Jay has already tagged this item, and Gretchen is positioning it as a political movement in the making (“Slow writing will be like slow food! ”) over at Facebook, so I thought it worth throwing this up here on the mainpage for discussion. Lindsay Waters has published an article at IHE advocating slowing our writing down. The article ranges over a number of issues of interest to us Minds (the politics of publishing being a big one), and returns to one major refrain: Zizek is a big fake, but one that typifies today’s celebrated (read: celebrity) scholar. Mostly, the piece seems to condemn the hyper-active, CPU/CGI-like aspect of academia today, where the ‘publish or perish’ refrain has been amped up to the nth degree. Academia seems more and more like Hollywood: too many channels, nothing on, the whole thing ruled by an inflationary ethos of fame. When young professors jones for Adderall just like their students, maybe it’s time for a chill pill. Part of me is agreeable to such a critique; the other part thinks it (like most resistance these days) is futile. The tidal wave of mediocrity that comprises so much scholarship, that fills library shelves (and online forums!) with a flood of words no one will care about in 15 minutes, much less 10 years, cannot be stopped. Waters advocates the humanistic essay as a reinvigorated genre for the future: full of lucid reflection and promise. Will the essay save us from ourselves?
{A confession: While reading the piece, I kept thinking of Tony Kushner’s stuttering angel and his/her refrain: ‘Stasis.’ This probably relates more to unconscious anxiety about market free-fall than to something as unimportant as needlessly accelerated academic publishing…}
The article is about the humanities. Anthropologists have special problems with time and with concision: a) our research methods are deliberately very very very slow (or used to be before the days of drive-through ethnography), b) one goal of our research is to record in great (often excruciating) detail whole sociocultural worlds. On the one hand, anthropologists have produced many really wonderful essays. I can think of examples from Douglas and Geertz. On the other, these essays seem always to be in a complementary relationship with much longer works (monographs). So, I think the argument about slowing down needs to be disarticulated from the argument about over-production of books.
Anyway, I am wondering what other folks think about this piece.
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