Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as Conversational Scholarship Melissa Gregg*
Can academic work ever be considered ‘ordinary’ given the history of privilege behind it? Cultural studies has spent many years establishing ‘ordinariness’ as a positive trait in the practices of other people (e.g. Williams, 1958; Hartley, 1999) yet it has tended to avoid using the concept in relation to the everyday lives of scholars themselves. This may be understandable given the field's original political aspirations to indict the class-based elitism of academic modes of valuing. Many writers agree that the resources and job security of the academic profession bestow a particular responsibility on cultural studies practitioners (e.g. Hall, 1992; Couldry, 1996). If its total renunciation is strategically undesirable, then, it still seems appropriate to contemplate strategies that might ameliorate this taken-for-granted privilege. If Gramsci's point that ‘we are all intellectuals’ is a cornerstone of cultural studies’ practice, the second dimension of his statement—‘not all men have the function of intellectuals’—must also be remembered. The possible functions that contemporary cultural studies’ intellectual practice might serve forms the backdrop for this paper, bearing in mind Gramsci's wider and more provocative question: ‘is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary?’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 144).
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304310600641604#.UxXwA_vYMmY
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[HTML] Abdullah's blogging: A generation 1.5 student enters the blogosphere
Can academic work ever be considered ‘ordinary’ given the history of privilege behind it? Cultural studies has spent many years establishing ‘ordinariness’ as a positive trait in the practices of other people (e.g. Williams, 1958; Hartley, 1999) yet it has tended to avoid using the concept in relation to the everyday lives of scholars themselves. This may be understandable given the field's original political aspirations to indict the class-based elitism of academic modes of valuing. Many writers agree that the resources and job security of the academic profession bestow a particular responsibility on cultural studies practitioners (e.g. Hall, 1992; Couldry, 1996). If its total renunciation is strategically undesirable, then, it still seems appropriate to contemplate strategies that might ameliorate this taken-for-granted privilege. If Gramsci's point that ‘we are all intellectuals’ is a cornerstone of cultural studies’ practice, the second dimension of his statement—‘not all men have the function of intellectuals’—must also be remembered. The possible functions that contemporary cultural studies’ intellectual practice might serve forms the backdrop for this paper, bearing in mind Gramsci's wider and more provocative question: ‘is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer necessary?’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 144).
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304310600641604#.UxXwA_vYMmY
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
Volume 20, Issue 2, 2006
It
is increasingly clear that new technologies are helping to situate
academic labour as a much more banal, if not quite ‘everyday’, practice
in a changing university environment.2 Self-publishing platforms like weblogs are beginning to influence what an academic career can involve—and be seen to
involve to an interested public. Blogs have made scholarly work
accessible and accountable to a readership outside the academy, an
achievement that seems important in the history of cultural studies’
concerns. Indeed, as I want to suggest in this paper, the very kinds of
conversations they encourage can be regarded as offering renewed vigour
to cultural studies’ anti-elitist and reflexive epistemological project.
This
article marks the beginning of a series of investigations in which I
hope to offer a ‘sympathetic’ account of the opportunities that new
media technologies provide for intellectual practice. Sympathetic
reading asks that the critic resist ‘the temptation to “answer back”’
(Morris, 1988,
p. 6) and instead approach cultural texts for their capacity to test
the habitual responses of academic training or political position. As
Meaghan Morris explains, reading texts sympathetically is ‘to understand
them as criticisms of those answers that my feminism might
automatically provide’ (ibid.). It forces the critic to question her own
assumptions and practices in the process of reading others’. Such
concerted tactics are called for at a time when the presumptions
emanating from mainstream media coverage of new media technologies seem
poised to threaten the present and future use of platforms like weblogs
in professional contexts (Collinson & Delaney, 2005).
