I’m teaching our introductory graduate course on “Media Theory” in the fall. The stereotype of these courses is that they are like a week-long tour of Western Europe (it’s Tuesday it must be feminism or Rome or whatever). While we anoint certain people as “theorists” in the humanities, that’s not really a job. It’s certainly not a job at the assistant professor rank. I remember reading Baudrillard’s America as an MA student and thinking I’d love to have a career writing stuff like that! He was 57 when was published and had 11 prior books. IOW, it’s not a first book kind of thing.
As I got a grip on academia, I realized “theorist” wasn’t really job I could get. My interest was in writing/media (this was in the earliest days of Netscape and the graphical internet), so I turned my interest there. Blah, blah, autobiography. TL;DR my career was based on my technical expertise rather than theoretical expertise (i.e., I had a PhD in English and could teach HTML; the latter was the game changer). Another way of thinking about it is that I failed to play the disciplinary game. I probably would have been better off if I did, but I’ve never been a joiner. But I was also never hired to be a theorist because those jobs don’t exits. In broad strokes, academia is an industry that is best for joiners, for folks who are willing and able to perform highly complex procedures and draw upon a large amount of technical data. I don’t mean “joiner” in a pejorative way. In ‘Merica we hypothetically place a premium on individualism, but in practice I don’t think we mean it. And often outliers present more risks than benefits, as our politics have demonstrated.
But I digress. Enough about me, let’s talk about you: what do you think of my work? Not really.
Let’s talk about the “Adirondack Speculator.” For me, this is a kind of Ulmerian pursuit a la Internet Invention where moments in one’s life become a heuristic for philosophical discoveries. Since the 1920s/30s my family has had a house/home/camp in the Adirondacks in Speculator, NY. TBH, for various reasons more relevant to a therapist than this post, as an adult I’ve never been happy there, but I spent many summer vacations there as a kid. It’s the cornerstone of our family’s identity. Coincidentally (?) as an academic my interests have pursued the philosophical practice of speculation. Again, in very broad strokes, if empiricism claims to identify objective facts and idealism lays claim to subjective insights into truth, speculation is an experimental imaginative pursuit of the remaining world, beyond empirical facts, beyond subjective claims of truth, justice and other ideals. I’m guessing the eponymous speculators of this town were miners, but I’ve never figured that out for sure. The Adirondacks is a large state park in upstate NY. It’s the watershed for NYC. As I understand it, the term comes from a Haudenosaunee slur for the Algonquin peoples who they drove from this region into Canada. It means “bark-eater,” perhaps a reference to their lack of agriculture.
I will claim no disciplinary expertise in this area of history, but as far as I can tell this is not a disputed matter.
From Ulmer’s perspective (and mine), what is relevant here is how one attunes oneself to a concept. To be disciplinary is to work in a field, to be agricultural. Theories (and theorists) are regularly captured to work inside fields, but another version of theory is not agricultural. It is a speculative, nondisciplinary itineracy or even line of flight. And one could rightly say that’s a matter of privilege and that’s true. You don’t get to publish America as your first book. However it is also a matter of cultural difference, of being an outsider, as it represents thought from outside.
For me, it’s just always been the way I am most suited to work, for good or bad, and certainly for both.
Alex Reid 