bluff your way as an academic

Music: Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV (2008)

My advisor is fond of saying that all academic departments began with the following statement: "in the beginning there was the error." I also think we should add another statement as the one which sustains a department: "our field is in danger of erasure," or alternately, "Such-and-So threatens the field" (e.g., "cultural studies," "sloppy operatinalization," "high theory,""inattention to pedagogy," "Dilip Gaonkar"). As I was responding to comments on a previous post, I think I am ready to add a third statement to the academic enterprise: "It's more complicated than that!" Now, I have finally happened upon a trinity of academic bromides that we can teach to any aspiring academic:

• In the beginning there was the error.
• Our field is in danger of erasure.
• It's more complicated than that.

"In the beginning there was the error" is a sort of retrojected mythic moment; it has always-already been there. It will remain. It will be restated. There is little we can do about this moment of utterance, as it was a necessary moment. Elsewhere I have written about the perils of the apocalyptic, sustaining statement too: "our field is in danger" seems monotonous and often becomes a principle way in which people and their ideas get rejected or excluded. I find "our field is in danger" both necessary to encourage certain actions and dangerous because of its built-in exclusions. "Our field is in danger!" is the utterance of contracting, what must be said in order to collect others into some sort of pact or agreement. Therein is the danger with the second.

But what of this third statement, "it's more complicated than that?" The phrase is usually the opening gambit of most essays in the academic humanities, and this morning I joked we could probably rechristen most departments as "The Department of It's More Complicated Than That" and function just as well. Yet I think the phrase sometimes becomes the tool of abuse, and more recently, the key technique of the academic troll.

As some of you know, a troll is Internet slang for someone who baits or attempts to get an emotional rise among folks in an online community. My colleague Dana Cloud gets troll emails all the time (and amazingly, sometimes she can bring 'em around). In general, the online rule is "don't feed the troll." The reason you ignore or don't respond to the troll is because they don't shut-up, keep coming back, and so on.

The issues with academic trolling are more difficult to discern. Here's the set up: I post something on my blog that is designed to be provocative. Someone posts the (obvious) response: "But Josh, it's more complicated than that." Well, of course the issue I blog about is always going to be more complicated than any blog argument would allow. "Simplification" is, indeed, the function of argument in general and blogs, owing to time commitments, space limitations, and so forth, further constrain what is possible to argue. That said, when does the comment, "but it's more complicated than that" become less of an invitation to discussion and more of a taunt? I don't know, but it's an interesting twist on what academic are trained to do: assert something is more complex than the status quo understanding, and then explain why.

I reckon the obvious tip-off is tone. For example, (not to single you out Ken, but . . . ) Ken Rufo often makes the "but it's more complicated than that" claim in respect to my posts, and it comes off as a sincere wiliness to engage. The recent comment by Thorkild, however, begins: " Aren’t you capable of making the disconnect between academic theorizing and lived experience?" The tone is accusatory, even if that tone was unintentional. I reckon tone is the tip-off, the way to distinguish between trolling and engagement.

Regardless, I suppose as someone who enjoys pushing buttons I should be used to "but it's more complicated than that" by now. It's only fair, right? Even so, at times I think this third phrase of the Academic Trinity is also used as a lazy way to troll, in both the classroom and on blogs. Whenever I took classes in the cultural studies department as a grad student, invariably some snot-nosed cultural study boy (you know, the ones that don't bathe and wear ratty t-shirts or plaid, or who assume you're too stupid to understand unstable irony as a way to make digs on the unsuspecting) . . . where was I? Oh yeah, inevitably some guy would chime in, "but, it's more complicated than that because . . . X." It was always a show for the instructor in that department, a one-up fest such that the discussion rather resembled the content-less argumentation of policy debate than a struggle for understanding. I mean, I think we should always assume everything is much more complex than the way we re-present any one thing. Such is the nature of language. Saying "it's more complicated than that" is redundant, in a way.

I reckon the bottom line is this: if we wrote a book titled, Bluff Your Way as an Academic, chapter three would be titled, "But, It's More Complicated Than That."