Preferring to focus on the anomie or indeed aspiring celebrity of those
who choose to maintain a Web presence, the lack of credentials of news
pundit bloggers, or the highly charged terrain of copyright, content
delivery and intellectual property issues, the subsidized nature of much
media commentary is poorly matched to reflect the complexity and
subtlety of wider shifts brought with new technologies. The
‘interpellative imperative’ of criticism as a genre 3
seems to have avoided discussion of how practices like blogging fit
within a tradition of public intellectualism otherwise mourned (Buettner
& Mitchell, 2005).
As I want to argue here, it has also overlooked blogging's role in
carrying out cultural studies’ long-standing commitment to scholarship
which reaches beyond the limited range of the academic sphere.
Professionalism
The
institutional constraints on academics have always challenged the
objectives of sharing knowledge and fostering conversation with an
audience outside the university. As Judith Brett noted in 1991, the
bureaucratization of the university has had ‘profound effects on the
writing of academics in the humanities and social sciences’, the
clearest of which being that academics now write in order to fulfil the
criteria of a carefully managed institution, pushing their writing ‘away
from its proper goal—the contribution to culture and society’ (Brett, 1991,
p. 516). When Brett asked ‘why so few academics are public
intellectuals’, part of her aim was to identify why it is so rare for
academics to be good writers, indeed why so many of them are ‘such bad
or indifferent writers’ (Brett, 1991,
p. 514). Brett's essay forms part of a sustained period of reflection,
in Australia and the United States in particular, lamenting the decline
of public intellectual practice on the one hand and the quality of
academic writing on the other.4
In
light of these discussions, what remains refreshing about Brett's
article is the way in which it articulates the professional pressures
which affect the ‘traditional’ intellectual function, creating a
shrinking ‘public’ for academic practice:
The
preconditions for good discursive prose are relatively simple: a fully
imagined audience, a sense of urgency, something interesting and
important to say. The biggest problem with most academic writing is
achieving the first two. Many academics start out with important and
interesting things to say, but very few feel compelled to say them in
ways that engage an audience outside their discipline; and in the end
this corrodes the importance of what they have to say. (Brett, 1991, p. 514)
Brett
considers it nearly impossible for academics to provide a public
intellectual function in the contemporary university context because it
goes ‘against the grain of the job’ (Brett, 1991, p. 515). The problem with academic writing, she says, is that it is writing that ‘never leaves school’ (Brett, 1991, p. 521).
It
is in this sense that Brett considers cultural studies to be one of a
number of intellectual challenges to have emerged from outside the
academy that inevitably narrows the audience for its writing upon entry.
Like feminism and Marxism before it, cultural studies is another of
those social movements ‘in danger of becoming the basis of new careers and so losing their engagement with broad social and political goals’ (Brett, 1991,
p. 518; emphasis added). Reading this article today, it is the ‘and so’
in this particular sentence that holds my interest. It implies that an
academic career can only mean a loss of ‘engagement with broad social
and political goals’. In so far as her remarks are directed to the fate
of the New Left since the 1960s, Brett claims: ‘The threat of
unemployment has kept one-time radicals busy ensuring their futures;
academic politics has replaced the broad public politics of their youth’
(Brett, 1991, p. 518).
This
warning as to the apoliticizing effects of professionalism echoes that
of another feminist colleague with experience witnessing the trajectory
of New Left colleagues. In ‘Politics Now: Anxieties of a Petty-bourgeois
Intellectual’ Morris also reads the period from 1975 to 1985 as a shift
from the full-time radicalism to the radical professionalism of the
left (Morris, 1988,
p. 177). Kept busy with grant applications and the politic-ing of
various institutional matters, the horizon for investment amongst
cultural workers is described by Morris as perilously parochial,
completely substituting any other form of politics (Morris, 1988, p. 179). For both writers, professionalism brings a necessary end to a certain cherished sense of political engagement.
