I just came across this while reading up on “dialogue” for a paper (that’s coming along fantastically, I'm glad you asked). It’s from
Postmodern Culture 2.1 , and it’s actually by Jerome McGann, not “Sheri Meghan,” but he is using that pseudonym to make a point about dialogue, context, and performativity [
ed. note: gay].
That thing you smell is the musk of early-90s-academic angst. But if you find that appealing, then read on (and if not, then skip ahead to my glorious unpacking):
AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY: A DIALOGUE by SHERI MEGHAN
a. A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: "The only interesting talk is shop talk."
b. B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you're not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?
c. C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.
d. A: But it wouldn't be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.
e. B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open--or so their citizens like to think--to every kind of talk.
f. A: And so they are.
g. B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there--unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.
h. C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.
i. B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?
j. C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state--the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally--because every state, every closed shop, is what it is--expelled.
k. B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become--field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth's Newton, "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein's soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider's--in this case, a woman's--sense of the pitiful.
l. C: So you don't care for ethnographers either.
m. B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk--it is called Cultural Studies--has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.
n. A: That "critical observer" you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren't they wouldn't even know about the shop, couldn't see it, and hence couldn't talk at all. Shop talk is "interesting" because people share their differences.
o. C: So for you it is not merely that "The only interesting talk is shop talk"; more than that, "Shop talk is all there is!"
p. A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.
q. C: And what makes it more interesting?
r. A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking--talking about them, or talking in their terms.
s. B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?
t. A: Evidently.
u. C: Why "evidently"? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades--drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.
v. B: Inside or outside, it doesn't matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate--either conceptually or experientially-- anything "new."
w. A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don't bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.
x. B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don't insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop--no academy--can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests--let us say, the professors--will indulge their shop talk of explanations.
The idea of discourses as shops got me thinking. In analogies!
1. Shop of academia = the Bibelot Shop (sorry people who didn’t grow up in Minnesota.)
2. Shop of the MC = Creative Kidstuff (sorry again Eastcoasters: my analogical frame of reference is Midwestern. Deal with it. It will shovel your walk or yield up its parking space if you ask nicely.)
3. Shop of law = Jamba Juice
4. Shop of evolutionary psychology = Old Navy. In that it falls apart at the seams as soon as you touch it, and that it’s basically just Banana Republic (=the shop of anthropology) but nominally less racist.
5. Shop of the blogosphere = IKEA. Admit it, we're all happy it's around.
