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Academic distinction
While universities continue to be significant in the production of what-passes-for knowledge, theory, science and so on (for reasons that have to do with resources, libraries, payment of relatively high wages and therefore the allocation of time), it's nevertheless also the case that the internet - among other things - has posed significant problems for anyone wishing to protect the status of universities, and perhaps the universities' increasingly shaky monopoly on the authorisation and licensing of expertise, knowlege, etc.
So, while some feel nauseated, I'm actually a little amused, saddened and, from a distance, quite fascinated by the protectionist gesture of academicblogs.org.
Because I'm quite sure that academics, as much as they use the internet to seek out forms of communication and collaboration that exceed the limits (and political pressures) of the university, many of them also trawl the internet - and particularly the non-academic spaces of the internet - looking for theoretical innovations they might convert into ideas for publication, academic capital, job security and suchlike. The credentialist boundary of academicblogs.org is, I think, very much about promoting the pretense that academics do not do any of these things - the pretense that the walls of the university remain intact or that they should be more meaningfully applied in the blogsphere. Or, it could be, also, a kind of mourning, of something - what? - believed to have been lost, or at risk of being lost, in the encounter with cyberspace and blogging.
Now, I doubt that any academic blogger thinks of the blogsphere as an 'ivory tower'. Indeed, I suppose that the attraction of blogging is, for many who toil away in various institutions, that it is precisely not an 'ivory tower'. And yet, it seems that the aspiration to recreate and recapture, in and through cyberspace, a sense of elevation, disciplinary boundaries and a (state- or corporate-) authorised intellectuality remains strong. Unfortunately.
It also seems a remarkable displacement of some, perhaps understandable, fears that arise from the the increasing competititiveness, political pressures and desperation within the universtities - or just fearful, compared to, say, many of the projects linked to here. Is it really the putative absence of strict boundaries between academic and non-academic blogging that has created increasing levels of competition, higher workloads or casualised conditions within the university, and therefore an enhanced bid for distinction?
By s0metim3s | October 6, 2006 in Academia, Blogs | Permalink
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Academic Blogs: a new wiki designed to create an invisible college of academic blogs. It started as an idea for an aggregation of theory blogs, I think, but the project has developed. Ange is already writing a post about this for Long Su... [Read More]
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Comments
Good post. I must say, my previous enthusiasm wanes.
Though, to give McLemee (and Farrell) the benefit of the doubt, it is only just beginning...and these things are always only more or less imperfect tools.
At least our Adam has gotten his dual Religion/Theology and Linguistics/Philosophy listing well in hand; hrm. The latter section is predictably analytic-centric, it seems (short our Young Hegelian, whose blog disappeared some time ago anyway – I have the caches saved somewhere, if anyone is interested). The fact that some of the most valuable blogs are run by non-academics (thinking of Ray Davis, and others), and some of the most consistently "continental" too...well it's all predictable enough.
So we get a single listing in Culture/Theory/something or other..not that any of that matters.
Suppose it should really be up to the individual whether they prefer media/communications, literature/culture or philosophy...
Of course, if anything is clear, it is that there should absolutely be no "Theory" category whatsoever (headed by SEK, if rumours are to be believed); I'm sorry, but Bachelard and Heidegger, Derrida and Agamben scholars belong in the linguistics/philosophy section, right there beside John Holbo's children's drawings and Belle's recipes (the absence of "poetics" in that heading is rather striking). But ok, I'm off the hobbyhorse, and such.
Your third paragraph is spot on, A.
Posted by: Matt | Oct 6, 2006 2:11:29 PM
People without a university appointment can request to be on the list. The Weblog was put on the blogroll when I was a lowly MA student, even though being in a PhD program was the normal standard.
This cynical interpretation didn't even occur to me.
The solution to the problem of categories is to go in there and fucking edit it, since it's a Wiki. I'm sure you could also e-mail Harry and suggest a different breakdown -- linguistics separate from philosophy, a distinction between analytic and continental, etc.
Of course, editing it would send the message of approval of the project as a whole, so it might be strategically incorrect for you guys to do that if you're opposed to the idea in principle.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 6, 2006 2:23:46 PM
I'll also note that this blogroll basically existed on Crooked Timber's site long before the launch of a separate site -- which was, of course, suggested by Scott McLemee, who doesn't have so much as a BA.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 6, 2006 2:25:08 PM
I'm hardly opposed in principle.
