Humanities academics’ poor communication skills
Today I was most inspired to write a comment at Binary Bonsai, where Michael Heilemann was complaining about DAC 2005 delegates’ inability to express themselves clearly. It’s a post in its own right.
To academics, Michael, the words you think are barely known are commonplace: they use them every day. Academia has its own dialect, and it is able to do so because academics aren’t, as a rule, forced to have much contact with the world outside academia. It’s incredibly destructive, because the more time academics spend with each other, reinforcing their curious use of language, the more they ensure no-one in the world at large will be interested in what they have to say.
Why did academics start using this language to begin with? Why do they tolerate speech that often verges on nonsensical? The answer, I believe, is in the emergence of literary modernism in the early 20th century. Experimental writers of prose from Ezra Pound to James Joyce attempted to reinvent literary style according to the idea that new times demanded new language, and they produced some famously unreadable pieces like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans.
The “make it new” idea of modernism seems to mesh rather well with the need for humanities scholars to write something “original” to get their doctorate. Rather than talking about something new, you can talk about something old using new words that you made up yourself, or by taking an old, incomprehensible study of something and making it incomprehensible in a slightly different way. The experimental techniques of the literary modernists made their way into the academy, where they slowly infected almost all of the humanities, throughout the world.
These days, to get a doctorate in the humanities, you usually have to emulate your peers’ incomprehensible style. This is called being scholarly. Sadly, the people you think are unenthusiastic on stage probably are very passionate about what they’re trying so unsuccessfully to talk about, but they’re labouring under the extraordinary effort of producing convoluted sentences.
To get a doctorate, you also have to cite “previous scholarship.” If there isn’t much in your field (as there usually isn’t in game studies), you have to choose some from another field. Which explains why you might be hearing people going on about literary hypertexts, political theory, or psychoanalysis when it seems they really ought to be telling you about a game they played. It’s also, sadly, part of what they have to do to convince other academics that studying videogames is a worthwhile activity.
It was the entrenched poverty of communication in academia that made my time as a PhD student in Melbourne, Australia, very unhappy. At DAC 2003, I put forth the same tripe that seems to have been boring you for the last day or so. But I got tired of it, I spoke against it, and I tried to stop doing it. It earned me no love, but now I’m living in Japan, thousands of kilometres away from my university, I feel much more at home in my intellectual life. I can think more clearly about my PhD thesis when I don’t have to spend time with my colleagues.
For what it’s worth, I found the Scandinavian contingent at DAC 2003 to be among the plainest-speaking of the delegates. Think yourself lucky you’re living among the best of them.
End government arts funding now!
So I proposed in my review of Japanese Story. Adam Ford commented:
This is a joke, right?
No, Adam, it’s no joke. Here’s why I’d like to see an immediate end to government arts funding:
Taxation is a form of coercion (which under normal circumstances I view as always being wrong). The government uses the threat of force (eventual imprisonment if you don’t pay) to extort money from you. One may argue that taxation allows us to provide necessary services, and even socially beneficial services, but since the coercion is wrong the government should tax only when absolutely necessary, and as little as possible.
Art is a luxury. This doesn’t mean to say I’d want to live without it, but it’s not so absolutely necessary that the government should extort money from people to pay for it. The wrong involved in taxation, for me, outweighs the limited benefits of funding the arts.
Creative work should be for audiences, unless it’s just your own self-indulgent catharsis that you keep in a drawer/shed/etc. One of the good things about subjecting artists to market pressures is that it forces them to really think about what their audience wants. Some artists might want to do something crazy that most people will never enjoy or understand, or some piece of political propaganda or nation-building that a government body would be happier to fund than audiences would be to consume. Such artists don’t have to rely on taxation to fund their life and work: James Joyce, for instance, enjoyed private patronage, and despite Bloomsday, I would classify Ulysses as one of those crazy pieces of work that most people don’t get (I slogged through it, though, and actually enjoyed most of it). Even in a more populist vein, work that doesn’t have an obvious potential for commercialisation can still be funded by private patronage. This is what Jason Kottke, who recently quit his job to blog full-time, is banking on.
If an artist can’t get audiences to fund their work, though, either by buying it or donating to it, they obviously have to find other ways of making a living, unless they’re a wealthy dilettante (man, I wish that was me—-I’m just another tax-funded leech). Under no circumstances should creative workers imagine that they are entitled to this support from the government, nor that it has a duty to support us. I can’t blame anyone from taking the money that gets dished out (after all, I take my government scholarship): you’d be mad to turn it down, since if you do it’ll only go to someone less worthy and less principled. But this doesn’t mean that the money should get dished out in the first place. I once read a quote from Mark Twain where he advised aspiring authors to “write for three years, and if no-one pays you, give up,” or something to that effect. I think that’s good advice. Surely there are people out there who are wasting their time on artistic pursuits that they’re just no good at, and that no-one (not even hyper-sophisticated private patrons) is interested in. If they find working another job for a living robs them of the energy they need to create, then it can’t be helped. Shôganai, ne, as they say in Japan.
Just to make things perfectly clear, it’s not just government arts funding that I’m opposed to. It’s funding for all things that are clearly luxuries. That includes sports, public swimming pools and so on, street parties, Christmas decorations in the CBD, tourist information centres, museums, art galleries, and maybe, even, public libraries. Yes, public libraries. I am a mad, evil bastard.
It would break my heart to get rid of public libraries, but should I be driven to advocate their end, to be consistent? I think perhaps I should. I am confident that people would find ways to share books, probably using the internet and tools like Delicious Library or BookCrossing to build private book-sharing networks that aren’t built on a foundation of coercion.
End government arts funding now!