Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conversational scholarship
Can academic work ever be considered ‘ordinary’ given the history of privilege behind
it? Cultural studies has spent many years establishing ‘ordinariness’ as a positive trait
in the practices of other people (e.g.Williams, 1958; Hartley, 1999) yet it has tended to
avoid using the concept in relation to the everyday lives of scholars themselves. This
may be understandable given the field’s original political aspirations to indict the classbased
elitism of academic modes of valuing.Many writers agree that the resources and
job security of the academic profession bestow a particular responsibility on cultural
studies practitioners (e.g. Hall, 1992; Couldry, 1996). If its total renunciation is
strategically undesirable, then, it still seems appropriate to contemplate strategies that
might ameliorate this taken-for-granted privilege. If Gramsci’s point that ‘we are all
intellectuals’ is a cornerstone of cultural studies’ practice, the second dimension of his
statement—‘not all men have the function of intellectuals’—must also be remembered.
The possible functions that contemporary cultural studies’ intellectual practice might
serve forms the backdrop for this paper, bearing in mind Gramsci’s wider and more
provocative question: ‘is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled,
or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer
necessary?’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 144).
It is increasingly clear that new technologies are helping to situate academic labour
as a much more banal, if not quite ‘everyday’, practice in a changing university
environment.2 Self-publishing platforms like weblogs are beginning to influence what
ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/06/020147-14 q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310600641604
Melissa Gregg is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and Lecturer in
Media and Cultural Studies in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of
Queensland. Her forthcoming book, Emotionally Invested: Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006),
considers the significance of ‘affect’ in the writing of key cultural studies figures and its particular role in securing
commitment to the academic vocation. Correspondence to: Melissa Gregg, Centre for Critical and Cultural
Studies, 4th Floor Forgan Smith Tower, University of Queensland, Qld 4072, Australia. E-mail: m.gregg
@uq.edu.au
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies
Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 147–160
an academic career can involve—and be seen to involve to an interested public. Blogs
have made scholarly work accessible and accountable to a readership outside the
academy, an achievement that seems important in the history of cultural studies’
concerns. Indeed, as I want to suggest in this paper, the very kinds of conversations
they encourage can be regarded as offering renewed vigour to cultural studies’ antielitist
and reflexive epistemological project.
This article marks the beginning of a series of investigations in which I hope to offer a
‘sympathetic’ account of the opportunities that new media technologies provide for
intellectual practice. Sympathetic reading asks that the critic resist ‘the temptation to
“answer back”’(Morris, 1988, p. 6) and instead approach cultural texts for their capacity
to test the habitual responses of academic training or political position. As Meaghan
Morris explains, reading texts sympathetically is ‘to understand them as criticisms of
those answers that my feminism might automatically provide’ (ibid.). It forces the critic
to question her own assumptions and practices in the process of reading others’. Such
concerted tactics are called for at a time when the presumptions emanating from
mainstream media coverage of new media technologies seem poised to threaten the
present and future use of platforms like weblogs in professional contexts (Collinson &
Delaney, 2005). Preferring to focus on the anomie or indeed aspiring celebrity of those
who choose to maintain aWeb presence, the lack of credentials of news pundit bloggers,
or the highly charged terrain of copyright, content delivery and intellectual property
issues, the subsidized nature of much media commentary is poorly matched to reflect
the complexity and subtlety of wider shifts brought with new technologies. The
‘interpellative imperative’ of criticism as a genre3 seems to have avoided discussion of
how practices like blogging fit within a tradition of public intellectualism otherwise
mourned (Buettner & Mitchell, 2005). As I want to argue here, it has also overlooked
blogging’s role in carrying out cultural studies’ long-standing commitment to
scholarship which reaches beyond the limited range of the academic sphere.
Professionalism
The institutional constraints on academics have always challenged the objectives of
sharing knowledge and fostering conversation with an audience outside the university.
As Judith Brett noted in 1991, the bureaucratization of the university has had
‘profound effects on the writing of academics in the humanities and social sciences’,
the clearest of which being that academics now write in order to fulfil the criteria of a
carefully managed institution, pushing their writing ‘away from its proper goal—the
contribution to culture and society’ (Brett, 1991, p. 516). When Brett asked ‘why so
few academics are public intellectuals’, part of her aim was to identify why it is so rare
for academics to be good writers, indeed why so many of them are ‘such bad or
indifferent writers’ (Brett, 1991, p. 514). Brett’s essay forms part of a sustained period
of reflection, in Australia and the United States in particular, lamenting the decline of
public intellectual practice on the one hand and the quality of academic writing on the
other.4
148 M. Gregg
In light of these discussions, what remains refreshing about Brett’s article is the way
in which it articulates the professional pressures which affect the ‘traditional’
intellectual function, creating a shrinking ‘public’ for academic practice:
The preconditions for good discursive prose are relatively simple: a fully imagined
audience, a sense of urgency, something interesting and important to say. The
biggest problem with most academic writing is achieving the first two. Many
academics start out with important and interesting things to say, but very few feel
compelled to say them in ways that engage an audience outside their discipline; and
in the end this corrodes the importance of what they have to say. (Brett, 1991, p. 514)
Brett considers it nearly impossible for academics to provide a public intellectual
function in the contemporary university context because it goes ‘against the grain of
the job’ (Brett, 1991, p. 515). The problem with academic writing, she says, is that it is
writing that ‘never leaves school’ (Brett, 1991, p. 521).
It is in this sense that Brett considers cultural studies to be one of a number of
intellectual challenges to have emerged from outside the academy that inevitably
narrows the audience for its writing upon entry. Like feminism andMarxism before it,
cultural studies is another of those social movements ‘in danger of becoming the basis of
new careers and so losing their engagement with broad social and political goals’ (Brett,
1991, p. 518; emphasis added). Reading this article today, it is the ‘and so’ in this
particular sentence that holds my interest. It implies that an academic career can only
mean a loss of ‘engagementwith broad social and political goals’. In so far as her remarks
are directed to the fate of the New Left since the 1960s, Brett claims: ‘The threat of
unemployment has kept one-time radicals busy ensuring their futures; academic
politics has replaced the broad public politics of their youth’ (Brett, 1991, p. 518).
This warning as to the apoliticizing effects of professionalism echoes that of another
feminist colleague with experience witnessing the trajectory of New Left colleagues.
In ‘Politics Now: Anxieties of a Petty-bourgeois Intellectual’ Morris also reads the
period from 1975 to 1985 as a shift from the full-time radicalism to the radical
professionalism of the left (Morris, 1988, p. 177). Kept busy with grant applications and
the politic-ing of various institutional matters, the horizon for investment amongst
cultural workers is described byMorris as perilously parochial, completely substituting
any other form of politics (Morris, 1988, p. 179). For both writers, professionalism
brings a necessary end to a certain cherished sense of political engagement.
Fledgling at the beginning of one of the new careers in cultural studies that Brett
anticipated, I approach these two descriptions with some trepidation. Not only are they
writers whose work has secured my belief in the value of sophisticated and timely
scholarship which transcends a purely academic audience (Morris was a freelance
journalist without ever having a full-time academic job in Australia prior to her move to
Hong Kong, while Brett has recently gained a wide cross-over readership with her research
on the Liberal Party; see Brett, 2003, 2005). They also represent the important achievement
of feminist movements which have ensured that women now have the choice to pursue
professional careers.5What troublesmeabout their descriptions nowis that for researchers
inheriting cultural studies’ legacies today, there has never been a time before radical
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 149
professionalism, before the strategic thinking required by institutional politics, a time when
one might not have spent most of their energy navigating funding bodies.What is more,
many recent graduates have been politicized by their exposure to academic theory,which is
to say that for the present generation there has never been a time ‘before’ or ‘after’ theory, as
the story usually goes (Eagleton, 2003; Butler et al., 2000). Ruth Barcan described this
wonderfully in a keynote address to the What’s Left of Theory? Australian Cultural Studies
conference in Hobart in 2001: ‘theory operated not as the suspect opposite to politics, as it
did for many people, but as the verymode ofmy politicisation’ (Barcan, 2002, p. 344). I can
identify as one of those students Barcan describes ‘whose life is transformed unequivocally
for the better by their encounter with theory, who looks at the world anew, and who
becomes filled with a sense of purpose and energy’ as a result (Barcan, 2002, p. 354).Work
in the academy hasn’t been a shift of focus for politics: theoretically and practically,
academic politics is the most familiar (if not the only) form I know.
Heroics
If I am uncomfortable with the way that the politics of professionalization has often
been described it is because there is a missing narrative to account for the experience of
more recent graduates who, having experienced cultural studies teaching at
undergraduate and postgraduate level, see political opportunities in an academic
career. These opportunities seem to me limited, however, by the consistency with
which cultural studies’ stated preference for studying ‘the ordinary’ rarely matches the
modes of writing typically practised in the attempt to legitimate such attention.