What about sometimes' post struck you as cynical?
Posted by: Matt | Oct 6, 2006 2:32:38 PM
I mean, there are requests, and then there are requests:
Very rarely, blogs written by non-academics may qualify. If you think a blog by a non-academic qualifies on its merits, you should suggest it to one of the Senior Editors, with supporting evidence. The Senior Editor will then decide whether to nominate it. Otherwise it is liable to be deleted summarily. If you are a non-academic and you nominate your own blog for consideration, don't be offended if it isn't accepted - only very exceptional blogs will be included. The intent of this site isn't to provide comprehensive lists of blogs and resources dealing with history, politics, archaeology etc - there are already very good sites in existence that do this. It's to provide a resource for academic bloggers, and readers of academic blogs.
Posted by: Matt | Oct 6, 2006 2:34:50 PM
The issue is not whether a blog is included or excluded, but what is served by insisting on a distinction between academic and non-academic blogs, however modified by the (more or less arbitrary) discretion of wiki editors or section admins.
Nothing you've said, Adam, explains why that distinction is important.
Which is what interests me, and I see no point in not thinking about it. Related, and something else here.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 6, 2006 2:47:44 PM
One could just as easily read it as an attempt among academic bloggers to say, "See, lots of academics blog." It might be a defense against enemies internal to the university system, rather than primarily a defense against the unwashed masses outside. That possibility isn't even considered -- the difference between academics as a class and the corporatizing administrators is folded into a monolithic concept of academic privilege.
I want there to be more academic privilege, not less. And I think it's ridiculous to claim that the Internet has negatively affected academic privilege -- many of the most prominent bloggers are academics (or former academics), for instance -- and to even compare it to the culture of corporatization, leading to adjunctification, a withering away of tenure, etc., in the decline of academic privilege.
At the end of the day, this post is just misplaced blog triumphalism.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 6, 2006 3:21:59 PM
Adam,
It might be a defense against enemies internal to the university system, rather than primarily a defense against the unwashed masses outside.
Um, it might be, but seriously, I didn't consider it because it says nothing about excluding university management, does it. (Are there any blogs by university managers you know of, btw?)
The criteria of distinction is academic (and non-academic) - and you've yet to give any reasons as to why this is an important distinction to make.
I want there to be more academic privilege, not less.
And what would this privelige consist of, exactly?
More later.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 6, 2006 3:49:46 PM
The distinction already exists in real life, and it's an obvious one. It's not like they've devised the category of "academic" themselves.
Also, it's just a fact that most academic bloggers are much more concerned that blogging be considered an acceptable activity for academics than they are that no one else get to talk about Walter Benjamin or something. (Remember the controversy surrounding the anonymous Chronicle piece about how bloggers should be blackballed from all academic employment?)
You're just hallucinating a motive out of thin air -- mine is based on what these people actually tend to talk about. This is almost, but not quite, the equal to RIPope's statement that very few people seem to have devoted much time to analyzing blogging as a phenomenon.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 6, 2006 4:14:25 PM
I'm confused; are you saying she is hallucinating, speculatively, "a kind of mourning" on behalf of academia?
Or is it just the connecting of that with this: "...promoting the pretense that academics do not do any of these things - the pretense that the walls of the university remain intact or that they should be more meaningfully applied in the blogsphere."
I would probably beg to distinguish, however difficultly, something like the rigors and protocols of "academic" standards (or at least their ideals), from the more mundanely obvious (but still significant) things as "resources, libraries, payment of relatively high wages and therefore the allocation of time) [???]" or for that matter the evils of the state, bulging corporatization, neoMcarthyism, etc.
Being as careful as A to avoid the knee-jerk pejorative merely doesn't mean pondering the insistence on such boundaries (namely, their reactionary nature) isn't still interesting or even necessary.
To wit:
It also seems a remarkable displacement of some, perhaps understandable, fears...
Adam:
(Remember the controversy surrounding the anonymous Chronicle piece about how bloggers should be blackballed from all academic employment?)