Fledgling
at the beginning of one of the new careers in cultural studies that
Brett anticipated, I approach these two descriptions with some
trepidation. Not only are they writers whose work has secured my belief
in the value of sophisticated and timely scholarship which transcends a
purely academic audience (Morris was a freelance journalist without ever
having a full-time academic job in Australia prior to her move to Hong
Kong, while Brett has recently gained a wide cross-over readership with
her research on the Liberal Party; see Brett, 2003, 2005). They also represent the important achievement of feminist movements which have ensured that women now have the choice to pursue professional careers.5
What troubles me about their descriptions now is that for researchers
inheriting cultural studies’ legacies today, there has never been a time
before radical professionalism, before the strategic thinking required by institutional politics, a time when one might not have spent most of their energy navigating funding bodies. What is more, many recent graduates have been politicized by
their exposure to academic theory, which is to say that for the present
generation there has never been a time ‘before’ or ‘after’ theory, as
the story usually goes (Eagleton, 2003; Butler et al., 2000). Ruth Barcan described this wonderfully in a keynote address to the What's Left of Theory? Australian Cultural Studies conference in Hobart in 2001: ‘theory operated not as the suspect opposite to politics, as it did for many people, but as the very mode of my politicisation’ (Barcan, 2002,
p. 344). I can identify as one of those students Barcan describes
‘whose life is transformed unequivocally for the better by their
encounter with theory, who looks at the world anew, and who becomes
filled with a sense of purpose and energy’ as a result (Barcan, 2002,
p. 354). Work in the academy hasn't been a shift of focus for politics:
theoretically and practically, academic politics is the most familiar
(if not the only) form I know.
Heroics
If
I am uncomfortable with the way that the politics of
professionalization has often been described it is because there is a
missing narrative to account for the experience of more recent graduates
who, having experienced cultural studies teaching at undergraduate and
postgraduate level, see political opportunities in an academic
career. These opportunities seem to me limited, however, by the
consistency with which cultural studies’ stated preference for studying
‘the ordinary’ rarely matches the modes of writing typically practised
in the attempt to legitimate such attention. A theoretical
understanding of the performative force of writing and the material
effects of discourse should make this problematic enough; what makes it
worse is when abstract writing for an initiated audience serves merely
to reproduce what Eve Sedgwick (2003, p. 108) has called the ‘thinking routines’ of contemporary theory.
In her recent book Touching Feeling,
Sedgwick mounts a critique of ‘paranoid reading’: what she perceives to
be a dominant scholarly preoccupation with exposing residual forms of
essentialism, unearthing the unconscious drives and compulsions of an
author, or uncovering the oppressive forces of history ‘masquerading
under liberal aesthetic guise’ (ibid.). Demonstrating a sensitivity to
historical and political shifts that I also want to foreground, Sedgwick
writes:
Where are all
these supposed modern liberal subjects? I daily encounter graduate
students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences
that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism. Yet these
students’ sentient years, unlike the formative years of their teachers,
have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush
America where ‘liberal’ is, if anything, a taboo category and where
‘secular humanism’ is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect,
while a vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct
intercourse with multiple invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and
God. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 140)
It
is not simply critical mantras that Sedgwick objects to, or the
political landscape in the United States, for that matter. She queries
the logic of the spatial metaphors common in contemporary research
practice—the habitual speech that accompanies intellectual positioning:
Beneath and behind are hard enough to let go of; what has been even more difficult is to get a little distance from beyond,
in particular the bossy gesture of ‘calling for’ an imminently
perfected critical or revolutionary practice that one can oneself only
adumbrate. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 8)
It
is precisely this sense of an avant-garde or well-placed lone critic
‘calling for’ changes in others’ political priorities that I take the
‘counter-heroics’ of this special issue's title to mean. If it in any
way resembles the ‘sense of urgency’ that Brett demands of public
intellectual practice, it does so to the extent that the urgency is both
generic and manufactured.
