Trifecta

Today began early with a trifecta of back to back to back meetings: a personnel committee meeting, a department meeting, and a search committee meeting. This is not the recommended way to start a day.

I notice a previous post where I managed to find a silver lining even for the drudgery of committee work: "We're all in it together, so we can safely grouse about it to each other. ... We bond over our shared suffering."

Clearly timing matters. This morning the end of the semester rush precluded even the simple pleasure of companionable complaint.

Last Laugh

"The Laughing Song" of George W. Johnson is one of the very earliest hit records. Joshua Gunn discusses it in his intriguing talk below. There's a great deal to be said about the psychoanalytic meaning of recorded laughter, but one oddity mentioned by Gunn in passing is that laughing songs were very popular early on and perhaps constitute one of the first genres of recorded music.

Here is a twisted and perverse repetition of Johnson's laughter by Hasil Adkins, however, I had no idea that this song was part of venerable and historic musical genre. It certainly resonates for me, though, as a return of the repressed. Hasil Adkins as a symptom of the hauntological moment in pop music is all too plausible to me. Adkins certainly haunts me.

The full talk by Gunn is here and is also well worth a listen. Or two.

Student Feedback

Below is a paragraph that was written after a pleasant discussion with students about one of my current works in progress. Having a venue to discuss faculty writing with students is new for me. I like it. I rarely want to subject my own classes to such a thing. The content is unlikely to fit well into the class. But this class revolves around discussions of academic research more generally and student engagement with issues involved in doing interdisciplinary work. It seems to be working. The students seem to like the glimpse of their professors at work, and I like the opportunity for student feedback on my writing.

Another corollary to the reliance on unpaid digital labor is a loss of waged jobs. As more and more amateur and user-generated content is produced, less and less waged work may become available. This trend may be offset somewhat by the overall expansion in the size of the audience and in the demand for digital content, but as a total share of the labor involved, waged labor will become an ever dwindling part or the total labor expended on digital production. Coupled with this contraction of waged digital labor, there is another type of pressure created by the capitalist integument of digital work. Like other jobs under capitalism, there is always a tendency to de-skill the labor force. This serves to make more labor-power available for exploitation, to increase competition among workers, and to lower wages. While the creation and dissemination of digital content used to require relatively high technical skills and some knowledge of computers and programming, now it is often reduced to a point and click skill. This de-skilling of the digital labor force is, of course, a prerequisite for the widespread use of unwaged digital labor. Tasks such as streaming digital video online, which used to require significant technical skills, now require about the same amount of skill as sending an email. This process is most often seen in the light of a broadening of access and a democratization of the process of producing digital content. And so it is. However, this was never really the goal for capital. Freeing digital labor from the shackles of specialized knowledge is less important to capital than the attendant benefits of expanding the available labor supply in such a way that waged digital jobs vanish into a vast ocean of unwaged, user-generated content. That digital work begins to look more like a kind of addictive behavior and less like an economically valuable activity of its own is of little consequence.

Best. Show. Ever.

The Lumpen Prof was here! Last Sunday was an amazing night. The Dave Rawlings Machine from left to right in the video above are John Paul Jones on mandolin (yes, that John Paul Jones, from Led Zeppelin), David Rawlings on his vintage Epiphone guitar, Gillian Welch on guitar, in the back on bass is Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers, and on the right on guitar is Willie Watson formerly of the Old Crow Medicine Show.

The show began with a gorgeous rendition of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," and included a medley of "I Hear Them All / This Land is Your Land" (with all the best subversive verses included). The high point of the show for me, though, was a truly mesmerizing version of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer." A close second was their version of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" performed in what Rawlings described as a "special Dark Lord tuning." Hearing Gillian Welch sing Zeppelin was a strange and wonderful experience.

Setlist.

Alternative Academic Titles

I just realized that my inaugural post for this blog concerned a list of John Hodgman inspired academic hobo names. The recent post below on academic titles seemed in a similar vein. So in honor of this confluence, I decided I should post a slightly longer list of alternative, unused academic ranks and titles.

