Alec Badenoch

I seem to be back to writing about work. I have been back at work more or less full time (actually 80%) for over two years now. It’s been overwhelming at times, but it has also had its deeply good aspects, a lot of which have been bound up in realising that I have reached a place in my career where I have some sense that I know what I am doing. I can draw on years of experience in this line of work, and enough confidence in that to trust my instincts, and also to trust that it won’t be the end of the world if I make a mistake. At the same time, as I was recently able to tell a junior colleague, I still get nervous in my first class at the start of every term. These things go a long way at a time when I’m not always able to concentrate on what I am doing. I am also in a secure enough academic position that I can be thinking more clearly about the kind of scholar I am, and the kind of scholarship I want to do (and that needs to be done), and prioritise my work accordingly. Especially while also prioritizing the task of raising a child as a single parent, I am looking soberly at my remaining working years and realising that the biggest contributions I can make in the field will not come through any innovation as a researcher, but in paving pathways for others as a caring teacher and colleage. It’s an ongoing adjustment in mindset, but one that is rewarding in its own right.

It also helps that my coming back has been into some of the parts of my job that I love most, especially teaching Humanities Honours Programme students. My class “Honours Explorations” (in Dutch Terreinverkenning, surveying the landscape) is their ‘extra’ introduction to the discipline. As I mentioned in this post, and my last post, the theme of the course is ‘normal’, and its conceit is that the discipline of Media and Cultural Studies, perhaps more than any other, is concerned with how things come to be ‘normal’. In so doing, we observe how ‘normal’ works as a social construct (a process of contestation and consensus), an experience (a feeling that things in the world are within a range of expectation), and a value (how things ought to be). But the goal is for the students to use these explorations to understand their (current) position in the field, for them to start to formulate for themselves what this discipline is all about. We do this by what I’m coming to call ‘echo-location’: having students bounce their interests and motivations off of various approaches to the field. In fact, we spend a lot of time chatting about what it is do this kind of work, and I always learn a lot about that myself in the process.

In both engaging with the theme and reflexive thinking about this work, I’ve come to realise once more how much of my work – my interests, my thinking, my writing, my teaching, and my intellectual joy – can be traced to my time learning from the anthropologist James W. Fernandez, who was the advisor of my MA paper at the University of Chicago. Unless you know what you are looking for, you wouldn’t know it to read my work. His name appears exactly twice in the footnotes of my published work: once in my monograph Voices in Ruins (also in its acknowledgements) and now again in a recent publication about radio archives (about which more in a moment) plus a shout out in my recent lecture. But without his thought and teaching – and also his encouragement, patience, and help, not least including the letters of recommendation that paved my way into PhD study – none of my other publications, nor the academic career in which they are interwoven, would be here. There is above all a resonance, quite akin to my description of joy in an earlier post. Indeed, an appreciation of resonance as a concept is one of the many things I learned from Jim Fernandez. The anthropologist Ruth Behar begins her discussion of his influence in similar terms. Perhaps, in thinking along with an anthropologist, it’s a kind of kinship. So, though it can be hard to pinpoint into something direct enough to footnote, if you know what you are listening for, you can hear in almost everything that I do that I’m a student of James W. Fernandez.

I can’t put it all into words here now, either. If you have an hour, you can hear him introduce himself, some of his stories, and some of his thought here. (speaking of kinship, I discovered from this clip that he went to the same high school as my paternal grandparents, about a decade after they were there, which he mentions starting around 14:30 as being central to his own development. It hits me listening to this now how much his accent echoes theirs).

When I tell students that ours is a discipline concerned with unloved things, I am echoing Fernandez’s assertion to us that ours was a study of ‘mere’ things. When I assign Raymond Williams’s seminal 1958 essay “Culture is Ordinary” to my honours students, I am really pointing them to thinking I learned from Jim Fernandez. As an undergraduate, I had been torn between literary study – an interest in the working of texts as art – and anthropology, a broader interest in cultural processes and meaning sharing. One of the many reasons I assign Williams is that he ‘insist[s] on both’ meanings. For me, by the time I got my BA, culture in the anthropological sense of the term was winning out as a subject of interest. But, as I touched on briefly in an older post, in Chicago, I was thrilled to learn from Jim Fernandez and the anthropologist/linguist/poet Paul Friedrich who shared a deep concern for the poetry and the poetics of everyday language and gesture. In Fernandez’s class and work, we explored how ‘grammaticalized’ metaphors (figures that no longer register as metaphorical) can be revitalized into new meanings and contexts. Indeed, this is both a wellsrping of shared meaning as well as creativity (indeed, literature meets anthropology). The metaphor of culture and language as sleepwalking came up more than once (among other things in an essay I wrote for his class). ‘Such retrieval and such construction is the ultimate and recurrent strategy of the human experience’, he concludes in his essay ‘Returning to the whole’ in Persuasions and Performances. Taking such a view of life and language means that one is constantly alert to the radical potential in everyday things, everyday practice, and everyday speech. One of the things I admire so much about Sara Ahmed is the way she does this brilliantly and constantly. Highlighting this potentially generative ambiguity in ‘common sense’ (as theorised by Gramsci) will be a core part of my lesson that will take in both Stuart Hall and Jack Halberstam.