Posted by: Matt | Oct 6, 2006 7:16:36 PM
Ummm, as Adam says, you're hallucinating a motive out of thin air. To quote what I've said in the past in a Chronicle piece that was specifically intended as a counterblast against the attacks on academic bloggers that Adam mentions:
cross-blog conversations can turn the traditional hierarchies of the academy topsy-turvy. An interesting viewpoint expressed by an adjunct professor (or, even more shocking, an "independent scholar") will almost certainly receive more attention than ponderous stodge regurgitated by the holder of an endowed chair at an Ivy League university. Prominent academics who start blogging do have an initial advantage; they're more likely to attract early attention than people without established reputations. But if they want to keep readers and attract other bloggers' links over the medium term, they need to provide provocative and interesting content. Otherwise, they're likely to fall by the wayside....
t's not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem "threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to ... well, decorum." Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven't had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.
The reason why there's a high bar for non-academic blogs doesn't have anything to do with "the universities' increasingly shaky monopoly on the authorisation and licensing of expertise, knowlege, etc," still less with pretending that academics don't search "the internet - and particularly the non-academic spaces of the internet - looking for theoretical innovations they might convert into ideas for publication, academic capital, job security and suchlike." It's motivated by practical experience. As someone who has maintained, more or less well, a list of academic blogs for some time, I've discovered from bitter experience that unless you have a clear and exacting standard of some sort, you're liable to be deluged with cranks and crackpots who are convinced that they've discovered the secret of perpetual motion, or how Theory masks a leftwing alliance with the Islamofascists to subject our children to dhimmitude or whatever. Now, maybe I'm oppressing these people with the Power of Disciplinarity and my Accumulated Cultural Capital. But as a simple matter of practicality, I think that this list is likely not to be a very useful tool unless there's some cutoff point; there are a lot of lunatics out there on the Internets. Certainly, having the criterion being membership of the academy (with some room for non-members who have interesting things to say, reinforces academic hegemony etc etc. And there are a few nutters in the academy too. But short of saying that the blogs suitable for inclusion on the list are those that I and the other editors like for our idiosyncratic reasons (which doesn't seem to me to be at all likely to be an improvement), some sort of external criterion of validation is necessary, and all the available ones that I can think of have implications for power relations, exclusion and inclusion, and the whole Bourdieuvian shebang.
You may disagree, in which case I would enthusiastically welcome you to take the information provided in the wiki (which is licensed under a Creative Commons license, exactly so that people can do this sort of thing) and create your own resource, with whatever rules or lack of rules seem to you to be best suited to produce the kinds of discussions and community that you prefer. Or indeed, start your own from scratch if that suits you better.
Matt - I thought a bit about the philosophy/Continental philosophy/Theory question while putting this together, and came to the conclusion that I didn't know enough myself to decide how to organize this. What I have done, as best as I could (and almost certainly with some errors), is to organize people by the departments that they work in; e.g. Jodi Dean is classified as a political theorist. I realise that hiring practices in philosophy are the results of a long standing fight in which some have lost out - but I also don't feel that I personally should be the one who decides this question in more than the way that I have done (which is highly contingent). As the FAQs say, anyone who feels that they have been misclassified can shift their entry from the one list into the other, so if you and others feel that your blogs are better considered as philosophy blogs then go ahead. I would ask however that you list them under one field only; I recognize that this creates problems for some blogs, but a free-for-all in which everyone tries to list their blog under as many fields as possible so as to maximize attention is likely to be even more problematic.
Posted by: Henry | Oct 6, 2006 7:52:02 PM
Now, maybe I'm oppressing these people with the Power of Disciplinarity and my Accumulated Cultural Capital. But as a simple matter of practicality, I think that this list is likely not to be a very useful tool unless there's some cutoff point; there are a lot of lunatics out there on the Internets.
Of course you're right, Henry, and I'm not sure that objectors would have a problem with some kind of selection process. Every blogger (academic or not) does it, if only to delete spam. What bugs me is the contradiction between the discourse of democratic inclusion deployed in the desire to include every possible academic blog, to make a comprehensive and categorical list, and the reality, which is that editors' decisions will prevail. Why not make a list of theory blogs and edit it on whim? Why this incredible desire to reproduce the Enlightenment online, to institute proper disciplinary categories (and all the enjoyable, time-consuming arguments over who should be placed where, lists of exceptions and the uncategorisable that accompany such desires and place them firmly in the domain of the collegiate librarian fetish)? Especially when everyone has already acknowledged how disciplinary boundaries are localised and dependent on institutional micropolitics.