A theoretical understanding of the performative force of writing and the material
effects of discourse should make this problematic enough; what makes it worse is when
abstract writing for an initiated audience serves merely to reproduce what Eve
Sedgwick (2003, p. 108) has called the ‘thinking routines’ of contemporary theory.
In her recent book Touching Feeling, Sedgwick mounts a critique of ‘paranoid
reading’: what she perceives to be a dominant scholarly preoccupation with exposing
residual forms of essentialism, unearthing the unconscious drives and compulsions of
an author, or uncovering the oppressive forces of history ‘masquerading under liberal
aesthetic guise’ (ibid.). Demonstrating a sensitivity to historical and political shifts
that I also want to foreground, Sedgwick writes:
Where are all these supposed modern liberal subjects? I daily encounter graduate
students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie
a secular, universalist liberal humanism. Yet these students’ sentient years, unlike the
formative years of their teachers, have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-
Bush-Clinton-Bush America where ‘liberal’ is, if anything, a taboo category and
where ‘secular humanism’ is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a
vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct intercourse with multiple
invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 140)
It is not simply critical mantras that Sedgwick objects to, or the political landscape in
the United States, for that matter. She queries the logic of the spatial metaphors
150 M. Gregg
common in contemporary research practice—the habitual speech that accompanies
intellectual positioning:
Beneath and behind are hard enough to let go of; what has been even more difficult is
to get a little distance from beyond, in particular the bossy gesture of ‘calling for’ an
imminently perfected critical or revolutionary practice that one can oneself only
adumbrate. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 8)
It is precisely this sense of an avant-garde or well-placed lone critic ‘calling for’ changes
in others’ political priorities that I take the ‘counter-heroics’ of this special issue’s title
to mean. If it in any way resembles the ‘sense of urgency’ that Brett demands of public
intellectual practice, it does so to the extent that the urgency is both generic and
manufactured.
Sedgwick’s descriptions may indeed be strategic caricatures, as Clare Hemmings
(2005) has recently argued. Yet I want to suggest that cultural studies’ unfinished
legacy includes abandoning the styles of academic practice that provide the substance
of their rhetorical force. For cultural studies academics to stake their politics on
providing readings for others’ benefit, or making plain the obviousness of others’
oppression, seems ill-fitting the mobilizing premises of the field. As Sedgwick argues,
such objectives depend ‘on an infinite reservoir of naı¨vete´ in those who make up the
audience’ for our work as scholars:
What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate,
anyone to learn that a given socialmanifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative,
phantasmatic, or even violent? . . .How television-starved would someone have to be to
find it shocking that ideologies contradict themselves, that simulacra don’t have originals,
or that gender representations are artificial? . . . Some expose´s, some demystifications,
some bearings of witness do have great effectual force (though often of an unanticipated
kind).Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all however, and as long as
that is so,wemust admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere
else than in their relation to knowledge per se. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 141)
As Toby Miller and Alec McHoul have argued (1998), cultural studies scholarship has
enough work cut out for it producing adequate accounts of actually existing ‘everyday’
practices to be satisfied with merely speculating about subversive pleasures. A more
modest, inquisitive, even fallible speaking position would only help in the endeavour
to discover trends that lie outside pre-given theoretical rubrics.
Resisting the Resistance Ritual
The ritualized form of scholarship that Sedgwick points to is only understandable
given the current expectation that academics publish regularly in refereed journals to
secure their career and professional advancement. Morris has noted that this model
which determines institutional funding as well as individual standing has developed in
tandem with the workload of today’s ‘hyper-busy’ academics:
To engage in it, we do not need to be involved at the time in serious ethnographic or
textual study, resource- and time-consuming as these are, and we do not need to
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 151
expect any kind of change to follow our intervention. It is entirely possible to
contribute to such a debate by referring only to a series of other contributions, each
playing variations on already familiar and firmly held positions. (Morris, 2000, p. 28)
It is this form of debate that Brett surely had in mind in her 1991 article. It also
epitomizes the effects of professionalism so abhorrent to Edward Said in the series of
lectures he delivered on the role of the intellectual in the early 1990s. Said’s formidable
description of the intellectual’s function was to:
raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to
produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or
corporations, and whose raison d’eˆtre is to represent all those people and issues that
are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. (Said, 1994, p. 11)
Said urged that a spirit of amateurism must transform professional routines ‘into
something much more lively and radical’ so that ‘instead of doing what one is
supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect
with a personal project and original thoughts’ (Said, 1994, p. 83). Said denounced
professionalism on the basis that it viewed intellectual work as:
something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five and with one eye
on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional
behaviour—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or
limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial
and unpolitical and ‘objective.’ (Said, 1994, p. 74)
Of course what is complicated about this formulation for those pursuing careers in
cultural studies is that radicalism is itself a professional expectation of our chosen field.
Cultural studies asks that we make a career out of ‘rocking the boat’. To refuse its
dominant forms of performance and endeavour is also to admit suspicion of the
innate progressivism of its main theoretical influences. Or, as Sedgwick puts it rather
more stylishly:
Comes the revolution, Comrade, you’ll be tickled pink by those deconstructive
jokes; you’ll faint from ennui every minute you’re not smashing the state apparatus;
you’ll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You’ll be mournful and
militant. You’ll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Not tonight, dears, I have a
headache.’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 146)
This more recent regime of political ‘cool’ appearing in tandem with cultural studies’
ongoing professionalization resembles the tightly policed regime of thought and
behaviour Morris identifies as the ‘lifestyle Leftism’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Morris,
1988, pp. 173–186). Yet the difficulty it poses for intellectual work is that
commonsense assumptions limit the acuity of the critical methods available to
appreciate emerging everyday practices. In Sedgwick’s reading, the ‘ethical urgency’
of terms like hegemony and subversion, or their counterparts, repression and
liberation, evacuates any critical reflection of their original theoretical formulation.
The correct codification of a cultural object or practice becomes the endpoint of an
analysis, meaning that the rich mid-ranges of agency become extremely hard to gauge
152 M. Gregg
in scholarly terms. From a critical as well as a political standpoint this can only be
disturbing, given that it is ‘the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual
creativity and change’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 13).
Blogging as Conversational Scholarship
It is precisely the ‘mid-range’ between disciplinary insularism and public intellectual
practice that best characterizes blogging. Instead of continuing the trend of ‘calling for’
a shift in others’ practices, I want to use the following discussion of blogging to
highlight ways in which elements of cultural studies’ political aspirations can be
adjusted to new historical contexts. I am not suggesting that blogs are an example
of ‘the way forward’ for public intellectual practice (see Dunlop, 2003), nor do I think
that they should be seen as a satisfactory complement to the very real pressures of
outcomes-driven academic publishing. Here I seek merely to provide an account
of their productive possibilities at a time when a degree of hyperbole and assumption
currently shrouds—and risks—their varied uses.
In light of recent controversy—especially following anonymous revelations in
The Chronicle of Higher Education that some hiring committees at US universities may
discriminate against bloggers (see Tribble, 2005a, b; and the many responses in the
discussion fora)—it seems odd that blogging suffers such persecution as a form of
extracurricular intellectual engagement. What I will call the ‘conversational
scholarship’ that it gives rise to can be seen to follow a tradition that includes
independent and small press publishing, reading groups, salons and even cafe´ culture;
that is, before the real estate boom and rising standards of living demanded that
urban-based students work full time to support their study, severely limiting other
forms of recreational intellectual practice. The issue seems to be with the technology
itself: the simultaneously anonymous and public nature of blogging as well as the
instant feedback the software make possible. Indeed, the virulence that typifies many
blog debates, and which is often the cause for their scorn, arises from a lack of
common ground and/or vocabulary. Blogs reveal in a very overt way how regularly
writing fails to communicate intention. They also indicate how much distance a
tertiary education can put between people trying to engage in a conversation.
Software contributes to blogging dynamics in a further notable way. Archives
memorialize the passion of intellectual debate as it happens. The temporality involved
in blogging’s ‘call and response’ dynamic is faster and more immediate than previous
forms of intellectual writing and publishing. In this sense, the disdain many academics
feel towards blogging6 can be understood at least partly in terms of the way it records
the vicissitudes and vulnerability of intellectual practice. At the very least, blogging is
useful for the way that it offers a chance to reflect upon which aspects of their ordinary,
everyday practice scholars prefer the public to see.
