Bookburning. I don’t like it. I hope you don’t like it. But there are things to be said in its favor. Look in a university library and you’ll find hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Go to one of the sections marked “Studies” – Women’s, Black, Gender, Media, Communication, take your pick. Pull a book at random off the shelves, and you’ll probably come across something in favor of bookburning straight away. Here’s an example from Stuart Allan, a lecturer in “media and cultural studies at the University of Glamorgan”:1
In this way, a Bakhtinian critique of news discourse brings to the fore the contradictory imperatives of truthfulness as they are re-inflected in a news context which implicitly assumes the status of being a factual translation of reality. In attempting to prioritize for discussion the ‘objective’ journalist’s claim of referential transparency, this issue of how monologic configurations of truth inform the ‘discipline of objectivity’ as a seemingly apolitical (‘gender-neutral’) normative ideal is critical.2Words fail me. I wish they failed him too. They don’t. He goes on like that for pages. Pages and pages and pages. “Currently, he is writing a book on news culture for Open University Press”.3 Deary me. Let’s have some David Hume:
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.4If we had to burn some of the books in a university library, that would be the justification for doing it. Not that I would want to but, as I hope you’re persuaded by now, there are things to be said in its favor. Writing like Stuart Allan’s is worthless by almost any standard you care to apply. It says nothing interesting or profound. It says it in execrable prose. It’s complete and utter tosh and twaddle. It even ceases to be amusing after the first couple of paragraphs.
But there is a standard by which it isn’t worthless. Stuart Allan’s own standard. He’s an academic. It’s his job to produce stuff like that. It earns him money and status. And that, I think, is the key to all those worthless millions of words filling all those thousands of books on all those hundreds of feet of shelving in university libraries all over the world. The point of Stuart Allan’s writing is to justify his existence to other academics in the same field. The point of their writing is to justify their existence to him.
Then again, isn’t the same true of all academics? If an academic can’t justify his existence to other academics he can’t be an academic. That applies just as much in maths or nuclear physics as it does in “media and cultural studies”. And maths and nuclear physics are even more impenetrable to outsiders, aren’t they? Yes, but they have an excuse. Ordinary language is not designed to talk about topological transformations in seventeen dimensions or the gravitational collapse of red giants. And mathematicians and nuclear physicists don’t just have to justify themselves to their colleagues but to their subjects too: the universe notices when you talk nonsense in maths or nuclear physics. Your equations come out wrong or your experiments fail.
The universe doesn’t notice when you talk nonsense in one or another of the “Studies”. Nor do academics in those fields. This was proved very clearly by the so-called “Sokal Affair”, in which the American physicist Alan Sokal composed a deliberately nonsensical article and sent it to the prestigious postmodern journal Social Text. It was accepted for publication and published without anyone – from editors to readers – noticing anything wrong. After all, why should they? The language isn’t designed to carry meaning, so how can you tell when someone’s deliberately talking nonsense? Perhaps Stuart Allan himself was. Perhaps he was laughing up his sleeve as he wrote that article for News, Gender and Power (Routledge, 1998).