Sorry if this sounds cynical, but what precise use will the wiki have, apart from designating some blogs 'academic' and others not? Given the incredible online networks along disciplinary/area lines that depend on the creative labour of people who aren't in the academy, or who see their work as semi-academic, what on earth could Academic Blogs do that would be useful for someone doing research, or looking for community? I'm thinking here of fanfiction resources or cinema bibliographies and journals whose ties are to shared spectatorships first, and whose academic participation comes second. (Don't get me started on the gendered implications of this desire to distinguish between 'real academic work' and not.)
And Adam, your claim that the wiki might aid survival inside academia is fair enough. But if academics must voluntarily expend yet more unpaid labour on making a Proper Academic Blogroll TM in order to endow ourselves with legitimacy (“Hey, we're value-adding! Get off our backs!”) we've already ceded the turf to the corporatising drones. To whom, I surmise, "Academic Blogs" would be about as meaningful as a buttercup.
Posted by: az | Oct 7, 2006 1:02:14 AM
There seems to me something very like nation-building in this whole idea. First, a very clear border is drawn - between academic blog and not-academic blog - then the rules of citizenship are produced. Those on the inside are citizens, and though a small number of outsiders are granted entry into the inside, they must jump through all sorts of regulative hoops, taking tests, passing administrative review, swearing oaths.
As if the idea of drawing such clear lines weren't objectionable enough, the criterion for deciding who belongs is not even the content of the blogs but the identity of the blogger. (And apparently there are some scofflaw academics out there who are blogging without revealing their credentials!) And so the division of labor is reproduced without any disciplinary intervention, particularly the strict delineation between head worker and hand worker.
Posted by: Eric | Oct 7, 2006 2:05:14 AM
Henry, thanks for the response.
I hope the philosophy section will become more rigorously open and enriched, though the institutional reality as you mention presents some obvious hurdles (it is foreseeably hard to muster numbers of academics in support, when they are already outnumbered, etc.)
In this I suppose my initial thoughts on the matter from several months ago haven't changed; either such an effort can actively work to be a corrective (to obvious imbalance), or it can simply mimic the institutional politics already in place. Hopefully it will at least be more sensitive to change than the university, traditionally, is.
Once again, I realize he includes a "popular" category, but Alfredo's superb blogroll (along with the listings Angela and others mention) seem for the moment far more interesting, not least of all for not only the lack of fear in their organizing principle, but also their potential contestation of/deliberate self-positioning slightly outside the university (granted, even Michael Berube does this too, to some degree). That is to say, no offense, but even if I were an academic, I'm not sure I would prefer to be known as one.
In short though, I remain willfully optimistic. If a new audience of the bored and the restless among students must first go through the blogging pilgrims to get to the organic stuff, then so be it.
(As it sounds now, to get an organic intellectual listed alongside CT, a certified academic must not only give her personal seal of approval, but also muster a handful of friends prepared to argue in favor of her paternalism.) Thankfully the Internet itself is not so easily divided..yet.
On another note, for those inclined, discussion has apparently commenced.
Posted by: Matt | Oct 7, 2006 4:14:11 PM
Any preferences, strong or mild, on whether LS wishes to be listed as a "philosophy/linguistics/poetics" or "culture/theory/literature/rhetoric" blog? Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Posted by: Charles | Oct 7, 2006 4:20:15 PM
Why not political theory/political science - or even sociology (at least two of us have or will have PhDs in sociology)?
Posted by: Craig | Oct 7, 2006 5:35:57 PM
I would vote for philosophy just to annoy Brian Leiter, but anyway is fine, really (by my rough count there are at least two or equivalent in political science, two in literature/rhetoric, one in media/communication studies(?) and two in philosophy...)
Posted by: Matt | Oct 7, 2006 6:21:22 PM
It's interesting that you mention Walter Benjamin, Adam, since he failed his habilitation and so couldn't be employed as an academic.
