Robert T. Craig
Associate Professor of Communication
Department of Communication
University of Colorado at Boulder
robert.craig@colorado.edu
Late yesterday afternoon as I began to nod over my work I turned, as I do at such times, to catching up on journals....
Opening the current Text and Performance Quarterly I find a special issue on "Alternatives in Writing about Performance."[2] The articles look kind of interesting although not in my area. The connecting theme appears to be narcissism, as a word from the title of each article suggests: "myself," "confessions," "me," "sextext," "performing," "sexy," "own." Experimenting with new forms of ethnographic writing, the authors courageously break rules, push envelopes, go over edges. The prudes among us will be shocked, shocked by much of what they read here. One article consists of short sections created and ordered by the very method of divination that is the subject of the article, with no introduction by the author because such would be an inappropriate "authorial intervention" (says the introduction, written by someone else). Another article, described as "fictional," contains passages of gay soft pornography. The "Performance in Review" department is by two authors and reviews a production of one author's book staged by the other author. Liberals like me will not be shocked or offended by any of this although reading it may induce a certain uneasy curiosity about where the field may be heading. Anyway, as I said, it's all out of my area. No time to read beyond skimming. Nothing for the files in this issue, I close and put it on the shelf.
Communication Research Reports,[3] to which I now turn, is experimental, of course, in a different sense. It consists almost entirely of short articles reporting behavioral science studies. The authors, with a sort of restrained self-discipline that bespeaks true courage, follow every rule, carefully stuff and address every envelope, and keep well away from edges. These articles report knowledge. We now know that negative political ads are used more for attacking the opponent than for building up the candidate's own image. We have a 15-item scale to measure a person's awareness of emotion. None of these articles is terribly important by itself but most contribute in some small way to some specialized research area. None to my area, however. Again, there's no time to read beyond skimming, nothing to file away in my notes for future reference. Straight-away the journal is on the shelf and will soon be forgotten--or so I assume.
I shut down my computer, walk the dog, and in due course go to bed. At 3 a.m. I suddenly awake, perspiring, my mind swirling in disconnected words and two obsessively alternating images.
One image is of a large, bright, ornate hall with dozens of youthful performers of various hues and genders all standing before full length gilded mirrors, all nude but wearing cute cowboy hats, all oiled and shapely bodies, some hairy some not, all admiring and caressing themselves.
The alternating image, on (or with) the other hand, is something out of Dickens. The ornate hall fades to a vast, dark, sooty sweatshop with dozens of prematurely aged drudges, all draped in torn dirty rags, indistinguishable, hunched over loudly clanging machines from which emerge box after identical gray box in endless series.
Again and again, from dicks to Dickens, it's damn dispiriting. Why am I so harassed and finally so depressed by these images?
But wait--it gets worse! Imagine this: Comes the revolution in our discipline and the new regime dic-tates that henceforth this special issue of TPQ will set the standard for all communication scholarship. The rules will change. Only experiments in autoethnography will count towards promotion and tenure. Our uniform will be cowboy hats. The sweatshop will retool. Every issue of Communication Research Reports will arrive filled with pointless pictures, bad poetry, and tedious bits of pornographic fiction....
THIS is the nightmare that startled me from my sleep at 3 a.m. this morning and drove me back to my computer to craft this little fictional piece.
Where should I send it?
Endnotes
1. This text first appeared on CRTNET [On-line] (Number 1681; January 31, 1997; Available: listserv@lists.psu.edu) and stimulated a lively on-line debate in subsequent numbers of CRTNET. To further explore issues that emerged in the debate, the Research Board of the National Communication Association sponsored a special NCA convention panel (presented in Chicago, November 22, 1997) entitled "What Counts as Scholarship in Communication? Evaluating Trends in Performance Studies, Autoethnography, and Communication Research." Papers presented on that panel have been revised for this symposium.
2. (1997, January). Text and Performance Quarterly, 17(1), 1-122.