is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Crab Enchilada.
Yesterday, when I was in the midst of a day of �crabby jill� (CJ) (and, yes, somewhere Liz Dunn is snort-laughing and making an off-color joke. but in 1970s Ohio dad-speak, crabby means grumpy or short-fused, I assure you), I was talking to someone about an academic presentation we had both witnessed, and I was complaining about how the presentation should have been more interesting, given how interesting its topic was. To me it seemed that the presenter had failed to lay out the stakes of what she was doing. It continually shocks me that, even though academics are supposedly charged, oftentimes, with teaching students how to write basic argumentative papers, academics themselves sometimes fail to live up to the expectations they would place on their students when they speak formally with their colleagues. Sure, when you speak with colleagues you can assume more willingness to listen (whether that assumption is safe or not is another matter) and more likelihood that your audience will follow complicated sets of ideas, etc. But everyone needs to be told, when witnessing an oral presentation, what the stakes of an argument are, why it matters, and where the argument is headed. And then, while the argument is proceeding, the audience needs to be reminded, occasionally, what has been accomplished or how what is currently being said helps to establish the presenter�s stated goals. This isn�t nitpickiness about style, or a request to be coddled or infantilized, it is a concern for the ethics of claiming the time of others. If you are going to give me 1.5 hours of your time, then I better take that as a responsibility. A responsibility to communicate with you in a meaningful fashion!
Ideas matter! I am deadly serious.
Anyway, that old rant. The person with whom I was having this brief discussion yesterday came to the defense of yesterday�s presenter, because that is the kind of stand-up guy that he is, and, because I was CJ, I�m sure I had stated my objections more forcefully than was necessary to represent my feelings�which were ambivalent rather than hostile. I mean, at least she wasn�t like a docent, offering me a walk-through of something and saying mostly only what I could have observed on my own. No, she had more to say than that. But too much was hidden. It was like she wouldn�t draw back the drapes. (I know.) It was possibly even as if she wasn�t sure what was behind the drapes (which is fine, but then it is also fine to show that). My complaint comes from the demands of interdisciplinarity in general, and it runs something like this: �you are a teacher. why are you not teaching? you cannot assume the room understands your background thoughts!�
Of course it is always true that the room cannot understand your background thoughts� unless you are lucky enough to be in that rare room peopled only by your intimate friends. And even then, communication can fail! That is the peril attendant on the good fortune that comes with the joy of intimacy. Otherwise put, that just is the risk involved in communication, intimate or not.
But we were talking about academic presentations. Communication is always already an ethical stance, so how you do it does matter. And that, my friends, is why I want to be told why a project is important, why I should care, why the author cares. It is always necessary to do that, even when the answer seems obvious. Because meaningful thinking requires that others follow you somewhere. Which means you must lead.
There are many ways to lead. I�m not prescribing a particular approach.
And, sure, there is a pleasure involved in contemplative thought, or other thought that isn�t concerned to lead anyone anywhere. Such thought is meaningful even when it never leaves the site of its thinker. One ought not denigrate such thinking (certainly not!). However, it is worthwhile to note that such thinking is inherently unpolitical, by which I mean unworldly, by which I mean, it is not aimed at communicating with others. Communicating with others is how we build a world at all (and here I seem to be stealing blatantly from Hannah Arendt, though this is also a feature on some level of most legal thought). What this means is: the world is built in ethical terms. This is true no matter what kind of a crappy or hopeful or ambivalently pitched world we (or you, or I) live in.
But, as my interlocutor in yesterday�s rant against the perils of communication asserted, I was perhaps too hard on the presenter. So I should clarify. It�s not like anyone can succeed in communicating well and successfully (the two are not the same) at every moment. I know this too well from personal experience. Communication is fraught with risk, like anything that exposes you to others. And, as the legal scholar Lon Fuller would put it, �in some situations nothing can be more baffling than to attempt to measure how vigorously a man intended to do that which he has failed to do.� (ha!) When someone makes an earnest attempt to achieve a higher goal like communicating important ideas, and misses the mark, she is not judged by the same standards as someone who has failed to live up to lower standards past which no one should sink without being blamed. She is not blamed. Others just wish she had said more.
(None of this means that I agree with the legal theory of Lon Fuller.)
(And, of course, sometimes the failure will be mine, a failure of understanding.)
So, yesterday�s presenter said a few things about which I would have liked to know more. It is possible to recognize intelligence and still feel let down by what gets said, you know? I suppose I repeat this rant-like thing about communication at intervals because I fear faintheartedness. Of course, failure to communicate is not always a sign of faintheartedness. But sometimes it is. So I react badly to underplanned presentations. Sometimes my reactions are fully just, sometimes they are not. But the reaction seems to come down to the fact that I fear faintheartedness and, like Hannah Arendt, I want to be able to love the world (that thing that we build together by communicating), difficult as it is (and I do mean that in both ways, that it is difficult to love the world, and that the world is difficult. The two are not the same, because sometimes it is not hard to love something that is difficult.).
Writing this just now, I thought of a line of poetry I had not thought of since I was much, much younger.
�I am tired of faintheartedness
their having to be exceptional
to do what an ordinary woman
does in the course of things
�
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.�
(From Adrienne Rich, �Natural Resources,� Dream of a Common Language, 1977, ah, 70s feminism!)
Thinking of this was itself my own day�s exposure to the uncanny, a form of communication from a past that has disappeared. Clearly, the word �faintheartedness� brought to mind the line of poetry. But the real order of events was probably the reverse of that. The line of poetry I barely remember inserted itself in my thoughts as I tried to articulate what the substance of my objection was. It�s one more way of demonstrating (or undergoing the sense) that words are important, and how we use them when we give our time to others does matter. Sometimes those words stick and become formative, the way a parent is formative of your sense of self whether you know it or not, whether you want it or not. Words on a page can be as forceful as parents, lovers, friends, influences a-plenty. We get haunted by the rhythms of words chosen by other minds, and that marks us for life. The way being called �crabby� as a child when you�re in a certain mood or humor marks your attitude toward that mood in a certain way.
Sometimes I am crabby. Apparently this was true as early as the age of 4. In fact I think I spent the whole decade of my 20s in that state of being. It is a fundamentally impatient comportment toward the world. Of course, some kinds of impatience are understandable, even necessary. But when you mete out your impatience unselectively, it will begin to lack meaning, because no one will read it as significant. So now I try my best to save it up for when it�s called for.
Halliday recently said to me that I really am not the same person I was when I was 25. �Because you�re not angry,� he said. He�s not the same, either. Both of those things are both true and false. But if there is anyone who knows something about my thankfully departed but once infamous impatience, it is Halliday!
8:28 p.m. - March 20, 2007
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