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Adam may not need blogging right now, but even he admits that the community he has as a graduate student is transitory -- contingent upon a certain group of students sharing an institutional affiliation in a particular historical moment -- and perhaps all the more vibrant for being so.
I have a similar community in Irvine: I speak regularly with Joseph Kugelmass, another contributor to The Valve, and our conversations as frequently turn to things we’ve read and written online as they do formal professional matters. Our conversations straddle two mediums; but someday soon, when he’s sporting tenure at an Ivy and I’m adjuncting my way up and down the California coast, we’ll still be able to keep half our current dynamic intact. I’m not talking about pointless Facebook update -- there may be a benefit to knowing that a Simpsons rerun left a fellow Americanist craving Cherry Garcia, but I doubt it’s intellectual. I’m talking about a regular engagement with each other’s intellectual concerns -- everything from the pains of preparing for the job market to the theoretical implications of an interpretive move you’re not sure you should’ve made -- all communicated in a medium able to accommodate everything from idle chatter to earnest manifesto.
Over the past three years, I’ve learned what it’s like to write in a way most academics never have: namely, for an audience. If this seems like a simple point, that’s because it is. Nor is it one of those profoundly simple points, either: it’s straight simple. When a blogger sits down to slave on her dissertation, article, or book, she doesn’t turn her back on the public sphere. Because in the end, the public sphere is us.
I’m talking about the communities we currently have, only five years in the future, when we’re scattered around the country, unable to communicate face-to-face, but still connected, still intellectually intimate, because we’ll still regularly be engaged with each other’s thoughts. But I’m not only talking about us. There’s no reason our community needs to consist solely of people we knew in grad school. Why not write for people who don’t already how you think about everything? Why not force yourself to articulate your points in such a way that strangers could come to know your thought as intimately as your friends from grad school do?
The informal publishing mechanisms available online can facilitate such communication so long as bloggers write for an audience informally. Senior faculty might continue to orient their scholarly production to the four people whose scholarly journals don’t pile up in the corner of the living room, slowly buried beneath unpaid bills and unread New Yorkers. Whether they know it or not, bloggers write for an audience larger than the search committees we hope to impress. They have already started eye-balling the rest of the world, asking themselves how they can communicate with it without seeming to pander to it. By and large, this approach works. To draw from my own recent experience:
In the first week of October, I presented at the American Literature Association’s Symposium on Naturalism. My talk went well enough, but the conference itself was surreal: two tenured faculty members -- both of whom wrote books I wish I’d written at institutions that would never consider hiring me -- two tenured faculty members independently introduced themselves to me and acknowledged that they’ve read my blog, Acephalous, for quite some time. Flattering, but hardly surreal. However, they then told me that they almost didn’t introduce themselves because they were, and I quote, “intimidated.”
Tenured faculty intimidated by a graduate student. These professors obviously put some weight into what I’ve written on Acephalous and The Valve. So I turned to my audience for feedback, and one of my commenters made the obvious point: I have commenters. Most scholars don’t. They have people they need to impress and tenure files to fill; but I have sustained intellectual engagement with hundreds of people. As one member of it wrote: “In the land of the people who work on things only three people will ever read, the schlub with a somewhat popular blog is king.”
Perhaps, but I don’t want to sound like one of Adam’s blog triumphalists, because I consider the power of blogs to be supplementary and concrete: they provide atomized intellectuals a way to meet and remain in contact with fellow sufferers and their ideas. More importantly, they ensure you’re not forgotten.