Yet this very capacity to offer a platform for dialogue between writer and reader is
also the political significance of weblogs.7 While blogs are generally associated with a
single author, the role of the writer quite often consists of instigator and provocateur
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 153
in the sense that Said endorses. This is a noticeable move away from any necessary
association between author and authority. Granted, it is hard to generalize too much
here: the objectives of bloggers are as diverse as the people who write them. Yet I would
venture that the amount of notoriety that individual bloggers seek to generate in the
mainstream media and in sections of the ‘blogosphere’ often relates to the degree to
which they do maintain a belief in the notion of author-as-authority. This is only to be
expected from those with an investment in maintaining or gaining credibility in order
to contribute to a broadcast model of communication (which I would further suggest
encapsulates the present love/hate relationship between many punditry bloggers and
journalists). Blogs reveal the mind of the critic as impressionable and open to
persuasion, for the writer is rarely able to sustain the confidence and assurance of a
fixed position. Such a function contrasts with conventional modes of academic
performance premised on expertise and mastery. It is to admit the hesitancy involved
in the difficult task of thinking about the world.
For cultural studies, the significant potential to be seen in blogging—in line with the
romantic new media ethos that ‘information wants to be free’—is that knowledge loses
any sense of being something to be guarded. Instead, it becomes something to be
facilitated, discussed and improved. Blogs can create an economy of generosity and gift
at the expense of jealousy and possessiveness (cf. Williams, 1958). They encourage
collaboration as much as competition. The participatory nature of writing, response
and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and
thinking-in-process. In this they illustrate very well that version of cultural studies
practice described by Stuart Hall, which is ‘to work with our always inadequate
theories to help move understanding “a little further on down the road”’ (Daryl Slack,
1996, p. 113).
In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes
to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. One of the main
reasons graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is that blogs offer
solidarity out of isolation, especially on long projects. They create the conditions for
collegiality, brainstorming and frank, fast feedback while also generating and
maintaining interest, enthusiasm and motivation. Even the best supervision in the
most convivial university department cannot offer this kind of support on a regular
basis. The persistence with which established academics condemn blogging as a
distraction preventing graduate students from timely completion and participation in
their desired career does a disservice to the many instances whereby blogs are utilized
as a sophisticated research tool. It also wilfully ignores the wider economic and
political circumstances making the potential for a tenured academic career
increasingly unlikely for a new generation of graduates (Ross, 2004; Gregg, 2006b).
In terms of the linguistic apartheid for which Brett chastises academics, blogs are
also one of the most convenient and efficient tools for improving writing skills.
Blogging forces the writer to make every word count, to be as clear as possible in
getting a message across. Unlike the preconditions for good writing in Brett’s
description, it is impossible to know precisely who your audience is as a blogger.
154 M. Gregg
Its sheer publicness—the very unpredictability of audience—is what creates a sense of
immediacy and urgency.8
For all the positive tendencies I have just noted, however, blogging can also be a
volatile, archly personal and estranging practice. To be confronted by the opinions of
others who share little concern for or understanding of your work is a discomforting and
chastening experience. It is the quickest way to have any pretensions about academic
work deflated. Then again, this is not so very unlike the process of peer review, or giving
a conference paper. If anything, the explosiveness of blogging flame wars serves to
indicate the fac¸ade of much ‘polite’ academic discourse. A blog readership may not
always share a referee’s investment in a discipline or a profession, but a willingness to
offer opinion is evidence that a particular topic has resonance beyond academic niceties.
Outside the Comfort Zone: Feeling Ordinary in the Blogosphere
In line with the participatory ethic for cultural studies we are advocating in this issue,
Iwant now to offer a brief account of the ways inwhichmy own theoretical presumptions
have been tested and invigorated by blogging over the last two years. The main point I
want to underline is the manner in which blogging provokes acute recognition of what
may otherwise remain ‘mere’ theoretical tenets in one’s academic work—a point which
adds to the benefits of Morris’s sympathetic criticism that I have already outlined. For
instance, since starting my blog I have become a lot more conscious of my status as:
(a) an interchangeable persona available for others’ use: despite my knowledge of
postmodern theories of identity fabrication and simulacra I never expected that
someone would use my blog for a personal vendetta, writing under my name and
also using the names of other regular contributors to disrupt the dynamics of the
blog and seek to expose me as some kind of fraud;
(b) a woman (assumed to be single): despite my feminist training I never seriously
thought that meeting people offline in public, group events would lead to volatile
situations with readers assuming intimacy and ‘entitlement’ to friendship because
of shared interests online. Even though I disagree with the moralizing agenda
attached to alarmist descriptions of new media I now find myself holding a similar
position, i.e. that even the most stable online personas cannot be trusted. For me,
the cliche´ has been proved;
(c) an academic: despite being regarded as an ‘early career researcher’ in a university
context I have been told by readers that what I write on my blog is too academic,
too theoretical or too jargon laden, and therefore not fitting the ‘spirit’
of blogging. Others who regard my blog as academic assume that when I write it
signifies my fully formed intellectual position on something and that I seek
to argue the point I allegedly made. Still others think that because I am an
academic I will obviously be interested in hearing the entire history of thought
behind any issue raised, because anything less would be unscholarly. This possibly
relates to:
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 155
(d) a young, female academic in a particular city of Australia: stereotypes about the
place where I currently live seem to lead some people to think I am therefore more
open to guidance or correction from others who blog from less peripheral/parochial
locations, or (of equal offence) that I deserve encouragement and support
for the same reasons;
(e) as an Australian feminist: blogging has drawn my attention to the specificity of my
training in Gender Studies in Australia rather than Women’s Studies or some of
the more polemical versions of liberal or radical feminism. The key feminist blogs
based in the United States are regularly engaged in the intricacies of legal rulings
(namely the ongoing fate of Roe v. Wade). Otherwise, their attention is usually
focused on issues of women’s under-representation on blogrolls, conferences,
speaking circuits, linking practices between blogs and the like. This means that
I have had to turn to different disciplines, for instance rhetoric and political
science, to find allies for the kind of work I do;
(f) as a person identified with cultural studies: the majority of research blogs are still
new media- or technology-industry specific, so it is difficult to find readers with a
similar disciplinary background. On the other hand, I have had cultural studies
professors find my blog and engage with my ideas at length—feedback I would
never have received otherwise. In terms of ‘political’ cool in the blogosphere,
however, cultural studies is often something of a punching bag, which has meant
that my blog has sometimes been used as a location for debating cultural studies’
politics, regardless of whether I describe my own work as political;
(g) as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, urban-based professional: these forms of
cultural capital, to my mind, define both the possibilities and the limits of
blogging’s audience reach at present, and while I have expressed my ambivalence
towards professional academic practice as a career choice on a number of
occasions, my lack of overtly identity-based or marginal politics means that I often
suffer credibility problems as an individual.
While it is clearly limited by its subjectivity, what I think this list helps to illustrate is that
despite my training in feminism and cultural studies, and hence my heightened
theoretical understanding of the ways in which my identity influences my perspective on
the world, having a blog has made me increasingly conscious of the multi-faceted ways
these identities play out in apparently banal, everyday encounters. Perhaps it was an
oversight to have assumed that these identities would not be particularly relevant to the
practice of my blogging; what I wonder instead is the extent to which even the most selfreflexive
of disciplines like cultural studies regularly strips identity characteristics fromits
dominant genres in order to accord itself scholarly status. My ability to comment as a
scholar on the practice of blogging has been to some extent jeopardized by my
participation in the practice itself. At the same time,my understanding of both blogging
and cultural theory has improved considerably during this same process. Blogging makes
me aware of my gender, race, sexuality, class, geographical location and education level
with a regularity that my typical daily encounters as an academic simply do not.
156 M. Gregg
The Will to Connect
While the analysis I have just offered seems to me an important justification for
blogging, I have yet to mention the most important reason I will continue to do so
beyond the time frame of my research. In Brett’s description from earlier, there is an
implicit distinction between academics who consider themselves to be writers and
those who consider writing to be a part of the job they do. In the face of persistent
media and colloquial opinion which categorizes blogging as variously self-serving,
self-aggrandizing or self-delusional, this distinction is useful to makes sense of what
I want to call the ‘will to blog’. As bell hooks has also argued so eloquently:
All academics write but not all see themselves as writers. Writing to fulfil
professional career expectations is not the same as writing that emerges as the
fulfilment of a yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit or reward,
when it is the experience of writing that matters. (hooks, 1999, p. 37)
As a writer, I have a keen desire to share and discuss ideas with others. Academic forms
of evaluation and publication are often unsatisfying for me precisely because they fail
to reach an audience for whom I would also like to write. Given the current
expectations of the academic profession, however, there appears little leeway for
alternative forms of publishing and intellectual practice. The ‘publish or perish’ dictum
has been particularly effective in narrowing the ambitions that many academics hold
for their writing to the extent that a ‘yearning to work with words when there is no
clear benefit’ is regularly met with disbelief, if not also disapproval, from colleagues.
