DANIELLE CARLO
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Jorge Castillo, Funámbulo/ Tightrope Walker (Chinese ink and watercolor on paper, 50 x 35 cm, 1966)
The path of intellectual development in the Humanities begins to take its course not only through reading, research and instruction, but also through basic academic production: the writing of essays, participation in literary and theoretical discussion, presentations of one’s work in conferences and colloquia, etc. So, it would seem that the ability to communicate would be a main component of becoming an academic.
I entered a Spanish Department knowing that I would be expected to communicate in Spanish, but also knowing that I was uncomfortable enough communicating in my native language. Why was I eager to read, write, speak, and discuss in a way that I knew would be futile? Why did I want to create a situation in which I would continue being incapable of properly communicating, of not being able to actually say what I meant, or what I wanted to say in the fullest sense? Perhaps, I needed every obstacle to saying what I thought, knowing that even in my own language I could never truly get to the bottom of things. Maybe this was a way of evading a real attempt at critique and intellectual thought. Possibly, this was simply an attempt to bypass a confrontation with my culture.
I got lost in a maze of Spanish grammar. I lost sense of the form and the content of my intellectual pursuits through the required usage of Spanish as my language of writing. I became silent, I did not speak or raise questions, as I found myself thinking too much about how to say what was on my mind, thinking too much about the proper verbal construction and then I would lose the question all together. I would forget what I was going to say, I would get lost in the vortex of language, the collision of English and Spanish. I realized soon enough that whether or not I spoke in English or in Spanish, it was all lost as the language being used in academia, in any tongue, was full of stock vocabulary. It was not really about the content in any profound sense, but what was being said in the most superficial sense. The utterance of certain phrases was key to the proper punctuation of any conversation in any language. I found myself becoming even more silent as I became aware of the emptiness of academic speech. I became more alienated in my rejection of this kind of communication. I shrunk at the realization that through these words a lettered city of power was being upheld, repaired, remodeled at times, and often stabilized. I did not want to take part in this construction so I became silent, withholding my speech.
I convinced myself that my silence was a result of my lack of fluency, and that my realization of this open secret, this construction of the seat of power based on the control of language, was just a misinterpretation. After all, I did not fully understand Spanish, or this broader academic vocabulary. However, I know retrospectively that this was a willful lack of comprehension as a means of intellectual survival. I began to understand that Spanish had become a refuge, that I sought shelter in the potential lack of fluency as I realized the responsibility that comes with language control. I understood the dangers of saying anything, and even more so of writing something. I also saw that this responsibility was not taken seriously. It had become mechanized and standardized through the use of academic catch phrases and intellectualized jargon. Language, and any thought conveyed by it, was carefully controlled by the use of style guidelines, rules and regulations about length, a concentration on margin size and spacing, font and proper citations. I recognized that this was what academics were doing in any language, they were citing and repeating, a religious intellectualism, chanting mantras, prayers laced with the names of academic holy men, revered through the repetition of their thoughts, made idols through mimicry, their intellectual contributions made empty through this myth-making process.
As I ponder my own linguistic development and underdevelopment, I realize that I have been witness to a rapid change in this academic language, specifically within Spanish and Comparative Literature departments, over the past few years.
When I first entered graduate school, conversations, lectures and questions demonstrated the reliance on empty, but popular and fashionable words and concepts to create the image of intelligence and thought. This terminology, derived from an academic postmodernism that was very much in vogue for the last few decades of the 20th century, was an exemplification of mimicry and repetition as the academic norm and the limit of academic production.
During the later years of the Bush regime, it became apparent through a lack of intense critical production from within the academy that these words and concepts were not contributing to ways of thinking deeply about what was going on outside the thick institutional walls of higher education. The jargon used in academia shifted in line with the move in US politics towards capitalist totalitarianism. As the university quickly became more corporatized, the language used in the classroom became a censored jumble of political opacity; words and concepts mumbled and whispered through the halls, concealing secrets and lies, adding to the confusion and alienation of the times. The language of the university became one of complicity, reticence and fear.
Now, in times of economic crisis and hope for political change at the beginning of the Obama administration, the language of the university has entered a new phase, which is, of course, economic. Due to the fact that the corporate university structure is being overhauled along with the world financial system, academics and institutionalized intellectuals find themselves speaking a dead language of Wall Street, incorporating words such as portfolio, capital, assets, or brand into their departmental discussions, speaking of downsizing, and as always outsourcing labor to underpaid adjuncts. So now, instead of actually being able to critique or even observe the outside situation, academics are further distracted and bureaucratized. Critical distance is becoming an impossibility, perhaps even more so than during the Bush years, because of real fears of economic survival and ultimately an overwhelming sense of impending academic apocalypse. This collapse of academia is in many ways a direct result of the inability of academics to communicate in a language that is their own.
As an introduction for this volume, Intellectuals & Academics, I offer an instance of my intellectual development, a small facet of my academic experience on the most basic level, that of language. This usage of language refers to a mother tongue, an idiom, and a means of spoken, written and silent communication. I narrate the beginnings of my academic experience in order to illustrate a primary encounter with the practice of dissimulation through the use of academic language, which one often quickly adapts to, and subsequently adopts, in the academic world. This language system functions as both a safety net and jail cell, at the same time that it commonly fosters an evasion of praxis and commitment, and often a state of incommunicability.
My personal academic experience briefly outlined above, which resulted in a rejection of a stifling academic language system in favor of personal, direct and lucid intellectual communication, opens the door to the varied discourses to be found within the essays to follow. Through various methods, the essays presented here vigorously address the intellectual experience within a US academic context; some specifically through a background of Hispanism, or more generally through the philosophical lens of critical theory, others through the personal method of autocriticism. All of the work in this volume cuts through and disregards departmental conventions, disciplinary and linguistic boundaries and directly confronts the many crises that intellectuals, academics, and those who straddle this fine line are currently facing.