Indeed, he both practices and encourages this kind of higly creative and metaphorically-driven thinking, what he calls ‘playful thought’. ‘In considering how metaphors are mixed in revitalization, or better how tropes are mixed […] we begin to make music.’ (P&P, p. 200) Such thought itself is revitalizing. Not least inspired by this extended musical metaphor, by the time I was done with my MA studies, I began to think of culture not as much as language but as dance: which both emphasizes a more embodied a series of movements to a beat we all hear, but reproduced ideosyncratically and with meanings that are often inchoate themselves. This notion was returned to me recently reading the BA thesis of an honours student who is also a professional dancer, thinking about how the house music scene of Chicago was a mode of collective resistance. So to build a new metaphor out of an old one: if we are, as some have asserted, sleepwalking into fascism (I would challenge that assertion – or at least its ‘we’), perhaps we could also look at all the ways in which we have also been sleepdancing resistance.

His writing and teaching perform this kind of thought in that the most salient concepts appeared in the form of almost common-sense phrases, like the notion of ‘mere’ things mentioned above. These were understandable at face value, but would also reveal depth over time and repetition. I remember him saying in class: culture is the story we’re telling ourselves. When I heard it at the time, I took it to heart as an assertion of the power of stories (narrative anthropology was another class of his I sat in on), as well as an insistence on culture as a diffuse and reflexive process. Later I came to hear a layer of playful yet critical irony in it, too: that we have a culture is a story we’re telling ourselves, too. And of course it revolves around the inchoate pronoun ‘we’ (JWF was talking about pronouns before it was cool), which are a call to imagination and meaningful action to grasp: what is/are ‘we’ here? In his work, this is the moment when we have to grab for tropes, not least metaphor, to make sense of this inchoate we. Metaphors both conceal and reveal was another one. Metaphor’s revelations are a kind of double discovery: both of the way two things are related, but also by highlighting specific traits and thereby concealing others. They create meanings in part by shutting down other meanings. While the effectiveness of metaphor lies in part in its novelty, much of its truth power is more conservative: it is rooted in what we (there’s that word again) already know. But where it builds community – returns us to the whole – perhaps it’s better thought of as conservationism than conservatism. I think it can be a form of care of language that Komska, Moyd and Gramling discuss.

As a researcher, I experienced my own ‘revitalization’ a couple of years ago, when Hugh Chignell and Kathryn McDonald asked me to write a chapter for the ‘Radio Futures’ section of their Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio. I found this to be an intimidating assignment, not only because I’m mostly a historian, but also because it suggested an overview of the field and the medium that I still felt I was lacking in spite of two decades of being known as a ‘radio scholar’. So I suggested instead a chapter that would observe and reflect on my own participation and engagement with the radio archive (indeed, an anthropologist’s approach) and ask a question in future perfect tense: what will radio have been based on how we are preserving it now? But that left the question: what do we mean by radio in the first place? This, I realised, was again a question of coping with the inchoate, and decided to go back to my roots and approach the issue tropologically: exploring common conceptions of radio not as simply aspects, but as structuring tropes that are transformed – and potentially revitalize – through the processes of digitization and archivalization. What does it reveal and conceal when we think of archival traces as radio, when we consider traces of radio activity as sound, voice, music, and noise? This approach opened up a joy in writing (though I still blew all my deadlines), and indeed a playful and masterful-sounding writing voice, that I had not had in years.

This was a reminder of what I had been telling students for years (which I also expressed when my friend David asked me about how I approach writer’s block): write for an audience who will bring out what you need. Sometimes, I find myself explaining to students how I wrote my MA thesis on German radio history for an anthropologist who specialized in religious revitalization movements in Africa and the ethnography of Norther Spain. That story often underpins an explanation for the students on the beloved BA Taal- en Cultuurstudies (Language and Culture Studies, our broad humanities BA) that I am of their curious and interdisciplinary tribe. But while the intellectual links there were important to that decision, it was even moreso that he was a caring and generative reader at a moment when I feared the critical eye or many of my other teachers. I still remember the comments he left on my essays, which were all a kind of dialogue with the thoughts I was expressing – pushing ideas further, making connections, reveling in seeing thought develop. As Ruth Behar describes as well, the main disappointment I heard from him was when an assignment brought out a more critical, rather than a poetic and playful voice in me. At a time when I was constantly questioning my place in academia and my worth in the world, Jim’s comments were a constant encouragement and also a generous invitation to be part of the academic conversation even while a ‘mere’ MA student. With sufficient time and mental space, left to my own devices and away from pre-set rubrics (which does not happen all that often in teaching these days), I end up giving feedback on student work the same way: valuing the insights that students discover in their work and inviting them to think about how they can develop ideas further. It often takes the form of questions, with which I hope to bring students into this crazy inchoate whole that is studying the humanities.

So as I am off to sleepdance into my teaching day (today is Raymond Williams again!), I know my students would probably be as bemused if I were to assign Ferndandez as we were by Pepper’s World Hypotheses in his class. But really, they have already been learning from him.