evolve or die!
So, after the big test, there was this kind of debriefing. Perhaps I should remind you that for the big test, none of my professors actually bothered to familiarize themselves with the stuff I was being tested on, and one of them kept falling asleep. Questions were impossible to answer (do you know the source of ghost stories?) because no one could think of anything specific to hang the thing on. Someone asked me if there were any theoretical frameworks that guided my work--I pointed to the Roland Barthes essay that was on my reading list. They weren't satisfied so I mentioned Brunvald which, they confessed, hadn't read.
In any case, at the debriefing, my chair explained to me that he was a bit ambivalent about what he was going to say. Nonetheless...
"While everyone is impressed by the number of sources of information from which you are able to draw, and that's really good, but you lack a kind of theoretical framework in which to situate your ideas. Readers need to know from your language what kind of critical questions are being brought to the table."
"So, like a tradition of thought which I see myself as a part of..."
Which, by the way, I don't bother doing, because it's ridiculous to pigeon hole yourself. If I figure out the cure for cancer tomorrow, I'm not going to not pursue it because I'm working on the codification of semiotics.
"Yes, exactly."
"Hmm..."
I am, by the way, a Socratic Humanist.
For those of you who don't know what my guy is asking, he's basically saying that people don't really want to think about what your article is about, they just want code words in it so that they can figure out what field it is that you are making a major contribution to.
So, what to do, what to do? Should I be a pre-Freudien post-colonialist, a neo-Marxist materialist, a neo-platonist third wave feminist? Is my deconstruction derrideridean or Deleuzian? Body theory, thing theory, hypertext reality. Am I Nietzschean in the Will To Power sense or in the Uses and Abuses of History sense? These are tough questions, people. I think I'm going to go read a book.
In any case, at the debriefing, my chair explained to me that he was a bit ambivalent about what he was going to say. Nonetheless...
"While everyone is impressed by the number of sources of information from which you are able to draw, and that's really good, but you lack a kind of theoretical framework in which to situate your ideas. Readers need to know from your language what kind of critical questions are being brought to the table."
"So, like a tradition of thought which I see myself as a part of..."
Which, by the way, I don't bother doing, because it's ridiculous to pigeon hole yourself. If I figure out the cure for cancer tomorrow, I'm not going to not pursue it because I'm working on the codification of semiotics.
"Yes, exactly."
"Hmm..."
I am, by the way, a Socratic Humanist.
For those of you who don't know what my guy is asking, he's basically saying that people don't really want to think about what your article is about, they just want code words in it so that they can figure out what field it is that you are making a major contribution to.
So, what to do, what to do? Should I be a pre-Freudien post-colonialist, a neo-Marxist materialist, a neo-platonist third wave feminist? Is my deconstruction derrideridean or Deleuzian? Body theory, thing theory, hypertext reality. Am I Nietzschean in the Will To Power sense or in the Uses and Abuses of History sense? These are tough questions, people. I think I'm going to go read a book.
2 Comments:
I suggest you work within the retro-clamydian aldoflatulist framework. As I'm sure you are well aware this type of discourse requires you, when faced with asinine questions, to grab your crotch and make a farting noise at your interrogator. Worked for me in phrenology school.
Perhaps the mass hypnosis, power of suggestion, psychological phenomenon angle would be good. Or perhaps you could point to Ken Wilbur's integral psychological theories from Boomeritis (no idea how to underline here) as describing the lack of mental development on the part of people who focus on mysticism.
But, of course, then you'd be pigeon-holing yourself.
Pigeon-holing is a bad idea if you want your work to be taken seriously in the future; however, it's a good idea for acceptance within the contemporary academic community. After all, that way you aren't challenging any of their work and ideas, and people who are that insecure don't like to feel like someone else is smarter than them.
So my point on this is a: do what they say and publish the 'acceptable' thesis. And then b: when you're out from under their thumbs, recant your watered down doctoral thesis and publish the real version, complete with a note about how it was suppressed by your board. Everybody loves a controversy, right?
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