Sedgwick's descriptions may indeed be strategic caricatures, as Clare Hemmings (2005)
has recently argued. Yet I want to suggest that cultural studies’
unfinished legacy includes abandoning the styles of academic practice
that provide the substance of their rhetorical force. For cultural
studies academics to stake their politics on providing readings for
others’ benefit, or making plain the obviousness of others’ oppression,
seems ill-fitting the mobilizing premises of the field. As Sedgwick
argues, such objectives depend ‘on an infinite reservoir of naïveté in
those who make up the audience’ for our work as scholars:
What
is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind
motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is
artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even
violent? … How television-starved would someone have to be to find it
shocking that ideologies contradict themselves, that simulacra don't
have originals, or that gender representations are artificial? … Some
exposés, some demystifications, some bearings of witness do have great
effectual force (though often of an unanticipated kind). Many that are
just as true and convincing have none at all however, and as long as
that is so, we must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such
acts reside somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se.
(Sedgwick, 2003, p. 141)
As Toby Miller and Alec McHoul have argued (1998),
cultural studies scholarship has enough work cut out for it producing
adequate accounts of actually existing ‘everyday’ practices to be
satisfied with merely speculating about subversive pleasures. A more
modest, inquisitive, even fallible speaking position would only help in
the endeavour to discover trends that lie outside pre-given theoretical
rubrics.
Resisting the Resistance Ritual
The
ritualized form of scholarship that Sedgwick points to is only
understandable given the current expectation that academics publish
regularly in refereed journals to secure their career and professional
advancement. Morris has noted that this model which determines
institutional funding as well as individual standing has developed in
tandem with the workload of today's ‘hyper-busy’ academics:
To
engage in it, we do not need to be involved at the time in serious
ethnographic or textual study, resource- and time-consuming as these
are, and we do not need to expect any kind of change to follow our
intervention. It is entirely possible to contribute to such a debate by
referring only to a series of other contributions, each playing
variations on already familiar and firmly held positions. (Morris, 2000, p. 28)
It
is this form of debate that Brett surely had in mind in her 1991
article. It also epitomizes the effects of professionalism so abhorrent
to Edward Said in the series of lectures he delivered on the role of the
intellectual in the early 1990s. Said's formidable description of the
intellectual's function was to:
raise
embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to
produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by
governments or corporations, and whose raison d'être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. (Said, 1994, p. 11)
Said
urged that a spirit of amateurism must transform professional routines
‘into something much more lively and radical’ so that ‘instead of doing
what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits
from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original
thoughts’ (Said, 1994, p. 83). Said denounced professionalism on the basis that it viewed intellectual work as:
something
you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five and with one
eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper,
professional behaviour—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the
accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all
presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and ‘objective.’
(Said, 1994, p. 74)
Of
course what is complicated about this formulation for those pursuing
careers in cultural studies is that radicalism is itself a professional
expectation of our chosen field. Cultural studies asks that we make a
career out of ‘rocking the boat’. To refuse its dominant forms of
performance and endeavour is also to admit suspicion of the innate
progressivism of its main theoretical influences. Or, as Sedgwick puts
it rather more stylishly:
Comes the revolution, Comrade, you'll be tickled pink by those deconstructive jokes; you'll faint from ennui
every minute you're not smashing the state apparatus; you'll definitely
want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You'll be mournful and militant. You'll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Not tonight, dears, I have a headache.’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 146)
This
more recent regime of political ‘cool’ appearing in tandem with
cultural studies’ ongoing professionalization resembles the tightly
policed regime of thought and behaviour Morris identifies as the
‘lifestyle Leftism’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Morris, 1988,
pp. 173–186). Yet the difficulty it poses for intellectual work is that
commonsense assumptions limit the acuity of the critical methods
available to appreciate emerging everyday practices. In
Sedgwick's reading, the ‘ethical urgency’ of terms like hegemony and
subversion, or their counterparts, repression and liberation, evacuates
any critical reflection of their original theoretical formulation. The
correct codification of a cultural object or practice becomes the
endpoint of an analysis, meaning that the rich mid-ranges of agency
become extremely hard to gauge in scholarly terms. From a critical as
well as a political standpoint this can only be disturbing, given that
it is ‘the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual
creativity and change’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 13).