In any case, there was nothing triumphalist about blogs (or the internet) in the above post.
As merely one aspect of this, and so far unmentioned: all institutions, including universties, which rely on forms of copyright are struggling with ways to assert copyright on the internet. The remarks in the post about how academics make use of the internet has to do with the ways in which academics are obliged to assert intellectual property, and to do so in specific ways, as a condition of employment. On that note: I doubt that anyone is being 'oppressed by accumulated cultural capital' - on the contrary, I think that this is felt not to be as secure or accumulated (through the internets) as it might be.
And yes, there is a distinction between academics and non-academics "in the real world" - the question, once again, is why this distinction should be important to assert in aggregations, and in this way.
That is, not a distinction over content, but distinctions of credentials which are explicitly asserted as representing distinctions of rationality, quality and so on.
As I said, I don't see the point in not thinking this stuff through. Resorting to psychological or personalised explanations - or personalised accusations of cynicism and hallucination - is one way of not thinking this through. I didn't raise the issue of personal "motivations," not least because I doubt those are either as transparent or personal/individual as some responses (but not others) have suggested.
Some of those links mentioned earlier are here. Also, Tiziana Terranova & Marc Bousquet's "Recomposing the University", and Workplace - the only academic journal that I know of which openly acknowledges that 'academics' is an occupational category.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 8, 2006 2:33:39 AM
As I said, I don't see the point in not thinking this stuff through. Resorting to psychological or personalised explanations - or personalised accusations of cynicism and hallucination - is one way of not thinking this through. I didn't raise the issue of personal "motivations," not least because I doubt those are either as transparent or personal/individual as some responses (but not others) have suggested.
So your assertion that this was a "protectionist gesture" and the "remarkable displacement of some, perhaps understandable, fears" had nothing to say about motives? This is all structures operating on other structures without my personal motivations entering into it? Come off it. This was a rather silly post, which had nothing to do with "thinking it through" and everything to do with making some rather lazy and badly thought-out gestures in the direction of a pseudo-structural analysis. If you want to do this kind of analysis properly, you really need to do the hard research that goes into a proper genealogy of what is going on, which is hard work admittedly, of the kind that's not usually associated with blogposts. Without that, you get what's on display in this blogpost, which is chunks of semi-digested theory being regurgitated as a substitute for actual thought and analysis.
Posted by: Henry | Oct 8, 2006 11:57:18 AM
Sure, it has quite a bit to say about 'motivation,' but that hardly means such motivations - particularly given the collective nature of the project, as well as its institutional reference-points - are as privatised or personal as you keep suggesting. Indeed, is there some register other than a personalised (and atomised) one possible here, beyond the to and fro of personalised insults and the taking of offense? Because that seems to me like a distraction.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Oct 8, 2006 12:42:49 PM
A rather silly distraction, one might suggest? Sadly this thread seems to be approaching a familiar wall.
I'm curious what Henry makes of the actual links provided (presumably they are all just "chunks of semi-digested theory" - yuck!)
Posted by: Chin the Uninevitable | Oct 8, 2006 12:51:44 PM
Okay...so on the issue of categorization, I hereby call a vote! (as if)
Opinions of readers, and new creative categories, also welcome (this should be interesting).
Posted by: Charles | Oct 8, 2006 3:20:41 PM
Testing...
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 8, 2006 6:13:57 PM
If I said that this blog was the result of structural forces -- namely, the realization that the tight academic job market means that at least some of the people here are unlikely to make it in academia, and therefore an attempt to carve out a space where failing to achieve that academic post will be seen as neutral or, ideally, a point of honor -- would individuals here not take it personally?
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 8, 2006 6:16:06 PM
Maybe, instead of taking it personally, they'd actually debate the issue.
It's quite odd, but I notice that the Academic Blogs list intersects almost not at all with the large network of explicitly political blogs that come out of the US, like Blackademic, Feministe, etc. Many of these are written by 'academics'. Is that intentional (like, leveling the playing field and giving some right-wing or apolitical blogs representation, because of the 'glut' of leftist blogs?) Or is that just what Henry and others' vision of the humanities looks like, kinda like before 1980?
Posted by: az | Oct 8, 2006 11:04:40 PM
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