BP3: Nial C. DeMena

Dalton's "A System Destabilized: Scholarly Books Today" I go back to, like Cassandra, because I find the awareness of eschatology of humanities scholarship a fascinating premise. Moreover, the "Invisible College," is the one term I love to extrapolate. Here, I quote from Pynchon's Against the Day: 

...a school of modern architecture which believed that the more 'rationally' a structure was designed, the less visible would it appear, in extreme examples converging to its so-called Penultimate Term—the step just before deliverance into the Invisible, or as some preferred to say 'into its own meta-structure,' minimally attached to the physical world (625).

I can’t help but think of coalition building within the department when I think of the Invisible College and the dependence on faculty in liking what I endeavor to do as a scholar as an integral part in my success. There is a type of coercion that is engendered in this practice that bothers me, for if I do not agree, or fall in-step with the advice of my elders, I, no matter how well I try, will not be able to transcend the politics of English and get recognition or get published. Pynchon (above) is talking about the meta-structure, which I’ve co-opted and applied to that of the scholarly politics of networking and publishing based off our Module 3 readings. It is invisible only because it is so rational. But what if the rational is precisely what is killing English as a discipline? How does one form a counterforce against such an overwhelming conformity? How does one critique the death that is caused by the architectonic logic of the discipline without falling in line with the cortege?  

From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vest herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choice, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor (10).

The passage describes how I feel as a neophyte humanities scholar, whereas the established “tenure-track” and “tenured” professors are the Chums watching me head to my disaster, parsing the scope of my vision, my project, into the “straight-line” specificity that kills it. The passage also connotes the product-like quality of the students in relationship the deadly machinery of the academy. We churn through the system but what happens to us after? Is there enough tenure for us all—surely not? But the hope remains. 

Although pessimism in me regarding institutions of higher learning remains, for my own account, I find this creative coiffure a pretense for its own liberation. I want to demolish the foundations of English, raze them to the ground, to rebuild the in the organic splendor of open-source and creative commons models. Or, as the software engineer turned rapper Sole puts it in his song “Dumb this Down,”  “if there’s a policeman living in your head, you’re not free,” which is as true as sentiment as I’ve ever heard. To echo and reify my point, I quote Deleuze, “Representation no longer exists; there is only action.” 

What I’ve learned is during the course of our modules is thus: scholarship, for me, represents what I hate. Hidden, networked information, the cabal of monied, conservative "city-fathers" whose magisterial moxie lies in their ability to privilege information then squirrel it away in closed discourse communities beyond the reach of my lower-middle-class glazzies, behind pay-walls, copyrights, and official insignia. There is a global society, us as educators and scholars must build. Informational control is a serious threat to our futures; we must not allow it to take part. Our prerogative should be to staple the source code to the network to the doors of every college freshman.

Now, certain measures, it could be argued, are in place to reward financially those whose scholarship is oft cited, and therefore better. Yes, I do realize cash is important. However, the information if it is useful will make the money for you at large and not just in the cloistered sanctum of the classroom. 

You’re doing your job if you’re showing what the exploit is to the kids paying too much money to go to a school that will churn them out and close behind them the archives with which they can move beyond the institution. We must work together. As Genet from Miracle of the Rose writes, “From his head—or from mine—came the roar of an airplane engine. I felt in all my veins that the miracle was underway” (15). The sounds is technological philosophical change; its coming, at least, from one of our heads.