Blogging as Conversational Scholarship
It
is precisely the ‘mid-range’ between disciplinary insularism and public
intellectual practice that best characterizes blogging. Instead of
continuing the trend of ‘calling for’ a shift in others’ practices, I
want to use the following discussion of blogging to highlight ways in
which elements of cultural studies’ political aspirations can be
adjusted to new historical contexts. I am not suggesting that blogs are
an example of ‘the way forward’ for public intellectual practice (see
Dunlop, 2003),
nor do I think that they should be seen as a satisfactory complement to
the very real pressures of outcomes-driven academic publishing. Here I
seek merely to provide an account of their productive possibilities at a
time when a degree of hyperbole and assumption currently shrouds—and
risks—their varied uses.
In light of recent controversy—especially following anonymous revelations in The Chronicle of Higher Education that some hiring committees at US universities may discriminate against bloggers (see Tribble, 2005a,b;
and the many responses in the discussion fora)—it seems odd that
blogging suffers such persecution as a form of extracurricular
intellectual engagement. What I will call the ‘conversational
scholarship’ that it gives rise to can be seen to follow a tradition
that includes independent and small press publishing, reading groups,
salons and even café culture; that is, before the real estate boom and
rising standards of living demanded that urban-based students work full
time to support their study, severely limiting other forms of
recreational intellectual practice. The issue seems to be with the
technology itself: the simultaneously anonymous and public nature of
blogging as well as the instant feedback the software make possible.
Indeed, the virulence that typifies many blog debates, and which is
often the cause for their scorn, arises from a lack of common ground
and/or vocabulary. Blogs reveal in a very overt way how regularly
writing fails to communicate intention. They also indicate how much
distance a tertiary education can put between people trying to engage in
a conversation.
Software contributes to
blogging dynamics in a further notable way. Archives memorialize the
passion of intellectual debate as it happens. The temporality involved
in blogging's ‘call and response’ dynamic is faster and more immediate
than previous forms of intellectual writing and publishing. In this
sense, the disdain many academics feel towards blogging6
can be understood at least partly in terms of the way it records the
vicissitudes and vulnerability of intellectual practice. At the very
least, blogging is useful for the way that it offers a chance to reflect
upon which aspects of their ordinary, everyday practice scholars prefer the public to see.
Yet this very capacity to offer a platform for dialogue between writer and reader is also the political significance of weblogs.7
While blogs are generally associated with a single author, the role of
the writer quite often consists of instigator and provocateur in the
sense that Said endorses. This is a noticeable move away from any
necessary association between author and authority. Granted, it is hard
to generalize too much here: the objectives of bloggers are as diverse
as the people who write them. Yet I would venture that the amount of
notoriety that individual bloggers seek to generate in the mainstream
media and in sections of the ‘blogosphere’ often relates to the degree
to which they do maintain a belief in the notion of
author-as-authority. This is only to be expected from those with an
investment in maintaining or gaining credibility in order to contribute
to a broadcast model of communication (which I would further suggest
encapsulates the present love/hate relationship between many punditry
bloggers and journalists). Blogs reveal the mind of the critic as
impressionable and open to persuasion, for the writer is rarely able to
sustain the confidence and assurance of a fixed position. Such a
function contrasts with conventional modes of academic performance
premised on expertise and mastery. It is to admit the hesitancy involved
in the difficult task of thinking about the world.
For
cultural studies, the significant potential to be seen in blogging—in
line with the romantic new media ethos that ‘information wants to be
free’—is that knowledge loses any sense of being something to be
guarded. Instead, it becomes something to be facilitated, discussed and
improved. Blogs can create an economy of generosity and gift at the
expense of jealousy and possessiveness (cf. Williams, 1958).
They encourage collaboration as much as competition. The participatory
nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for
ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this
they illustrate very well that version of cultural studies practice
described by Stuart Hall, which is ‘to work with our always inadequate
theories to help move understanding “a little further on down the road”’
(Daryl Slack, 1996, p. 113).
