When I turned down tenure and left UND (as opposed to being on leave), a friend from graduate school
said there was something romantic and rewarding about what he called the
“peripatetic intellectual.” The peripatetic is nomadic, working in many places
for relatively short periods of time. Those of us schooled in the arts and
history of rhetoric can appreciate why this is a romantic notion. We are
Aristotle moving and teaching, the itinerant sophists who go where there is
demand and work for as long as the students need us and the locals will tolerate us (as I write that sentence, it makes perfect sense why I was
destined to leave North Dakota).
Of course, the peripatetic teacher might also appear as the
charlatan, the dilettante--one with an attention deficit disorder. But let’s take the
attention economy seriously: in a world of second-screen experiences and
increasingly multimodal and marginal incursions into the awareness of
audiences, Plato’s accusations against the sophists--of flightiness, superficiality, etc.--might better be understood as a
savvy mode of addressing a contemporary audience (I've made this argument before).
Further, the notion of the peripatetic is made doubly
interesting when we think about the non-geographical boundaries interesting work crosses: code-switching, gender-bending, genre-mixing,
remediating, etc. Lately, I've distracted myself by identifying
cultural producers working not merely “at” the intersections of modes of
production and cultural identity, but despite, unconcerned with, and/or
antagonistic to (though never unaware of) those borders.
One of the nice things about shrugging off academe is a
concurrent ability to stop fretting over academe’s taxonomies. So this blog
will continue to focus on contemporary digital culture, but it will do so based
on what I find interesting as opposed to something more specific, like the
digital humanities (which itself is fraught with language about capacities and the value of the individual).
What you’ll find instead of academic disciplinarity is an
effort to discipline my intellectual work. My plan is to provide readers (and
let’s not perpetuate a lie: I am the only reader of this blog, the rest of you
are imaginary) with a menu of weekly exercises: an account of an interesting
cultural producer, a peak at work half-finished when I packed my office, a
textual replication of parts of my favorite course to teach (called Advertising
and Society at UND but what I always explained as a survey of consumer culture
and commercial communication), and—because those three things are productive
and positive articulations of the world around us—I will fill the gaps with things that fail to interest me via the dreaded negative critique.
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Wholly unrelated, but on my mind as I work on this: I assume everybody has a 90s band that they listened to well past the band's moment of relevance (if it ever survived the one-hit wondrousness of that era). For me, this band was the Ass Ponys. You bought the album, Electric Rock Music, because the band name was delightfully immature and the title track was, too. Anyhow, I've been listening to their more mature (but still tilting toward immature) albums, The Known Universe, Lohio. I'd like to say there's something to the Ass Ponys' lyricism that speaks to a youth spent in the declining industrial landscape of the Midwest in the late 20th-century. But honestly, I was 16 and their album included the words "Ass" and "Bastard." 20 years later, I am interested in different rhetorical choices (most of the time).
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So check in regularly, imaginary readers, for things that are (as we used to say) marginally interesting and in the meantime, check out a cut from Some Stupid with a Flare Gun.
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