I doubt it, though. So let’s consider the purpose of this kind of writing further. If the language of academia isn’t designed to carry meaning, what is it designed for? I’ve suggested that it’s to justify the existence of academics to other academics, but how does it do this? By being what might be called a “badge of belonging”. Academics like Stuart Allan and the other contributors to News, Gender and Power are addressing fellow academics. They need some way of identifying themselves as part of the group, and they find it in language, or rather, in jargon. This term was originally French and meant “the inarticulate utterance or twittering of birds”.5 Birds twitter to survive – to warn of danger or identify themselves as potential mates, for example. They don’t twitter to convey abstract or complex information. The same seems to be true of modern academics. It may even be significant that the most heavily “jargoned” piece in the book is by Stuart Allan, who is, of course, a man. He has identified himself fully with a postmodern feminist agenda but may be still be behaving in a typically male way, sending a mating call of inarticulate twittering in such passages as:
Now is the time, in my view, to engage with journalistic inflections of the ‘order of ordinary life’ precisely as they seek to reaffirm the patriarchal boundaries of truth within the limits of ‘objectively factual reporting’. In closing, then, I wish to suggest that we take up Bakhtin’s challenge to refashion our relationships to truth, to generate radically new ways of hearing the multivoicedness of the social world. Such a commitment to dialogicising the abstract universality of monologic truth-claims may succeed in highlighting the parameters of their authority in ways which disrupt their ideological purchase vis-à-vis the projections of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ which they actively re-inscribe as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’.6Et cetera ad nauseam (or is he taking the piss?). But note that “multivoicedness”: elsewhere he refers to “monologic truth” and the “denial of its lived locatedness in the social hierarchies of time, space and place.”7 I’ve come across that usage before:
The shape of the givenness of Jesus Christ answers the question both as to the reality of the livingness of God and as to the nature of the liveliness of man. ... The givenness of the personalness of Jesus Christ is, then, the givenness of the personalness of God in terms of materiality and history.8This is from The Glory of Man (1967), a theological work by Dr David Jenkins, the egomaniac former Bishop of Durham, and the usage there probably has the same origin as it does in Allan’s article, as an imitation of some overworked suffix in, say, German philosophy or theology. In fact, it’s interesting to compare modern academic writing with theology. Theology of both kinds: traditional and modernist. There are some important similarities and some important differences:
...St. Bernard cries out with reason (Ser 24, in Cant.)... St. John Chrysostom (Hom. lxxxviii., in Mat.) makes a very wonderful proposition... Father Francis Suarez, a celebrated doctor of the society of Jesus, pronounced these words... St John Climacus relates... the definition which Boethius, (lib. III.,) gives... It is written of St. Matilda... as St. Cyprian says, (lib. de sing. Cler.)... St. Bernard, discoursing on these motives...“Following Barthes...” Like traditional theologians, modern academics do a lot of “following”. They are continually appealing to authority, and “truth” is established not, as in a proper science, by observation and experiment, but by unproven assertion, either by the writer herself or by some other writer in the same field. Modern academia has its prophets and holy books, often, appropriately enough, in foreign languages: the French of Barthes and Derrida, the German of Marx and Heidegger, and so on.The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, Meditations VI, IX, XIII, X, XXII, IX.9
British media scholar Colin Sparks (1991) has related...10 For Valerie Walkerdine, the contradiction ... (Walkerdine 1997: 162)...11 ... we must turn to the recent work of feminist scholars ... (Nancy Fraser, Mary Ryan, Joan Landes, Carole Pateman, Seyla Benhabib and Iris Young among them)...12 As Cohen (1996:191) observes... Balibar’s observation ... (Balibar 1994:194)... As Williams (1997:227) suggests ...13 ...what I will call, following Barthes, a kind of punctum.14
Modernist theology has mostly abandoned the habit of appealing to scripture or traditional Christian writers (some of whom are a little too obviously psychopathic for modern tastes), but also has its authorities, who supply weight for similarly unproven assertions:
What Tillich is meaning by God is the exact opposite of any deus ex machina ... He is in Bonhoeffer’s words ‘the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, a depth of reality reached ... in Kierkegaard’s fine phrase, by ‘a deeper immersion in existence’.15But words like “immersion” are an important part of the difference between modernist theology and modern academia. These theological words, like their academic equivalents, are intended not to carry a clear meaning but to flavor the prose. The flavor of theological prose is meant to be sweet, that of academic prose astringent. In fact, they are respectively sickly and metallic. Here are some typical words and phrases from modernist theology:
living, growing, hidden treasure, organic, water, stream, current, mutually enriching, energy, revitalize, energised in these strands ... nourishment, nurture, roots, growing, umbilical, survival, life-long, umbilical communication cord.16And here are some typical words and phrases from modern academia:
public sphere, strategy, reconceptualization, construct, gender dynamics, vertical and horizontal segregation, hegemonic discourse, access, interrogate, stasis, intersection, polemic, autonomy, parameter17Both seem to be imitating and borrowing from science, but where modernist theology chooses biology (or perhaps natural history), postmodern academia chooses the hard sciences and technology – physics (“dynamics”, “stasis”) and computing (“access”, “parameter”) – as well, interestingly, as military science (“strategy”, “interrogate”). Modernist theology tries to evade reason by appealing to the emotion aroused by nature, postmodern academia by a spurious appeal to precision and rigor.