In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes to and mirrors
traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. One of the
main reasons graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is
that blogs offer solidarity out of isolation, especially on long
projects. They create the conditions for collegiality, brainstorming and
frank, fast feedback while also generating and maintaining interest,
enthusiasm and motivation. Even the best supervision in the most
convivial university department cannot offer this kind of support on a
regular basis. The persistence with which established academics condemn
blogging as a distraction preventing graduate students from timely
completion and participation in their desired career does a disservice
to the many instances whereby blogs are utilized as a sophisticated
research tool. It also wilfully ignores the wider economic and political
circumstances making the potential for a tenured academic career increasingly unlikely for a new generation of graduates (Ross, 2004; Gregg, 2006b).
In
terms of the linguistic apartheid for which Brett chastises academics,
blogs are also one of the most convenient and efficient tools for
improving writing skills. Blogging forces the writer to make every word
count, to be as clear as possible in getting a message across. Unlike
the preconditions for good writing in Brett's description, it is
impossible to know precisely who your audience is as a blogger. Its
sheer publicness—the very unpredictability of audience—is what creates a
sense of immediacy and urgency.8
For
all the positive tendencies I have just noted, however, blogging can
also be a volatile, archly personal and estranging practice. To be
confronted by the opinions of others who share little concern for or
understanding of your work is a discomforting and chastening experience.
It is the quickest way to have any pretensions about academic work
deflated. Then again, this is not so very unlike the process of peer
review, or giving a conference paper. If anything, the explosiveness of
blogging flame wars serves to indicate the façade of much ‘polite’
academic discourse. A blog readership may not always share a referee's
investment in a discipline or a profession, but a willingness to offer
opinion is evidence that a particular topic has resonance beyond
academic niceties.
Outside the Comfort Zone: Feeling Ordinary in the Blogosphere
In
line with the participatory ethic for cultural studies we are
advocating in this issue, I want now to offer a brief account of the
ways in which my own theoretical presumptions have been tested and
invigorated by blogging over the last two years. The main point I want
to underline is the manner in which blogging provokes acute recognition
of what may otherwise remain ‘mere’ theoretical tenets in one's academic
work—a point which adds to the benefits of Morris's sympathetic
criticism that I have already outlined. For instance, since starting my
blog I have become a lot more conscious of my status as:
an interchangeable persona available for others’ use: despite
my knowledge of postmodern theories of identity fabrication and
simulacra I never expected that someone would use my blog for a personal
vendetta, writing under my name and also using the names of other
regular contributors to disrupt the dynamics of the blog and seek to
expose me as some kind of fraud;
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a woman (assumed to be single): despite
my feminist training I never seriously thought that meeting people
offline in public, group events would lead to volatile situations with
readers assuming intimacy and ‘entitlement’ to friendship because of
shared interests online. Even though I disagree with the
moralizing agenda attached to alarmist descriptions of new media I now
find myself holding a similar position, i.e. that even the most stable
online personas cannot be trusted. For me, the cliché has been proved;
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an academic: despite
being regarded as an ‘early career researcher’ in a university context I
have been told by readers that what I write on my blog is too academic,
too theoretical or too jargon laden, and therefore not fitting the
‘spirit’ of blogging. Others who regard my blog as academic assume that
when I write it signifies my fully formed intellectual position on
something and that I seek to argue the point I allegedly made. Still
others think that because I am an academic I will obviously be
interested in hearing the entire history of thought behind any issue
raised, because anything less would be unscholarly. This possibly
relates to:
| |||||
a
young, female academic in a particular city of Australia: stereotypes
about the place where I currently live seem to lead some people to think
I am therefore more open to guidance or correction from others who blog
from less peripheral/parochial locations, or (of equal offence) that I
deserve encouragement and support for the same reasons;
| |||||
as