My understanding of cultural studies has always been that it emerges from a ‘will to
connect’ with others, or in the words of RichardHoggart, ‘only connect’ (Hoggart, 1972).
Blogging offers an exciting new avenue for academics and non-academics alike to ‘speak
to each other’ (Hoggart, 1970a, b). To blog is to react to the limited range of conversations
otherwise available to us in a heavily compartmentalized neoliberal culture, to share
thoughts, ideas and dreams with thosewhose paths wemay not cross ineveryday routines.
Blogs and Counter-professionalism
If we live in an era when academic practice entails radical professionalism, blogs are
a way to make contact with an audience both within and outside the narrow field of a
discipline. Instead of documenting heroic missions conducted on others’ behalf, blogs
foster conversational scholarship by actively seeking the voices of others. Blogs are
a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech
traditionally securing academic privilege. They are a way to be reflexive about the
privileges of an institutional position in the sense that Couldry describes:
if you take it as axiomatic that discursive resources are unequally distributed, then
for academics to use their discursive resources to reveal the places where others are
speaking may sometimes help those others to be heard. (Couldry, 1996, p. 324)
A career in cultural studies may meet its professional obligations as well as great
success by writing regularly about the ordinary and/or subversive practices of others.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 157
But to do so not only maintains the observer–subject, critic–amateur distinction that
mirrors wider forms of segregation and binary thinking that are manifest in our
society (Morris, 1992) but also proves that Brett’s fears about cultural studies’ political
goals were well founded. A politics which includes academic conventions in its sights
disrupts cultural criticism’s ritualistic potential by bringing different voices into a
broader conversation. Blogs allow us to write in conjunction with non-academic
‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not only value and improve our ideas but practise their
own rigorous forms of assessment, critique and review.
Blogs are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as banal. They
help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar secluded from the concerns of the
‘real world’. But blogging remains a liability in a professional environment focused on
Tier 1 journals, intellectual property and the tyranny of excellence. As a form of
counter-professionalism, blogs exhaust our most precious resources as academics:
good ideas and spare time. And this is the crux of the dilemma. Despite my
commitment to scholarly ideals, I am equally committed to any practice that makes
learning, thinking and writing feel ordinary as well as important. In this articlemy only
concern has been that such an objective, while apparently fitting the original impulse
of cultural studies, may no longer be extraordinary enough to warrant much attention.
Notes
[1] For the purposes of this paper I refer to blogging in general despite there being many distinctions
in online journal practice. At least part of my motivation in avoiding mention of journaling as
opposed to blogging is to discuss issues often downplayed in the gender and age characteristics
afforded to each (see Gregg, forthcoming 2006a).
[2] My use of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everyday’ are residues of the original context for this paper, the
CSAA conference Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-first Century Quotidian, Murdoch
University, Perth, Dec. 2004.
[3] For specific discussion of the interpellative strategies of new media commentary see Cohen (this
issue). Graham Meikle (2002) describes a similar process of ‘backing in to the future’ in his
Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet.
[4] For an overview of the former, see Culler and Lamb (2003). For a range of views on the public
intellectual in an Australian context, see Bartoloni et al. (1997), Dessaix (1998) and more
recently Carter (2004). The 1994 Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference held at the
University of Technology, Sydney, also had the theme ‘Intellectuals and Communities’.
[5] Bruce Robbins (1993) notes that this is an achievement typically overlooked in debates on the
politics of professionalism.
[6] And, I would add, e-mail list culture.
[7] Tim Dunlop (2003), one of Australia’s most prominent ‘political’ bloggers, argues that ‘blogging
has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving the division between intellectual
and citizen’. His essay is a more extensive engagement with the concerns raised by Brett’s article
and the idea of blogging as a public intellectual practice. ‘Rather than being in decline, as it is
fashionable to suggest’, Dunlop claims that blogs show the category of public intellectual to be
‘exploding’.
[8] Comments from readers of this paper have led me to agree that one of the most sobering aspects
of blogging regularly is the realization that one’s audience is insular, restricted and knowable,
that the idea of writing into the unknown is one of the great fallacies about everyday blogging.
158 M. Gregg
However, I would still want to accord a degree of power to the silent readers many blogs enjoy,
and the importance of this albeit small unknown readership in shaping the urgency of address.
References
Barcan, R. (2002) ‘Problems without solutions: teaching theory and the politics of hope’, Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 343–356.
Bartoloni, P., Lynch, K. & Kendal, S. (eds) (1997) Intellectuals and Publics: Essays on Cultural Theory
and Practice, School of English, La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Brett, J. (1991) ‘The bureaucratisation of writing: why so few academics are public intellectuals’,
Meanjin, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 513–522.
Brett, J. (2003) Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Brett, J. (2005) ‘Relaxed and comfortable: the Liberal Party’s Australia’, 19th Quarterly Essay.
Buettner, A. & Mitchell, P. (2005) ‘New intellectuals? Public culture and the new media in Australia’,
Unpublished conference paper delivered at Culture Fix, CSAA Annual Conference, University
of Technology, Sydney, Nov.
Butler, J., Guillory, J. & Thomas, K. (2000) (eds) What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of
Literary Theory, Routledge, London.
Carter, D. (ed.) (2004) The Ideas Market: an Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life,
Melbourne University Press, Carlton.
Cohen, K. (2006) ‘A welcome for blogs’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 20,
no. 2, pp. 000–000.
Collinson, S. & Delaney, B. (2005) ‘Work goes to blogs’, Sydney Morning Herald, vol. 5–6 Nov., p. 11.
Couldry, N. (1996) ‘Speaking about others and speaking personally: reflections after Elspeth
Probyn’s Sexing the Self ’, Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 315–333.
Culler, J. & Lamb, K. (eds) (2003) Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, Stanford
University Press, Stanford.
Daryl Slack, J. (1996) ‘The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’, in Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds D. Morley & Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge, London,
pp. 112–127.
Dessaix, R. (ed.) (1998) Speaking their Minds: Intellectuals and the Public Culture in Australia, ABC
Books, Sydney.
Dunlop, T. (2003) ‘If you build it they will come: blogging and the new citizenship’, Evatt Foundation
Papers, Available at: http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/91.html (accessed 12
Dec. 2005).
Eagleton, T. (2003) After Theory, Basic Books, New York.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and eds Q. Hoare &
G. Nowell Smith, Lawrence & Wishart, London.
Gregg, M. (forthcoming 2006a) ‘Posting with passion: blogs and the politics of gender’, in Uses of
Blogs, eds A. Bruns & J. Jacobs, Peter Lang, New York.
Gregg, M. (forthcoming 2006b) Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, Palgrave, London.
Hall, Stuart. (1992) ‘Cultural studies and its theoritical legacies’, in Cultural Studies, eds Cary Nelson,
Paula A. Treichler & Lawrence Grossberg, Routledge, London.
Hartley, J. (1999) The Uses of Television, Routledge, London.
Hemmings, C. (2005) ‘Invoking affect: cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies,
vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 548–567.
Hoggart, R. (1970a) Speaking to Each Other: About Society, vol. 1, Chatto & Windus, London.
Hoggart, R. (1970b) Speaking to Each Other: About Literature, vol. 2, Chatto & Windus, London.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 159
Hoggart, R. (1972) Only Connect: On Culture and Communication (Reith Lectures), Chatto &
Windus, London.
hooks, b. (1999) Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work, Henry Holt, New York.
Meikle, G. (2002) Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, Pluto Press, Annandale.
Miller, T. & McHoul, A. (1998) Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Sage, London.
Morris, M. (1988) The Pirate’s Fiance´e: Feminism Reading Postmodernism, Verso, London.
Morris, M. (1992) ‘Great moments in social climbing: King Kong and the human fly’, in Sexuality
and Space, ed. B. Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
Morris, M. (2000) ‘Globalisation and its discontents’, Meridian, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 17–29.
Robbins, B. (1993) Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture, Verso, London.
Ross, A. (2004) Low Pay, High Profile, New Press, New York.
Said, E. W. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures, Pantheon Books,
New York.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press,
Durham, NC.
Tribble, I. (pseudonym). ‘Bloggers need not apply’, Chronicle of Higher Education, (2005a) 8 Jul.,
Available at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm (accessed 18 Dec. 2005).
Tribble, I. (pseudonym). ‘They shoot messengers, don’t they?’, Chronicle of Higher Education, (2005b)
2 Sep., Available at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/09/2005090201c.htm (accessed 18
Dec. 2005)
Williams, R. (1958) ‘Culture is ordinary’, in Conviction, ed. N. MacKenzie, MacGibbon &
Kee, London.