1. Elder Viceroy for Academic Affairs
2. Grand Vizier of Student Services
3. Vice Admiral for Institutional Research
4. Lord High Provost
5. Temporary Trusted Advisor
6. Assistant Grand Inquisitor in Residence
7. Major General of General Studies
8. Adjutant Affiliate Graduate Dean
9. Honorary Academician
10. Eternal Assistant Dean
11. Associate Vice Khan
12. Distinguished Interim Emperor
13. Visiting Dean Regent
14. Acting Vice Sultan of Instruction
15. Supreme Exalted Associate Professor
16. Eminent Illustrious Adjunct Instructor
17. Serene Associate Vice Provost
18. Venerable Consulting Scholar
19. Grand High Instructor
20. Honored Guest Director
21. Emeritus Grand Mugwump

Here is an actual list of academic ranks and titles. It is no less strange.

How To Waste a Decade

Here is a brief chronology of my academic life so far at my bizarro university:

1. Interdisciplinary department with faculty lines, one degree, multiple concentrations.
2. Department eliminated and programs separated, no faculty lines, multiple degrees. 
3. Individual programs given some faculty lines, multiple degrees.
4. New interdisciplinary department formed with faculty lines, multiple degrees.
5. Interdisciplinary department with faculty lines, one degree, multiple concentrations. 

*headdesk*

Silent Socrates

A student pitched me an idea for her final class project: a silent film version of Plato's Apology. This makes me happy.

Academic Titles

As a consequence of my interdisciplinary program's perpetual restructuring, I've become unreasonably expert at academic job titles. There is a vast sea of differences among various ranks and titles which make no clear difference except to their office holders, but this does not prevent them from being jealously guarded and doled out only sparingly.

First, there are the mysteries of academic ranks: Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors, Adjuncts, Instructors, Lectures, etc. along with the entire alphabet for our various degrees: PhD, MA, BA, BS, EdD, MFA, etc. These are all used with relative consistency among academic institutions in the US and although often unclear to those outside of academia, those of us on the inside imagine them to be very clear and precise.

Then there are the various administrative job titles: Chairs, Deans, Assistants, Associates, Vice, Interim, Provost, Chancellors, and Presidents. This entire menagerie begins to overlap and interbreed so you get Associate Vice Chancellors and Interim Assistant Chairs. These often have specific local meanings and can be more difficult to translate from one institution to another.

Finally, there are the strange interstitial institutional locations which seem to demand their own names, but which aren't supposed to compete with the more well entrenched ranks and titles. Directors, Advisors, Coordinators, etc. I inhabit one of these institutional borderlands. My current rank is Associate Professor and my current administrative title is Interim Director. There are entire histories of institutional schism and intrigue that can be read within such titles by those intimate with the intricacies of academic power.

Recently, though, I have needed to create new titles to distinguish between various faculty performing useful and necessary, but uncompensated, services within our academic program. I have been leaning towards the bland but unobjectionable honorific of "Advisor" for all of these jobs. But no doubt this will still need more committee meetings to accomplish.

However, I began to think of all the other possible academic titles we could use, but don't. Why just plain "Advisor," why not "Trusted Advisor" instead? But why stop there? There are many possible honorifics which are currently untapped. Military titles: Vice Admiral for Institutional Research. Eastern titles: Grand Vizier of Student Services. The possibilities are endless. Academic Potentates, Captains, Bishops, Grand Dragons, Black Belts, Yahoos, Fuhrers, and Emperors are all possible academic titles just waiting to be claimed. Just think how this could liven up our dull and pedestrian cv's by the judicious use of some of these more colorful and unused options. I wager you would take special note of a colleague who was introduced with the title of Elder Viceroy for Academic Affairs. And given that so many of our academic jobs receive no remuneration beyond a dignified title, perhaps we should begin to insist on the splendid.

Reorganizing Again

I'm back.

My university is once again engaged in its periodic and inscrutable reorganization of my academic life. So once again I find myself in need of a creative outlet. So, blogging it is.

SOPA Strike