an Australian feminist: blogging has drawn my attention to the
specificity of my training in Gender Studies in Australia rather than
Women's Studies or some of the more polemical versions of liberal or
radical feminism. The key feminist blogs based in the United States are
regularly engaged in the intricacies of legal rulings (namely the
ongoing fate of Roe v. Wade). Otherwise, their attention
is usually focused on issues of women's under-representation on
blogrolls, conferences, speaking circuits, linking practices between
blogs and the like. This means that I have had to turn to different
disciplines, for instance rhetoric and political science, to find allies
for the kind of work I do;
| |||||
as
a person identified with cultural studies: the majority of research
blogs are still new media- or technology-industry specific, so it is
difficult to find readers with a similar disciplinary background. On the
other hand, I have had cultural studies professors find my blog and
engage with my ideas at length—feedback I would never have received
otherwise. In terms of ‘political’ cool in the blogosphere, however,
cultural studies is often something of a punching bag, which has meant
that my blog has sometimes been used as a location for debating cultural
studies’ politics, regardless of whether I describe my own work as
political;
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as
a white, middle-class, able-bodied, urban-based professional: these
forms of cultural capital, to my mind, define both the possibilities and
the limits of blogging's audience reach at present, and while I have
expressed my ambivalence towards professional academic practice as a
career choice on a number of occasions, my lack of overtly
identity-based or marginal politics means that I often suffer
credibility problems as an individual.
| |||||
While
it is clearly limited by its subjectivity, what I think this list helps
to illustrate is that despite my training in feminism and cultural
studies, and hence my heightened theoretical understanding of the
ways in which my identity influences my perspective on the world,
having a blog has made me increasingly conscious of the multi-faceted
ways these identities play out in apparently banal, everyday encounters.
Perhaps it was an oversight to have assumed that these identities would
not be particularly relevant to the practice of my blogging; what I
wonder instead is the extent to which even the most self-reflexive of
disciplines like cultural studies regularly strips identity
characteristics from its dominant genres in order to accord itself
scholarly status. My ability to comment as a scholar on the practice
of blogging has been to some extent jeopardized by my participation in
the practice itself. At the same time, my understanding of both blogging
and cultural theory has improved considerably during this same process.
Blogging makes me aware of my gender, race, sexuality, class,
geographical location and education level with a regularity that my
typical daily encounters as an academic simply do not.
The Will to Connect
While
the analysis I have just offered seems to me an important justification
for blogging, I have yet to mention the most important reason I will
continue to do so beyond the time frame of my research. In Brett's
description from earlier, there is an implicit distinction between
academics who consider themselves to be writers and those who consider
writing to be a part of the job they do. In the face of
persistent media and colloquial opinion which categorizes blogging as
variously self-serving, self-aggrandizing or self-delusional, this
distinction is useful to makes sense of what I want to call the ‘will to
blog’. As bell hooks has also argued so eloquently:
All
academics write but not all see themselves as writers. Writing to
fulfil professional career expectations is not the same as writing that
emerges as the fulfilment of a yearning to work with words when there is
no clear benefit or reward, when it is the experience of writing that
matters. (hooks, 1999, p. 37)
As
a writer, I have a keen desire to share and discuss ideas with others.
Academic forms of evaluation and publication are often unsatisfying for
me precisely because they fail to reach an audience for whom I would
also like to write. Given the current expectations of the academic
profession, however, there appears little leeway for alternative forms
of publishing and intellectual practice. The ‘publish or perish’ dictum
has been particularly effective in narrowing the ambitions that many
academics hold for their writing to the extent that a ‘yearning to work
with words when there is no clear benefit’ is regularly met with
disbelief, if not also disapproval, from colleagues.
My
understanding of cultural studies has always been that it emerges from a
‘will to connect’ with others, or in the words of Richard Hoggart,
‘only connect’ (Hoggart, 1972). Blogging offers an exciting new avenue for academics and non-academics alike to ‘speak to each other’ (Hoggart, 1970a,).
