Yes, the whole Land Grant Act and Humboldt model in the 19th-century onward, but it is in the mid-century that the trappings of the academic department have been established and promulgated across the US.: majors, minors, graduate degrees, general education, fields, tenure requirements, etc. By the 1980s all of that had become a mess and begun to creak… and so it remains, only moreso. Bill Readings and others tell this story.

Rhetoric and composition tells many versions of this institutional-disciplinary history and ties it into longer narratives about rhetoric and democracy. Arguably though, rhetoric and composition, like media studies, are disciplines. It’s not that they have not and do not strive for and claim disciplinarity. Journals, book series, conferences, professional organizations, degree programs, departments, subfields: it’s turkey with all the trimmings. Why isn’t it Thanksgiving? Maybe it is. Who am I to say it isn’t?

A more radical claim would be that computer science is also a discipline. As the blog post title suggests, this is a Latourian provocation (invocation?) of the crossed-out God that permits secular science (and scientists) to be Christian. Rhet/comp, media studies, and computer science each emerge in the 1960s and 70s as intellectual and creative classes of post-industrial hybridity. But to make them disciplines would be to make the hybrids visible, hence disciplines.

In doing so, computer science’s status makes clear that disciplinarity need not be materially detrimental. It does, however, alter the tendencies and capacities of one’s work in the academy. In an odd way that should not be unexpected we each find ourselves far out on a branch of Claude Shannon’s information theory. We study the information-media channels that modern disciplines require to be mute. That’s not news to anyone. Furthermore, being a discipline isn’t a step toward becoming a discipline, nor is it an impediment in official terms.

But none of us can be mid-century modern departments or disciplines.

We have been approaching this moment when the hybrids powering disciplines would become visible and their operation would shift. I make this argument in my last book in greater detail, but here it is in a nutshell. The whole write a proto-monograph dissertation, deliver conference papers via air travel, publish printed journal articles, and turn your dissertation into a published monograph for your tenure dossier thing: you know that thing? If you are a scholar of a certain era, like me, you might resemble that remark. From it extends everything down to the five-paragraph theme. They are all part of a mid-century American mediascape.

Of course they are. They had longer histories but these genres crystallized significantly during this period. 60-70 years later we are still producing the same basic artifacts for the same purposes except that we now email the documents. I remember helping colleagues open email attachments, so the “going digital” of sharing electronic files happened during my career. If journal articles feel like three-camera sitcoms with the laugh tracks missing, there’s a reason. They are akin to watching old comedy shows where it becomes hard to imagine how those jokes actually landed back then. Did we seek to reinvent them? Yes. There is Kairos and others. But how far did that spread?

There were a couple key points to how the system worked though (and yes past tense). First is the obvious individual expertise it takes took to produce one, as well as the signifiant labor it required. After all, it wasn’t like those books wrote themselves… sigh. Second is the material limits on publication. Meeting some basic standard of intellectual merit was not sufficient, we also had to beat out our colleagues for limited page space. In this way, peer review became proxy for tenure.

This all went oddly pear-shaped with the internet. And now? The mechanisms don’t really exist. We could create detection services to alter the media ecology and make the use of AI less palatable. But why exactly would we be doing that?

So critical negotiation as a disciplinary community. I have suggested pursuing an alternative to creative-anachronistic re-enactments of mid-century American disciplinarity. Not because those won’t be interesting. But a lot of people will be doing those. And not because I think I have such a great idea! I’m enough of a techno-pessimist to view disciplines as accidents that can’t wait to happen.

So which are the more interesting and survivable accidents? Which are the ones that will teach me a lesson without teaching me a lesson?