.
Or: one should be selfish with one's time, such that others do not divert your attention from your own research passions; meanwhile, one should be collegiate and work supportively with colleagues and students.
I am deeply impressed by the notion that I can contribute to excellent teaching through research by doing less teaching, be an unacademic academic, unselfishly deny students the time they ask of me, unselfishly refuse to provide cover for sick colleagues, unselfishly take no part in projects colleagues invite me to take part in, so that I can selfishly protect my time. (sorry, not "time", "output"). It is possible that the time I have taken to write this Trot nonsense is an example of inefficiency on my behalf.
Draft review notes #3
Saturday, 12 September, 2009 - 15:17
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
So the everyday is always written off: the mass produce trash culture without quality; they fail to rise up and revolt and against the elites; and they are deceived by machinations against which they have no real defence.
A key characteristic of the critiques of the everyday is their insistance on the schism between the real and the ideal, or between appearance and reality. Marxist thought constantly seeks to portray the common man as a duped fool, a donkey of a man suffering under false consciousness: if only we could make him see the world as it truly is, without the miasma of ideology to cloud and befuddle his judgement and ability to act, then he might rise up and take for himself the world that is truly his.
The critique of propaganda and ideology also hinges on the notion that the popular consciousness cannot adequately grasp the real forces, determining events behind the scenes, hidden from view, available only to the most critically engaged and forensically committed minds. Chomsky's line is exemplary of this - his work is largely characterised by 'exposures' of hidden motives and explanatory forces which most other people fail to notice, presumably because they either choose to ignore the evidence or are too taken up in the ideological hegemony to be able to transcend the deceit.
The paragon of this mode of critique is Habermas, who seems determined to project an image of a utopian world - the world as it might be - which can only be reached by the most stringently impossible means. Citizens must be competent, capable, engaged, critically objective and rational, yet willing to listen to and understand other subjective views. The object of this rational-critical discourse is a endpoint at which disagreements will have been ironed out, intersubjectivities achieved - and presumably we will all just sit around gazing at each other in a stupor of silence since we'll have no differences to speak of or dialectical positions to bother articulating.
At the heart of Habermas' vision of rational progress to some humanistic utopia is Enlightenment: the rejection of tradition and any authority that is handed down, seen as so much dogma, in favour of rationally justifiable positions and truths which are available to us to produce without reference to the tyranny of conservatism and prejudice. What an attractive notion - the worldview of science itself, which takes no article on faith, but only on falsifiable and empirical merit!
I find it almost irresistable - the restive rejection of the chains of the past, and the embrace of a world made of iron ration and reason... and yet, yet... why must we constantly fall for this notion that the world is or should be other than it is? What is it about the way of the world that we must always feel it is inadequate? Why must we diagnose the life of the everyday world as somehow being wrong?