160 M. Gregg
it? Cultural studies has spent many years establishing ‘ordinariness’ as a positive trait
in the practices of other people (e.g.Williams, 1958; Hartley, 1999) yet it has tended to
avoid using the concept in relation to the everyday lives of scholars themselves. This
may be understandable given the field’s original political aspirations to indict the classbased
elitism of academic modes of valuing.Many writers agree that the resources and
job security of the academic profession bestow a particular responsibility on cultural
studies practitioners (e.g. Hall, 1992; Couldry, 1996). If its total renunciation is
strategically undesirable, then, it still seems appropriate to contemplate strategies that
might ameliorate this taken-for-granted privilege. If Gramsci’s point that ‘we are all
intellectuals’ is a cornerstone of cultural studies’ practice, the second dimension of his
statement—‘not all men have the function of intellectuals’—must also be remembered.
The possible functions that contemporary cultural studies’ intellectual practice might
serve forms the backdrop for this paper, bearing in mind Gramsci’s wider and more
provocative question: ‘is it the intention that there should always be rulers and ruled,
or is the objective to create the conditions in which this division is no longer
necessary?’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 144).
It is increasingly clear that new technologies are helping to situate academic labour
as a much more banal, if not quite ‘everyday’, practice in a changing university
environment.2 Self-publishing platforms like weblogs are beginning to influence what
ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/06/020147-14 q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310600641604
Melissa Gregg is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and Lecturer in
Media and Cultural Studies in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of
Queensland. Her forthcoming book, Emotionally Invested: Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006),
considers the significance of ‘affect’ in the writing of key cultural studies figures and its particular role in securing
commitment to the academic vocation. Correspondence to: Melissa Gregg, Centre for Critical and Cultural
Studies, 4th Floor Forgan Smith Tower, University of Queensland, Qld 4072, Australia. E-mail: m.gregg
@uq.edu.au
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies
Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 147–160
an academic career can involve—and be seen to involve to an interested public. Blogs
have made scholarly work accessible and accountable to a readership outside the
academy, an achievement that seems important in the history of cultural studies’
concerns. Indeed, as I want to suggest in this paper, the very kinds of conversations
they encourage can be regarded as offering renewed vigour to cultural studies’ antielitist
and reflexive epistemological project.
This article marks the beginning of a series of investigations in which I hope to offer a
‘sympathetic’ account of the opportunities that new media technologies provide for
intellectual practice. Sympathetic reading asks that the critic resist ‘the temptation to
“answer back”’(Morris, 1988, p. 6) and instead approach cultural texts for their capacity
to test the habitual responses of academic training or political position. As Meaghan
Morris explains, reading texts sympathetically is ‘to understand them as criticisms of
those answers that my feminism might automatically provide’ (ibid.). It forces the critic
to question her own assumptions and practices in the process of reading others’. Such
concerted tactics are called for at a time when the presumptions emanating from
mainstream media coverage of new media technologies seem poised to threaten the
present and future use of platforms like weblogs in professional contexts (Collinson &
Delaney, 2005). Preferring to focus on the anomie or indeed aspiring celebrity of those
who choose to maintain aWeb presence, the lack of credentials of news pundit bloggers,
or the highly charged terrain of copyright, content delivery and intellectual property
issues, the subsidized nature of much media commentary is poorly matched to reflect
the complexity and subtlety of wider shifts brought with new technologies. The
‘interpellative imperative’ of criticism as a genre3 seems to have avoided discussion of
how practices like blogging fit within a tradition of public intellectualism otherwise
mourned (Buettner & Mitchell, 2005). As I want to argue here, it has also overlooked
blogging’s role in carrying out cultural studies’ long-standing commitment to
scholarship which reaches beyond the limited range of the academic sphere.
Professionalism
The institutional constraints on academics have always challenged the objectives of
sharing knowledge and fostering conversation with an audience outside the university.
As Judith Brett noted in 1991, the bureaucratization of the university has had
‘profound effects on the writing of academics in the humanities and social sciences’,
the clearest of which being that academics now write in order to fulfil the criteria of a
carefully managed institution, pushing their writing ‘away from its proper goal—the
contribution to culture and society’ (Brett, 1991, p. 516). When Brett asked ‘why so
few academics are public intellectuals’, part of her aim was to identify why it is so rare
for academics to be good writers, indeed why so many of them are ‘such bad or
indifferent writers’ (Brett, 1991, p. 514). Brett’s essay forms part of a sustained period
of reflection, in Australia and the United States in particular, lamenting the decline of
public intellectual practice on the one hand and the quality of academic writing on the
other.4
148 M. Gregg
In light of these discussions, what remains refreshing about Brett’s article is the way
in which it articulates the professional pressures which affect the ‘traditional’
intellectual function, creating a shrinking ‘public’ for academic practice:
The preconditions for good discursive prose are relatively simple: a fully imagined
audience, a sense of urgency, something interesting and important to say. The
biggest problem with most academic writing is achieving the first two. Many
academics start out with important and interesting things to say, but very few feel
compelled to say them in ways that engage an audience outside their discipline; and
in the end this corrodes the importance of what they have to say. (Brett, 1991, p. 514)
Brett considers it nearly impossible for academics to provide a public intellectual
function in the contemporary university context because it goes ‘against the grain of
the job’ (Brett, 1991, p. 515). The problem with academic writing, she says, is that it is
writing that ‘never leaves school’ (Brett, 1991, p. 521).
It is in this sense that Brett considers cultural studies to be one of a number of
intellectual challenges to have emerged from outside the academy that inevitably
narrows the audience for its writing upon entry. Like feminism andMarxism before it,
cultural studies is another of those social movements ‘in danger of becoming the basis of
new careers and so losing their engagement with broad social and political goals’ (Brett,
1991, p. 518; emphasis added). Reading this article today, it is the ‘and so’ in this
particular sentence that holds my interest. It implies that an academic career can only
mean a loss of ‘engagementwith broad social and political goals’. In so far as her remarks
are directed to the fate of the New Left since the 1960s, Brett claims: ‘The threat of
unemployment has kept one-time radicals busy ensuring their futures; academic
politics has replaced the broad public politics of their youth’ (Brett, 1991, p. 518).
This warning as to the apoliticizing effects of professionalism echoes that of another
feminist colleague with experience witnessing the trajectory of New Left colleagues.
In ‘Politics Now: Anxieties of a Petty-bourgeois Intellectual’ Morris also reads the
period from 1975 to 1985 as a shift from the full-time radicalism to the radical
professionalism of the left (Morris, 1988, p. 177). Kept busy with grant applications and
the politic-ing of various institutional matters, the horizon for investment amongst
cultural workers is described byMorris as perilously parochial, completely substituting
any other form of politics (Morris, 1988, p. 179). For both writers, professionalism
brings a necessary end to a certain cherished sense of political engagement.
Fledgling at the beginning of one of the new careers in cultural studies that Brett
anticipated, I approach these two descriptions with some trepidation. Not only are they
writers whose work has secured my belief in the value of sophisticated and timely
scholarship which transcends a purely academic audience (Morris was a freelance
journalist without ever having a full-time academic job in Australia prior to her move to
Hong Kong, while Brett has recently gained a wide cross-over readership with her research
on the Liberal Party; see Brett, 2003, 2005). They also represent the important achievement
of feminist movements which have ensured that women now have the choice to pursue
professional careers.5What troublesmeabout their descriptions nowis that for researchers
inheriting cultural studies’ legacies today, there has never been a time before radical
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 149
professionalism, before the strategic thinking required by institutional politics, a time when
one might not have spent most of their energy navigating funding bodies.What is more,
many recent graduates have been politicized by their exposure to academic theory,which is
to say that for the present generation there has never been a time ‘before’ or ‘after’ theory, as
the story usually goes (Eagleton, 2003; Butler et al., 2000). Ruth Barcan described this
wonderfully in a keynote address to the What’s Left of Theory? Australian Cultural Studies
conference in Hobart in 2001: ‘theory operated not as the suspect opposite to politics, as it
did for many people, but as the verymode ofmy politicisation’ (Barcan, 2002, p. 344). I can
identify as one of those students Barcan describes ‘whose life is transformed unequivocally
for the better by their encounter with theory, who looks at the world anew, and who
becomes filled with a sense of purpose and energy’ as a result (Barcan, 2002, p. 354).Work
in the academy hasn’t been a shift of focus for politics: theoretically and practically,
academic politics is the most familiar (if not the only) form I know.
Heroics
If I am uncomfortable with the way that the politics of professionalization has often
been described it is because there is a missing narrative to account for the experience of
more recent graduates who, having experienced cultural studies teaching at
undergraduate and postgraduate level, see political opportunities in an academic
career. These opportunities seem to me limited, however, by the consistency with
which cultural studies’ stated preference for studying ‘the ordinary’ rarely matches the
modes of writing typically practised in the attempt to legitimate such attention.
A theoretical understanding of the performative force of writing and the material
effects of discourse should make this problematic enough; what makes it worse is when
abstract writing for an initiated audience serves merely to reproduce what Eve
Sedgwick (2003, p. 108) has called the ‘thinking routines’ of contemporary theory.
