Summer Doldrums: Ends & Odds (2020)

Forgot to  mention that, early this year, Exposure, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education, republished the text of my spring 1978 keynote talk to the attendees of the SPE’s national conference. Titled “No Future For You? Speculations on the Next Decade in Photography Education,” it made its first appearance in print in Exposure 16:2, June 1978.

Here’s the explanation from Scott Hilton, Co-Chair, Communications Committee, SPE, of the ongoing project for which they solicited this as the premiere for a series revisiting Exposure highlights:

The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Exposure magazine, the journal of the Society for Photographic Education. Throughout the year, we will be republishing a selection of essays that were first published in the pages of Exposure, to introduce a new generation of photographic [sic] educators and students to this rich history. The Re-Exposure series starts with this essay by writer and critic A. D. Coleman, adapted from his [k]eynote address at the 1978 SPE Annual Conference.

Hilton requested a brief prefatory comment contextualizing the talk and reflecting on it at this remove. I provided the following for that purpose:

Reviewing this talk more than four decades after its delivery, it pleases me to confirm that, first and foremost, I conceived and developed it as a genuine keynote address — not the usual off-the-shelf self-congratulatory presentation of one’s own work that, then as now, passes as such at most SPE regional and national conferences, but an occasion-specific provocation aimed at that particular audience and moment.

I took its title from the refrain of the Sex Pistols’ caustic 1977 polemic “God Save the Queen.” That seemed suitable for a commentary that fell somewhere between the jeremiad and the cautionary prophecy. I remain unsure as to how many SPE members caught the reference.

At the time, a few SPE members had begun to explore what we might call post-analog imaging technologies: photocopy machines, fax machines, etc. But the organization as a whole had not addressed what we now know would soon transform radically the visual-communication environment globally — digital-imaging systems. So far as I can tell, this address represents the very first engagement with that cultural evolution to take place under SPE’s auspices. Yet my anticipation of advances in 3-D imaging methods was clearly premature and remains so, though I’ll stand by my prognosis of its impact, whenever it does arrive.

Exposure, June 1978 (cover)

My call for a deeper engagement with interdisciplinary studies went entirely unheeded, which came as no surprise. Given the territorial imperatives of academe and the calcified bureaucracies that run most educational institutions, the concept itself gets honored more in the breach than in the observance. Moreover, at the time and through the present, SPE has made no concerted effort to expand its membership by interaction with other organizations in even the most obviously relevant disciplines, such as media studies, image theory, visual communication, visual sociology, visual anthropology, and cultural history — choosing instead to remain isolated and thus increasingly marginal in its concerns.

My diagnosis of the meager financial and professional consequence of BFA and MFA degrees in photography has largely proven true, especially given the now-astronomical costs of such certification. So has my analysis of the precarious economic situation of photography in post-secondary education. (See the recent SPE “State of Photographic Education” survey for details, along with my 2014 assessment of the situation.) And the need for some vehicle through which SPE could respond to censorship issues endures. So, overall, I think this talk managed to provide substantial food for thought then and remains relevant today as more than a period piece.

I do recall something particular about its presentation at Asilomar: After some preliminary SPE housekeeping announcements, the conference program chairperson, Steven J. Cromwell, introduced me, and I launched into this calculatedly contentious talk. After a minute or so, some agitated, distracting conversation became audible from the side of the stage. Then Cromwell came over to tell me that I’d have to stop, as they’d forgotten some important organizational business.

So I gathered my papers and stepped aside, allowing Peter Bunnell to take the podium in order to deliver effusive eulogies for three or four SPE members who’d passed on that year, definitely shifting the mood. After which they graciously allowed me to start over. It took me a few minutes to regain my momentum. As my late friend Paul Diamond, present in the audience, told me afterward, “By that time there were bats flying all around over your head.”

Worth noting that the book of my writings in which this text subsequently served as the concluding statement, the first edition of Light Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), got savaged by the graduate student assigned to review it for SPE’s journal Exposure in 1980. He described me as “the Joan Baez of photography” and “a writer in a state of decline.” — A. D. C.

Click here for the complete text at Medium.com, SPE’s online platform for its journal. Taken in combination with my Y2K prognostications regarding press photography and photojournalism, recently posted here, you have some means of gauging my capacity for futurecasting.

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If you share my appreciation of the Alan Sokal/Social Text hoax of 1996 — in which a respected physicist got that prominent “cultural studies” journal to publish a paper claiming that gravity was merely a social construct — you may enjoy reading about a more recent experiment along the same lines.

Starting in August 2017, the team of Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian began creating and submitting fundamentally nonsensical (or, in their term, “broken”) pseudo-scholarly research papers to top-level, peer-reviewed journals in some of the sub-disciplines of the field known as cultural studies. They produced 20 such papers, planning on reporting the outcome after all 20 had gone through the review/revision/acceptance/rejection processes at their target publications.

Publication successes included “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism,” a chapter of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf with feminine pronouns substituted for masculine ones; “Stars, Planets, and Gender: A Framework for a Feminist Astronomy,” arguing that “the science of astronomy is and always has been intrinsically sexist and Western”; and “Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding,” proposing that “it is only oppressive cultural norms which make society regard the building of muscle rather than fat admirable.”

They got outed midway through by the Wall Street Journal, in an October 5, 2018 article by Jillian Kay Melchior titled “Fake News Comes to Academia” and subtitled “How three scholars gulled academic journals to publish hoax papers on ‘grievance studies.'” (The article, archived here at the WSJ, is available to subscribers only.) This forced them, for ethical reasons, to go public prematurely with their successful results up to that point. (Since they submitted these papers either pseudonymously or under the borrowed names of willing colleagues, papers still in the editorial pipeline remained unaffected.)

