Unpublished thoughts.
I’m punning, of course, on the criticism leveled at overambitious academics–“she’s never had an unpublished thought.” I don’t recall when I first heard that one. It must have been in graduate school. I did my grad work in a history department, and the scorn we were supposed to feel toward the trendier academics was incorporated in a number of such one-liners, like “the leisure of the theory class.” When I moved into the field of communication, of course, I was surrounded by members of the theory class, many of whom had never had an unpublished thought, at least by historians’ standards.
Here’s what historians think you ought to do to publish a thought. First, you ought to figure out every possible topic it could be connected with, and then you ought to read every available thing that’s ever been published about any of those topics. Then, you ought to find a cache of unexplored primary documents that bear on your thought. After thoroughly analyzing these documents, you may make a claim that you have something new to say, but, before publishing your thought, you should present it in oral form to your colleagues, to fellow researchers in the primary material, and then to academic gatherings. At that point you are ready to submit it to referees, who will tell you how to revise it before publishing it. Then you may have a published thought. Otherwise, all your thoughts should remain unpublished.
But not unspoken. One of the tricks of the trade is to have a lively but secluded private network of conversation, where unpublished thoughts are expressed and exchanged. It is in the unpublished arena that historians, and other interpretive communities, of course, coordinate the standards that will eventually determine what will be publishable, and it is in these arenas that the distinction between real and fake work will be drawn. If you aren’t connected to these arenas of unpublished thoughts, you will likely never be able to cross the barrier to having published thoughts, at least in the more austere fields of cultural–and political–work.
This is why I love the blogosphere. It makes it possible to extend access to the arenas of unpublished thought in interesting ways. This doesn’t mean it does away with expertise, or the standards of publication, but that it allows for a different kind of publicness. It lets a guy like me, who might set himself up as an expert, speak in relatively inexpert terms to an audience of no one in particular–perhaps no one at all–but at the same time perhaps everyone. It lets me air out my thoughts, but leaves them still unpublished.
It stands for the free play of the mind.
Which at one time was the only thing I was sure I believed in.
I’m punning, of course, on the criticism leveled at overambitious academics–“she’s never had an unpublished thought.” I don’t recall when I first heard that one. It must have been in graduate school. I did my grad work in a history department, and the scorn we were supposed to feel toward the trendier academics was incorporated in a number of such one-liners, like “the leisure of the theory class.” When I moved into the field of communication, of course, I was surrounded by members of the theory class, many of whom had never had an unpublished thought, at least by historians’ standards.
Here’s what historians think you ought to do to publish a thought. First, you ought to figure out every possible topic it could be connected with, and then you ought to read every available thing that’s ever been published about any of those topics. Then, you ought to find a cache of unexplored primary documents that bear on your thought. After thoroughly analyzing these documents, you may make a claim that you have something new to say, but, before publishing your thought, you should present it in oral form to your colleagues, to fellow researchers in the primary material, and then to academic gatherings. At that point you are ready to submit it to referees, who will tell you how to revise it before publishing it. Then you may have a published thought. Otherwise, all your thoughts should remain unpublished.
But not unspoken. One of the tricks of the trade is to have a lively but secluded private network of conversation, where unpublished thoughts are expressed and exchanged. It is in the unpublished arena that historians, and other interpretive communities, of course, coordinate the standards that will eventually determine what will be publishable, and it is in these arenas that the distinction between real and fake work will be drawn. If you aren’t connected to these arenas of unpublished thoughts, you will likely never be able to cross the barrier to having published thoughts, at least in the more austere fields of cultural–and political–work.
This is why I love the blogosphere. It makes it possible to extend access to the arenas of unpublished thought in interesting ways. This doesn’t mean it does away with expertise, or the standards of publication, but that it allows for a different kind of publicness. It lets a guy like me, who might set himself up as an expert, speak in relatively inexpert terms to an audience of no one in particular–perhaps no one at all–but at the same time perhaps everyone. It lets me air out my thoughts, but leaves them still unpublished.
It stands for the free play of the mind.
Which at one time was the only thing I was sure I believed in.
posted by jnerone at 1:42 PM
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