In her recent book Touching Feeling, Sedgwick mounts a critique of ‘paranoid
reading’: what she perceives to be a dominant scholarly preoccupation with exposing
residual forms of essentialism, unearthing the unconscious drives and compulsions of
an author, or uncovering the oppressive forces of history ‘masquerading under liberal
aesthetic guise’ (ibid.). Demonstrating a sensitivity to historical and political shifts
that I also want to foreground, Sedgwick writes:
Where are all these supposed modern liberal subjects? I daily encounter graduate
students who are dab hands at unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie
a secular, universalist liberal humanism. Yet these students’ sentient years, unlike the
formative years of their teachers, have been spent entirely in a xenophobic Reagan-
Bush-Clinton-Bush America where ‘liberal’ is, if anything, a taboo category and
where ‘secular humanism’ is routinely treated as a marginal religious sect, while a
vast majority of the population claims to engage in direct intercourse with multiple
invisible entities such as angels, Satan, and God. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 140)
It is not simply critical mantras that Sedgwick objects to, or the political landscape in
the United States, for that matter. She queries the logic of the spatial metaphors
150 M. Gregg
common in contemporary research practice—the habitual speech that accompanies
intellectual positioning:
Beneath and behind are hard enough to let go of; what has been even more difficult is
to get a little distance from beyond, in particular the bossy gesture of ‘calling for’ an
imminently perfected critical or revolutionary practice that one can oneself only
adumbrate. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 8)
It is precisely this sense of an avant-garde or well-placed lone critic ‘calling for’ changes
in others’ political priorities that I take the ‘counter-heroics’ of this special issue’s title
to mean. If it in any way resembles the ‘sense of urgency’ that Brett demands of public
intellectual practice, it does so to the extent that the urgency is both generic and
manufactured.
Sedgwick’s descriptions may indeed be strategic caricatures, as Clare Hemmings
(2005) has recently argued. Yet I want to suggest that cultural studies’ unfinished
legacy includes abandoning the styles of academic practice that provide the substance
of their rhetorical force. For cultural studies academics to stake their politics on
providing readings for others’ benefit, or making plain the obviousness of others’
oppression, seems ill-fitting the mobilizing premises of the field. As Sedgwick argues,
such objectives depend ‘on an infinite reservoir of naı¨vete´ in those who make up the
audience’ for our work as scholars:
What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate,
anyone to learn that a given socialmanifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative,
phantasmatic, or even violent? . . .How television-starved would someone have to be to
find it shocking that ideologies contradict themselves, that simulacra don’t have originals,
or that gender representations are artificial? . . . Some expose´s, some demystifications,
some bearings of witness do have great effectual force (though often of an unanticipated
kind).Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all however, and as long as
that is so,wemust admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere
else than in their relation to knowledge per se. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 141)
As Toby Miller and Alec McHoul have argued (1998), cultural studies scholarship has
enough work cut out for it producing adequate accounts of actually existing ‘everyday’
practices to be satisfied with merely speculating about subversive pleasures. A more
modest, inquisitive, even fallible speaking position would only help in the endeavour
to discover trends that lie outside pre-given theoretical rubrics.
Resisting the Resistance Ritual
The ritualized form of scholarship that Sedgwick points to is only understandable
given the current expectation that academics publish regularly in refereed journals to
secure their career and professional advancement. Morris has noted that this model
which determines institutional funding as well as individual standing has developed in
tandem with the workload of today’s ‘hyper-busy’ academics:
To engage in it, we do not need to be involved at the time in serious ethnographic or
textual study, resource- and time-consuming as these are, and we do not need to
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 151
expect any kind of change to follow our intervention. It is entirely possible to
contribute to such a debate by referring only to a series of other contributions, each
playing variations on already familiar and firmly held positions. (Morris, 2000, p. 28)
It is this form of debate that Brett surely had in mind in her 1991 article. It also
epitomizes the effects of professionalism so abhorrent to Edward Said in the series of
lectures he delivered on the role of the intellectual in the early 1990s. Said’s formidable
description of the intellectual’s function was to:
raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to
produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or
corporations, and whose raison d’eˆtre is to represent all those people and issues that
are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. (Said, 1994, p. 11)
Said urged that a spirit of amateurism must transform professional routines ‘into
something much more lively and radical’ so that ‘instead of doing what one is
supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect
with a personal project and original thoughts’ (Said, 1994, p. 83). Said denounced
professionalism on the basis that it viewed intellectual work as:
something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five and with one eye
on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional
behaviour—not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or
limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial
and unpolitical and ‘objective.’ (Said, 1994, p. 74)
Of course what is complicated about this formulation for those pursuing careers in
cultural studies is that radicalism is itself a professional expectation of our chosen field.
Cultural studies asks that we make a career out of ‘rocking the boat’. To refuse its
dominant forms of performance and endeavour is also to admit suspicion of the
innate progressivism of its main theoretical influences. Or, as Sedgwick puts it rather
more stylishly:
Comes the revolution, Comrade, you’ll be tickled pink by those deconstructive
jokes; you’ll faint from ennui every minute you’re not smashing the state apparatus;
you’ll definitely want hot sex twenty to thirty times a day. You’ll be mournful and
militant. You’ll never want to tell Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Not tonight, dears, I have a
headache.’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 146)
This more recent regime of political ‘cool’ appearing in tandem with cultural studies’
ongoing professionalization resembles the tightly policed regime of thought and
behaviour Morris identifies as the ‘lifestyle Leftism’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Morris,
1988, pp. 173–186). Yet the difficulty it poses for intellectual work is that
commonsense assumptions limit the acuity of the critical methods available to
appreciate emerging everyday practices. In Sedgwick’s reading, the ‘ethical urgency’
of terms like hegemony and subversion, or their counterparts, repression and
liberation, evacuates any critical reflection of their original theoretical formulation.
The correct codification of a cultural object or practice becomes the endpoint of an
analysis, meaning that the rich mid-ranges of agency become extremely hard to gauge
152 M. Gregg
in scholarly terms. From a critical as well as a political standpoint this can only be
disturbing, given that it is ‘the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual
creativity and change’ (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 13).
Blogging as Conversational Scholarship
It is precisely the ‘mid-range’ between disciplinary insularism and public intellectual
practice that best characterizes blogging. Instead of continuing the trend of ‘calling for’
a shift in others’ practices, I want to use the following discussion of blogging to
highlight ways in which elements of cultural studies’ political aspirations can be
adjusted to new historical contexts. I am not suggesting that blogs are an example
of ‘the way forward’ for public intellectual practice (see Dunlop, 2003), nor do I think
that they should be seen as a satisfactory complement to the very real pressures of
outcomes-driven academic publishing. Here I seek merely to provide an account
of their productive possibilities at a time when a degree of hyperbole and assumption
currently shrouds—and risks—their varied uses.
In light of recent controversy—especially following anonymous revelations in
The Chronicle of Higher Education that some hiring committees at US universities may
discriminate against bloggers (see Tribble, 2005a, b; and the many responses in the
discussion fora)—it seems odd that blogging suffers such persecution as a form of
extracurricular intellectual engagement. What I will call the ‘conversational
scholarship’ that it gives rise to can be seen to follow a tradition that includes
independent and small press publishing, reading groups, salons and even cafe´ culture;
that is, before the real estate boom and rising standards of living demanded that
urban-based students work full time to support their study, severely limiting other
forms of recreational intellectual practice. The issue seems to be with the technology
itself: the simultaneously anonymous and public nature of blogging as well as the
instant feedback the software make possible. Indeed, the virulence that typifies many
blog debates, and which is often the cause for their scorn, arises from a lack of
common ground and/or vocabulary. Blogs reveal in a very overt way how regularly
writing fails to communicate intention. They also indicate how much distance a
tertiary education can put between people trying to engage in a conversation.
Software contributes to blogging dynamics in a further notable way. Archives
memorialize the passion of intellectual debate as it happens. The temporality involved
in blogging’s ‘call and response’ dynamic is faster and more immediate than previous
forms of intellectual writing and publishing. In this sense, the disdain many academics
feel towards blogging6 can be understood at least partly in terms of the way it records
the vicissitudes and vulnerability of intellectual practice. At the very least, blogging is
useful for the way that it offers a chance to reflect upon which aspects of their ordinary,
everyday practice scholars prefer the public to see.