Their rationale for the experiment appeared under the title “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship” in the digital magazine Areo, of which Pluckrose is editor. You can find it here, complete with links to all the essays and all the related correspondence, so you can get as granular as you care to in your engagement with this project.

The experiment has become known as “the Grievance Studies Affair,” also sometimes referred to as the “Sokal Squared scandal.” Here’s the Wikipedia page synopsizing the endeavor, and here’s a YouTube video in which the hoaxers celebrate their first successful placement of one of the articles — “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon.” A film documenting the project is in the works.

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Why Good People (and Some Not-so-good Ones) Write Bad Prose

Related to this, though in an oblique way, we have the issue of academic prose in general, the standards of whose production — especially in the current political climate within the ivory tower — contribute directly to the convoluted, impenetrable prose that so many in cultural studies generate as a matter of course, and which the “grievance studies” team mastered as part of their enterprise.

Steven Pinker has an explanation for this phenomenon that runs parallel to my own, though I consider his much more tender-hearted than mine. In “The single reason why some people can’t write, according to a Harvard psychologist,” published at Linkedin on August 10, 2017 by Glenn Leibowitz, the author considers Pinker’s 2014 book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century and homes in on what Pinker calls “the Curse of Knowledge,” which he defines as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”

Pinker uses the word “argot” (synonymous with jargon), plus the above-described failure on the parts of writers to put themselves in their readers’ shoes, as the underlying causes of bad writing. People don’t write badly on purpose, in other words; they do so because they take the shoptalk of their field or discipline for granted and don’t consider their communicative efforts through the eyes of their intended receivers — a lapse in empathy, you might say.

I wouldn’t disagree with this as a best-case-scenario rationale for some bad writing whose authors could presumably write well if they simply glossed the jargon (or substituted more common synonyms) and raised their empathy levels, and would eagerly do so once they had this explained to them. (“How can we lift the curse of knowledge? A considerate writer will … cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms.”) But Pinker’s analysis sidesteps issues underlying much bad writing, to wit:

• Many people simply don’t write well, and never will. Chalk it up to evolution, poor toilet training, the pernicious influence of television/the internet, the deteriorating educational system; wherever you apportion the blame, many — perhaps most — people will never write clearly, much less write well. That’s because most of them can’t think clearly, the basis for coherent prose. Factor in the Dunning-Kruger effect and it becomes obvious that no increase in empathy will magically provide the language skills needed to achieve clarity of verbal expression.
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  Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style (2014), cover

  Many people who write and distribute their output to others — whether for intramural use (as in corporate interoffice memos) or for wider publication — simply do not write enough to hone the skills necessary for effective communication. Nor do they read their own prose out loud to themselves, to become familiar with how it sounds to the ear, or seek feedback on it from others. Academics publishing the occasional research paper certainly manifest that tendency.

• Argot or jargon doesn’t only get used for its convenience as shorthand and shop talk while inadvertently leaving non-specialists out of the loop. Many, especially but not exclusively in academe, employ it deliberately for its utility as a gate-keeping device, deploying it to identify (and identify oneself with) the cognoscenti while excluding the uninitiated. Over the past few decades the humanities have proved particularly susceptible to such willful jargonization.
• This represents a subset of a larger issue, that of strategic obscurantism. The use of jargon, euphemisms, syntactically tortured locutions, and other characteristics of corporate/governmental/academic prose all manifest a bureaucratic tendency to disguise hard facts, unpleasant truths, thinness of ideation and illogicality, among other shortcomings. Perversely, using Pinker’s concept, this represents not a lack of empathy but a surfeit of it — the keen awareness that, if readers actually understand what you are saying and its implications, they will reject it out of hand.
• Pinker writes, in regard to jargon-free, lucid expository prose, “It’s not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.” His own magnanimity blinds him to the fact that many writers really, really don’t want that.

For an earlier discussion of this set of issues in relation to the particular dialect known as “artspeak,” click here.

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Finding myself in the process of drafting several applications for grants in support of the further research and writing necessary to produce the book version of the Capa D-Day project, I face the requirement of accompanying my requests with letters of recommendation (or at least the names and addresses of available providers of same).

This led me to re-reading “What’s Wrong With Soliciting Letters of Recommendation?” by philosopher Michael Huemer of the University of Colorado, an October 2017 op-ed that starts out boldly — “I think the practice of soliciting letters of recommendation for academic positions is both foolish and immoral” — and continues in that vein to the end.

While I have provided letters in this genre for select colleagues, and solicited them on my own behalf from time to time, I have (blessedly) never sat on a review committee with duties including the reading of these missives. So I can’t speak from experience in that regard. However, Huemer makes an excellent case for discontinuing the practice of requiring such encomia as both time-wasting and counter-productive. Certainly, as with any act of calling in markers, it has a discomfiting aspect. Which perhaps constitutes the unarticulated point, since trading such favors serves as common currency in institutional circles.

A comment on Huemer’s provocation led me to “Academic reference inflation has set in, and everyone is simply wonderful,” published by Jonathan Wolff in the January 28, 2013 issue of The Guardian (UK). Wolff, professor of philosophy and dean of arts and humanities, University College London, has much the same things to say about this feature of academic life, while offering what may be the ultimate in damning-with-faint-praise, this from Isaiah Berlin’s recommendation for the brilliant legal philosopher HLA Hart:

“What he is tortured by is the thought that he will never be better than [AC] Ewing and will never hold other views than Ewing. He realises himself that this is not a very exciting state of mind to be in … Nevertheless … he cannot be worse than Ewing, who, after all, is … in his own way, not contemptible.”

For more of the letter (and more of the same), click here. Wolff might have added that not only did Hart get the job but now enjoys a reputation in his field much higher than Berlin’s.

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