Perhaps this is connected with a strange and interesting observation made by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1932). Little can probably said in general about the politics of physicists or mathematicians or computer scientists; academics working in one or another of the “Studies” are, it’s probably true to say, almost always left-wing. This is what Orwell had to say about the left-wing temperament before the Second World War:
The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order.18Perhaps this explains the curiously militaristic and instrumental tone of so much of the work of left-wing academics. When sociology, for example, wanted a term for a group of people it took “cohort” from military history: the word was originally applied to a unit in a Roman legion. The “Studies” took “access” from computing: a (male) writer in News, Gender and Power tells us that “Young people are rarely accessed”.19 Metal-and-plastic computers are “accessed”, and so, for left-wing academics, are flesh-and-blood human beings.
Just as, for them, the world itself is “read”. Behavior and culture are texts to be read and subjected to “critique”: deconstructed, contextualized, re-narrativized, dialogicized. In fact, modern academics seem to do the same thing to language as they do to life: they treat it as an mechanical or industrial process:
The omnipresent circulation of differences would not pose a problem if the normative form of the feminist reconceptualization of the public sphere were operative at the level of institutions.20Part of the ugliness of a sentence like that comes from its unnecessary complexity: the meaning of a word like “reconceptualization” has been packed in stages that the reader must then unpack: a noun (concept) is converted to an adjective (conceptual) that is converted to a verb (conceptualize) that is converted to a noun (conceptualization). And the sentence uses “were operative at the level of institutions” rather than “operated in institutions” (or “worked in institutions”). Writing like this seems to make a fetish of grammar and morphology – the way language organizes and creates words – and to ignore aesthetics and semantics. There is no beauty or truth in the prose of modern academics.
Perhaps this tendency is summed up in the term they have chosen to encapsulate the complexities of sexual difference: “gender”. Gender is a linguistic term. It describes the way words in languages like French and Latin fall into categories – are organized and regimented. A little like the speech in a play or film. Also known as “dialog”. A word that is, of course, a great favorite of modern academics. Though it’s been somewhat neglected in favor of “discourse” recently. A term from rhetoric – another way of organizing and regimenting language and thought.
In other words, modern academics seem to see everything sub specie academicitatis. The “Studies” are a projection of the egos and lives of academics onto the world. The ivory tower has grown to enclose the universe, and we are all narrative elements in a postmodern text whose footnotes and glosses they are cleverly writing. Theology and Christianity are similar projections of the ego onto the world (God is a first-person pronoun) and perhaps modern academia is simply a mutation or homologue of them, having evolved under similar conditions – those of tax-or-tithe-subsidized intellectual parasitism – to take a similar form.
1. News, Gender and Power, ed. Cynthia Carter, Gill Branston and Stuart Allan, Routledge, London, 1998, notes on contributors, pg. vii
2. “(En)Gendering the Truth Politics of News Discourse”, ibid., pg. 127
3. “Notes on contributors”, ibid.
4. Closing lines of Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
5. Oxford English Dictionary, entry for “jargon, sb”.
6. “(En)Gendering the Truth Politics of News Discourse”, op. cit, pg. 135
7. Ibid., pg. 134
8. The Glory of Man, David E. Jenkins, SCM Press, London, 1967, pp. 84 and 104 (page numbers refer to the 1984 edition).
9. Translated from the Italian by a Catholic clergyman, James Duffy, London, 1864.
10. Liesbet van Zoonen, “ONE OF THE GIRLS? The changing gender of journalism”, pg. 39
11. John Hartley, “Juvenation: News, Girls and Power“, pg. 61
12. Lisa McLaughlin, “Gender, Privacy and Publicity In Media Space“, pg. 73
13. Ibid., pg. 85
14. Janet Thumim, “ ‘MRS KNIGHT MUST BE BALANCED’: Methodological problems in researching early British television”, pg. 91
15. John A.T. Robinson, Honest To God, ch. 3, “The Ground of our Being”, pg. 47 of the 1963 SCM paperback.
16. Taken from the Saturday Times’ Credo columns “Beware the False Idol of Tradition” (24th April, 1993) and “A timeless tale that highlights virtues of family”, (31st Dec., 1994).
17. News, Gender and Power.
18. Op. cit., ch. 11, pg. 157 of the 204-pg 1962 Penguin paperback. Am I appealing to authority here myself? Not in the same way as left-wing academics, I hope.
19. John Hartley, “Juvenation: News, Girls and Power”, pg. 66
20. News, Gender and Power.