Yet this very capacity to offer a platform for dialogue between writer and reader is
also the political significance of weblogs.7 While blogs are generally associated with a
single author, the role of the writer quite often consists of instigator and provocateur
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 153
in the sense that Said endorses. This is a noticeable move away from any necessary
association between author and authority. Granted, it is hard to generalize too much
here: the objectives of bloggers are as diverse as the people who write them. Yet I would
venture that the amount of notoriety that individual bloggers seek to generate in the
mainstream media and in sections of the ‘blogosphere’ often relates to the degree to
which they do maintain a belief in the notion of author-as-authority. This is only to be
expected from those with an investment in maintaining or gaining credibility in order
to contribute to a broadcast model of communication (which I would further suggest
encapsulates the present love/hate relationship between many punditry bloggers and
journalists). Blogs reveal the mind of the critic as impressionable and open to
persuasion, for the writer is rarely able to sustain the confidence and assurance of a
fixed position. Such a function contrasts with conventional modes of academic
performance premised on expertise and mastery. It is to admit the hesitancy involved
in the difficult task of thinking about the world.
For cultural studies, the significant potential to be seen in blogging—in line with the
romantic new media ethos that ‘information wants to be free’—is that knowledge loses
any sense of being something to be guarded. Instead, it becomes something to be
facilitated, discussed and improved. Blogs can create an economy of generosity and gift
at the expense of jealousy and possessiveness (cf. Williams, 1958). They encourage
collaboration as much as competition. The participatory nature of writing, response
and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and
thinking-in-process. In this they illustrate very well that version of cultural studies
practice described by Stuart Hall, which is ‘to work with our always inadequate
theories to help move understanding “a little further on down the road”’ (Daryl Slack,
1996, p. 113).
In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes
to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. One of the main
reasons graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is that blogs offer
solidarity out of isolation, especially on long projects. They create the conditions for
collegiality, brainstorming and frank, fast feedback while also generating and
maintaining interest, enthusiasm and motivation. Even the best supervision in the
most convivial university department cannot offer this kind of support on a regular
basis. The persistence with which established academics condemn blogging as a
distraction preventing graduate students from timely completion and participation in
their desired career does a disservice to the many instances whereby blogs are utilized
as a sophisticated research tool. It also wilfully ignores the wider economic and
political circumstances making the potential for a tenured academic career
increasingly unlikely for a new generation of graduates (Ross, 2004; Gregg, 2006b).
In terms of the linguistic apartheid for which Brett chastises academics, blogs are
also one of the most convenient and efficient tools for improving writing skills.
Blogging forces the writer to make every word count, to be as clear as possible in
getting a message across. Unlike the preconditions for good writing in Brett’s
description, it is impossible to know precisely who your audience is as a blogger.
154 M. Gregg
Its sheer publicness—the very unpredictability of audience—is what creates a sense of
immediacy and urgency.8
For all the positive tendencies I have just noted, however, blogging can also be a
volatile, archly personal and estranging practice. To be confronted by the opinions of
others who share little concern for or understanding of your work is a discomforting and
chastening experience. It is the quickest way to have any pretensions about academic
work deflated. Then again, this is not so very unlike the process of peer review, or giving
a conference paper. If anything, the explosiveness of blogging flame wars serves to
indicate the fac¸ade of much ‘polite’ academic discourse. A blog readership may not
always share a referee’s investment in a discipline or a profession, but a willingness to
offer opinion is evidence that a particular topic has resonance beyond academic niceties.
Outside the Comfort Zone: Feeling Ordinary in the Blogosphere
In line with the participatory ethic for cultural studies we are advocating in this issue,
Iwant now to offer a brief account of the ways inwhichmy own theoretical presumptions
have been tested and invigorated by blogging over the last two years. The main point I
want to underline is the manner in which blogging provokes acute recognition of what
may otherwise remain ‘mere’ theoretical tenets in one’s academic work—a point which
adds to the benefits of Morris’s sympathetic criticism that I have already outlined. For
instance, since starting my blog I have become a lot more conscious of my status as:
(a) an interchangeable persona available for others’ use: despite my knowledge of
postmodern theories of identity fabrication and simulacra I never expected that
someone would use my blog for a personal vendetta, writing under my name and
also using the names of other regular contributors to disrupt the dynamics of the
blog and seek to expose me as some kind of fraud;
(b) a woman (assumed to be single): despite my feminist training I never seriously
thought that meeting people offline in public, group events would lead to volatile
situations with readers assuming intimacy and ‘entitlement’ to friendship because
of shared interests online. Even though I disagree with the moralizing agenda
attached to alarmist descriptions of new media I now find myself holding a similar
position, i.e. that even the most stable online personas cannot be trusted. For me,
the cliche´ has been proved;
(c) an academic: despite being regarded as an ‘early career researcher’ in a university
context I have been told by readers that what I write on my blog is too academic,
too theoretical or too jargon laden, and therefore not fitting the ‘spirit’
of blogging. Others who regard my blog as academic assume that when I write it
signifies my fully formed intellectual position on something and that I seek
to argue the point I allegedly made. Still others think that because I am an
academic I will obviously be interested in hearing the entire history of thought
behind any issue raised, because anything less would be unscholarly. This possibly
relates to:
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 155
(d) a young, female academic in a particular city of Australia: stereotypes about the
place where I currently live seem to lead some people to think I am therefore more
open to guidance or correction from others who blog from less peripheral/parochial
locations, or (of equal offence) that I deserve encouragement and support
for the same reasons;
(e) as an Australian feminist: blogging has drawn my attention to the specificity of my
training in Gender Studies in Australia rather than Women’s Studies or some of
the more polemical versions of liberal or radical feminism. The key feminist blogs
based in the United States are regularly engaged in the intricacies of legal rulings
(namely the ongoing fate of Roe v. Wade). Otherwise, their attention is usually
focused on issues of women’s under-representation on blogrolls, conferences,
speaking circuits, linking practices between blogs and the like. This means that
I have had to turn to different disciplines, for instance rhetoric and political
science, to find allies for the kind of work I do;
(f) as a person identified with cultural studies: the majority of research blogs are still
new media- or technology-industry specific, so it is difficult to find readers with a
similar disciplinary background. On the other hand, I have had cultural studies
professors find my blog and engage with my ideas at length—feedback I would
never have received otherwise. In terms of ‘political’ cool in the blogosphere,
however, cultural studies is often something of a punching bag, which has meant
that my blog has sometimes been used as a location for debating cultural studies’
politics, regardless of whether I describe my own work as political;
(g) as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, urban-based professional: these forms of
cultural capital, to my mind, define both the possibilities and the limits of
blogging’s audience reach at present, and while I have expressed my ambivalence
towards professional academic practice as a career choice on a number of
occasions, my lack of overtly identity-based or marginal politics means that I often
suffer credibility problems as an individual.
While it is clearly limited by its subjectivity, what I think this list helps to illustrate is that
despite my training in feminism and cultural studies, and hence my heightened
theoretical understanding of the ways in which my identity influences my perspective on
the world, having a blog has made me increasingly conscious of the multi-faceted ways
these identities play out in apparently banal, everyday encounters. Perhaps it was an
oversight to have assumed that these identities would not be particularly relevant to the
practice of my blogging; what I wonder instead is the extent to which even the most selfreflexive
of disciplines like cultural studies regularly strips identity characteristics fromits
dominant genres in order to accord itself scholarly status. My ability to comment as a
scholar on the practice of blogging has been to some extent jeopardized by my
participation in the practice itself. At the same time,my understanding of both blogging
and cultural theory has improved considerably during this same process. Blogging makes
me aware of my gender, race, sexuality, class, geographical location and education level
with a regularity that my typical daily encounters as an academic simply do not.
156 M. Gregg
The Will to Connect
While the analysis I have just offered seems to me an important justification for
blogging, I have yet to mention the most important reason I will continue to do so
beyond the time frame of my research. In Brett’s description from earlier, there is an
implicit distinction between academics who consider themselves to be writers and
those who consider writing to be a part of the job they do. In the face of persistent
media and colloquial opinion which categorizes blogging as variously self-serving,
self-aggrandizing or self-delusional, this distinction is useful to makes sense of what
I want to call the ‘will to blog’. As bell hooks has also argued so eloquently:
All academics write but not all see themselves as writers. Writing to fulfil
professional career expectations is not the same as writing that emerges as the
fulfilment of a yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit or reward,
when it is the experience of writing that matters. (hooks, 1999, p. 37)
As a writer, I have a keen desire to share and discuss ideas with others. Academic forms
of evaluation and publication are often unsatisfying for me precisely because they fail
to reach an audience for whom I would also like to write. Given the current
expectations of the academic profession, however, there appears little leeway for
alternative forms of publishing and intellectual practice. The ‘publish or perish’ dictum
has been particularly effective in narrowing the ambitions that many academics hold
for their writing to the extent that a ‘yearning to work with words when there is no
clear benefit’ is regularly met with disbelief, if not also disapproval, from colleagues.
My understanding of cultural studies has always been that it emerges from a ‘will to
connect’ with others, or in the words of RichardHoggart, ‘only connect’ (Hoggart, 1972).