To blog is to react to the limited range of conversations otherwise
available to us in a heavily compartmentalized neoliberal culture, to
share thoughts, ideas and dreams with those whose paths we may not cross
in everyday routines.
Blogs and Counter-professionalism
If
we live in an era when academic practice entails radical
professionalism, blogs are a way to make contact with an audience both
within and outside the narrow field of a discipline. Instead of
documenting heroic missions conducted on others’ behalf, blogs foster
conversational scholarship by actively seeking the voices of others.
Blogs are a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the
hierarchies of speech traditionally securing academic privilege. They
are a way to be reflexive about the privileges of an institutional
position in the sense that Couldry describes:
A
career in cultural studies may meet its professional obligations as
well as great success by writing regularly about the ordinary and/or
subversive practices of others. But to do so not only maintains the
observer–subject, critic–amateur distinction that mirrors wider forms of
segregation and binary thinking that are manifest in our society
(Morris, 1992)
but also proves that Brett's fears about cultural studies’ political
goals were well founded. A politics which includes academic conventions
in its sights disrupts cultural criticism's ritualistic potential by
bringing different voices into a broader conversation. Blogs allow us to
write in conjunction with non-academic ‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not
only value and improve our ideas but practise their own rigorous forms
of assessment, critique and review.
if
you take it as axiomatic that discursive resources are unequally
distributed, then for academics to use their discursive resources to
reveal the places where others are speaking may sometimes help those
others to be heard. (Couldry, 1996, p. 324)
Blogs
are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as
banal. They help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar
secluded from the concerns of the ‘real world’. But blogging remains a
liability in a professional environment focused on Tier 1 journals,
intellectual property and the tyranny of excellence. As a form of
counter-professionalism, blogs exhaust our most precious resources as
academics: good ideas and spare time. And this is the crux of the
dilemma. Despite my commitment to scholarly ideals, I am equally
committed to any practice that makes learning, thinking and writing feel
ordinary as well as important. In this article my only concern has been
that such an objective, while apparently fitting the original impulse
of cultural studies, may no longer be extraordinary enough to warrant
much attention.
Notes
[1]
For the purposes of this paper I refer to blogging in general despite
there being many distinctions in online journal practice. At least part
of my motivation in avoiding mention of journaling as opposed to
blogging is to discuss issues often downplayed in the gender and age
characteristics afforded to each (see Gregg, forthcoming 2006a).
[2] My use of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everyday’ are residues of the original context for this paper, the CSAA conference Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-first Century Quotidian, Murdoch University, Perth, Dec. 2004.
[3] For specific discussion of the interpellative strategies of new media commentary see Cohen (this issue). Graham Meikle (2002) describes a similar process of ‘backing in to the future’ in his Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet.
[4] For an overview of the former, see Culler and Lamb (2003). For a range of views on the public intellectual in an Australian context, see Bartoloni et al. (1997), Dessaix (1998) and more recently Carter (2004).
The 1994 Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference held at
the University of Technology, Sydney, also had the theme ‘Intellectuals
and Communities’.
[5] Bruce Robbins (1993) notes that this is an achievement typically overlooked in debates on the politics of professionalism.
[6] And, I would add, e-mail list culture.
[7] Tim Dunlop (2003),
one of Australia's most prominent ‘political’ bloggers, argues that
‘blogging has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving
the division between intellectual and citizen’. His essay is a more
extensive engagement with the concerns raised by Brett's article and the
idea of blogging as a public intellectual practice. ‘Rather than being
in decline, as it is fashionable to suggest’, Dunlop claims that blogs
show the category of public intellectual to be ‘exploding’.
[8]
Comments from readers of this paper have led me to agree that one of
the most sobering aspects of blogging regularly is the realization that
one's audience is insular, restricted and knowable, that the idea
of writing into the unknown is one of the great fallacies about
everyday blogging. However, I would still want to accord a degree of
power to the silent readers many blogs enjoy, and the importance of this
albeit small unknown readership in shaping the urgency of address.
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