Academia is an Exercise in Sameness

I was in Harvard at a conference when I said this to someone for the first time. Inside the famous, beautiful Memorial Hall, where we had been offered a free lunch in this imposing room the day before:Actually, we were having a conversation right under this window:
Of course what I am saying is nothing new to any academic. You're supposed to build upon the work(s) of people who came before you, you have to think and research about the same things before you can move on to new discoveries, and create new information. However, I think that academia, with all its rituals, all its elaborate peer reviewed journals, big conferences with myriads of panels has taken this "sameness" to a whole other level. It has perfected "sameness" and made it a way of life. Particularly in the humanities, but perhaps in other areas too.

In literature, for example, people can be analyzing many different authors, but the way they do it -- which necessarily follows whatever theories and theorists are fashionable at the moment -- is basically the same! And if you dare to be different, if your area is not what's en vogue, you cannot ever belong or get a job!! If you dare not to worship all those theorists that people think are like demi-gods or something, you're doomed.

If you don't absorb all the more famous or previously relevant researchers/theorists/studies in your subject area, digest them, and them spit them back out in a slightly different and highly condensed form and then, only then, try to present your own voice and demonstrate as well ad you can how you, poor insignificant you and your ideas fit in or contribute, and then, hopefully you'll get these people to read your work and respond (all in writing, in dry academic prose) -- they you will amount to nothing. And if you do all the above mentioned things like I tried to do in my dissertation, but the relevant/famous people don't know about your work or don't care aobut it, then... you will be worse than nothing.

Yeah, that's what the academy does to you. It's your reward for years of trying to fit in.

And the rare academic who does something different, like the guy I found out two weeks before I defended my dissertation, if they're recognized (after years and years of work), they say they're lucky (his words to me in a very kind email). Yeah, very very lucky, because his work, for example, is described as nothing sort of "heretical." I do/did something similar to what he does, but it's not something defended/advocated by any theorist and I can't just move to California, knock on Moretti's door and ask to work for him as a postdoc or something. This doesn't exist in the humanities.

What about academic conferences? I've written about them at length here, but, for the sake of this argument, all I have to say is that these conferences are the epitome of the "exercise in sameness" mentality. Ideally, you should go to conferences to learn new things and interact with people with different points of view, but all people do is present at panels with like-minded people and if there is something too unusually different there, it's just politely ignored (like my presentation at the conference in Rio, right after the woman who's the president of my discipline's association in this country and who works here). At the MLA, hundreds of panels have only a handful of people attending, it's depressing! And I understand that there's not enough time for people to get distracted with other areas that not their own, but aren't real scholars supposed to be working in several different areas? My interests, OTOH are just so multi-faceted that I have a hard time to arrange a schedule to go see all the presentations I want to see in conferences.

I guess it's not as bad when one analyzes publishing in peer reviewed journals, but who reads these things anyhow? Going to conferences, publishing become simply obligations to be able to fulfill tenure requirements and not really to "advance knowledge" in any significant way. These exercises in sameness bear little relevance to real life and therefore we academics become the butt of jokes and at all the idealistic "forces for the good" or for the advancement of society and humankind that we may aspire to be.

I know, it's pathetic, ridiculous even, but those who want to belong and who are, perchance given entrance into the select and ever more rarefied "club" of tenure track professors, go on playing by the same rules. And the rest of us just have to give up, I guess.

I think I'm not presenting any more compelling arguments here and I'm just getting bitter and personal, which doesn't help at all. It's just that I want to be able to say something, anything, because I don't agree with the "establishment" (hahaha) and I don't think I will ever fit in, not that I want it, given that I disagree so strongly with certain things that academia holds so dear.

And this, in the end, doesn't matter, because -- to use their own beloved jargon! -- I'm talking from the margins, I am, in a sense the other and, as the other, I can only be the subject of study, never in the center myself. Yeah... I don't want to be wrapped up in sameness, I want to be different! Vive la différence!, or, should it be différance? :-D