Blogging offers an exciting new avenue for academics and non-academics alike to ‘speak
to each other’ (Hoggart, 1970a, b). To blog is to react to the limited range of conversations
otherwise available to us in a heavily compartmentalized neoliberal culture, to share
thoughts, ideas and dreams with thosewhose paths wemay not cross ineveryday routines.
Blogs and Counter-professionalism
If we live in an era when academic practice entails radical professionalism, blogs are
a way to make contact with an audience both within and outside the narrow field of a
discipline. Instead of documenting heroic missions conducted on others’ behalf, blogs
foster conversational scholarship by actively seeking the voices of others. Blogs are
a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech
traditionally securing academic privilege. They are a way to be reflexive about the
privileges of an institutional position in the sense that Couldry describes:
if you take it as axiomatic that discursive resources are unequally distributed, then
for academics to use their discursive resources to reveal the places where others are
speaking may sometimes help those others to be heard. (Couldry, 1996, p. 324)
A career in cultural studies may meet its professional obligations as well as great
success by writing regularly about the ordinary and/or subversive practices of others.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 157
But to do so not only maintains the observer–subject, critic–amateur distinction that
mirrors wider forms of segregation and binary thinking that are manifest in our
society (Morris, 1992) but also proves that Brett’s fears about cultural studies’ political
goals were well founded. A politics which includes academic conventions in its sights
disrupts cultural criticism’s ritualistic potential by bringing different voices into a
broader conversation. Blogs allow us to write in conjunction with non-academic
‘peers’ and ‘colleagues’ who not only value and improve our ideas but practise their
own rigorous forms of assessment, critique and review.
Blogs are counter-heroic in that they expose the life of the academic as banal. They
help lay bare the fallacy of the ivory tower scholar secluded from the concerns of the
‘real world’. But blogging remains a liability in a professional environment focused on
Tier 1 journals, intellectual property and the tyranny of excellence. As a form of
counter-professionalism, blogs exhaust our most precious resources as academics:
good ideas and spare time. And this is the crux of the dilemma. Despite my
commitment to scholarly ideals, I am equally committed to any practice that makes
learning, thinking and writing feel ordinary as well as important. In this articlemy only
concern has been that such an objective, while apparently fitting the original impulse
of cultural studies, may no longer be extraordinary enough to warrant much attention.
Notes
[1] For the purposes of this paper I refer to blogging in general despite there being many distinctions
in online journal practice. At least part of my motivation in avoiding mention of journaling as
opposed to blogging is to discuss issues often downplayed in the gender and age characteristics
afforded to each (see Gregg, forthcoming 2006a).
[2] My use of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everyday’ are residues of the original context for this paper, the
CSAA conference Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-first Century Quotidian, Murdoch
University, Perth, Dec. 2004.
[3] For specific discussion of the interpellative strategies of new media commentary see Cohen (this
issue). Graham Meikle (2002) describes a similar process of ‘backing in to the future’ in his
Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet.
[4] For an overview of the former, see Culler and Lamb (2003). For a range of views on the public
intellectual in an Australian context, see Bartoloni et al. (1997), Dessaix (1998) and more
recently Carter (2004). The 1994 Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference held at the
University of Technology, Sydney, also had the theme ‘Intellectuals and Communities’.
[5] Bruce Robbins (1993) notes that this is an achievement typically overlooked in debates on the
politics of professionalism.
[6] And, I would add, e-mail list culture.
[7] Tim Dunlop (2003), one of Australia’s most prominent ‘political’ bloggers, argues that ‘blogging
has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving the division between intellectual
and citizen’. His essay is a more extensive engagement with the concerns raised by Brett’s article
and the idea of blogging as a public intellectual practice. ‘Rather than being in decline, as it is
fashionable to suggest’, Dunlop claims that blogs show the category of public intellectual to be
‘exploding’.
[8] Comments from readers of this paper have led me to agree that one of the most sobering aspects
of blogging regularly is the realization that one’s audience is insular, restricted and knowable,
that the idea of writing into the unknown is one of the great fallacies about everyday blogging.
158 M. Gregg
However, I would still want to accord a degree of power to the silent readers many blogs enjoy,
and the importance of this albeit small unknown readership in shaping the urgency of address.
References
Barcan, R. (2002) ‘Problems without solutions: teaching theory and the politics of hope’, Continuum:
Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 343–356.
Bartoloni, P., Lynch, K. & Kendal, S. (eds) (1997) Intellectuals and Publics: Essays on Cultural Theory
and Practice, School of English, La Trobe University, Melbourne.
Brett, J. (1991) ‘The bureaucratisation of writing: why so few academics are public intellectuals’,
Meanjin, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 513–522.
Brett, J. (2003) Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Brett, J. (2005) ‘Relaxed and comfortable: the Liberal Party’s Australia’, 19th Quarterly Essay.
Buettner, A. & Mitchell, P. (2005) ‘New intellectuals? Public culture and the new media in Australia’,
Unpublished conference paper delivered at Culture Fix, CSAA Annual Conference, University
of Technology, Sydney, Nov.
Butler, J., Guillory, J. & Thomas, K. (2000) (eds) What’s Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of
Literary Theory, Routledge, London.
Carter, D. (ed.) (2004) The Ideas Market: an Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life,
Melbourne University Press, Carlton.
Cohen, K. (2006) ‘A welcome for blogs’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 20,
no. 2, pp. 000–000.
Collinson, S. & Delaney, B. (2005) ‘Work goes to blogs’, Sydney Morning Herald, vol. 5–6 Nov., p. 11.
Couldry, N. (1996) ‘Speaking about others and speaking personally: reflections after Elspeth
Probyn’s Sexing the Self ’, Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 315–333.
Culler, J. & Lamb, K. (eds) (2003) Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, Stanford
University Press, Stanford.
Daryl Slack, J. (1996) ‘The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’, in Stuart Hall:
Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds D. Morley & Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge, London,
pp. 112–127.
Dessaix, R. (ed.) (1998) Speaking their Minds: Intellectuals and the Public Culture in Australia, ABC
Books, Sydney.
Dunlop, T. (2003) ‘If you build it they will come: blogging and the new citizenship’, Evatt Foundation
Papers, Available at: http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/91.html (accessed 12
Dec. 2005).
Eagleton, T. (2003) After Theory, Basic Books, New York.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and eds Q. Hoare &
G. Nowell Smith, Lawrence & Wishart, London.
Gregg, M. (forthcoming 2006a) ‘Posting with passion: blogs and the politics of gender’, in Uses of
Blogs, eds A. Bruns & J. Jacobs, Peter Lang, New York.
Gregg, M. (forthcoming 2006b) Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, Palgrave, London.
Hall, Stuart. (1992) ‘Cultural studies and its theoritical legacies’, in Cultural Studies, eds Cary Nelson,
Paula A. Treichler & Lawrence Grossberg, Routledge, London.
Hartley, J. (1999) The Uses of Television, Routledge, London.
Hemmings, C. (2005) ‘Invoking affect: cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies,
vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 548–567.
Hoggart, R. (1970a) Speaking to Each Other: About Society, vol. 1, Chatto & Windus, London.
Hoggart, R. (1970b) Speaking to Each Other: About Literature, vol. 2, Chatto & Windus, London.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies 159
Hoggart, R. (1972) Only Connect: On Culture and Communication (Reith Lectures), Chatto &
Windus, London.
hooks, b. (1999) Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work, Henry Holt, New York.
Meikle, G. (2002) Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, Pluto Press, Annandale.
Miller, T. & McHoul, A. (1998) Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Sage, London.
Morris, M. (1988) The Pirate’s Fiance´e: Feminism Reading Postmodernism, Verso, London.
Morris, M. (1992) ‘Great moments in social climbing: King Kong and the human fly’, in Sexuality
and Space, ed. B. Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
Morris, M. (2000) ‘Globalisation and its discontents’, Meridian, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 17–29.
Robbins, B. (1993) Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture, Verso, London.
Ross, A. (2004) Low Pay, High Profile, New Press, New York.
Said, E. W. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: the 1993 Reith Lectures, Pantheon Books,
New York.
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press,
Durham, NC.
Tribble, I. (pseudonym). ‘Bloggers need not apply’, Chronicle of Higher Education, (2005a) 8 Jul.,
Available at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/07/2005070801c.htm (accessed 18 Dec. 2005).
Tribble, I. (pseudonym). ‘They shoot messengers, don’t they?’, Chronicle of Higher Education, (2005b)
2 Sep., Available at: http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/09/2005090201c.htm (accessed 18
Dec. 2005)
Williams, R. (1958) ‘Culture is ordinary’, in Conviction, ed. N. MacKenzie, MacGibbon &
Kee, London.
160 M. Gregg
posted by Michael Roberts at
15.1.07
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home