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ganaele langlois (2009-05-22)

  

The topic addressed in “Reflections on the Academic Milieu of Media Studies” – the neo-liberalization of the north-American university and the complex status of communication and media studies programs as spaces of critical resistance and of training of the next generation of knowledge workers – is a crucial one and deserves attention. The use of one’s personal experience or personal milieu to ground one’s analysis can be an important starting point for the research process. After all, this can be a sound qualitative methodological approach, but is only effective if researchers engaging in such work are aware of and can reflect on the biases and limitations of their situated perspective. However, such reflections are crucially lacking from the article. Coupled with a limited range of sources, this lack undermines the critical scope of the article. Indeed, press releases serve a different discursive purpose than an overall list of academic accomplishments, and neither of these two sources would fully explain an “individual”. For this, one would think that ethnographic approaches bound by the rules of human research ethics would be more appropriate. The issue, thus, is when one’s analysis makes use of academic forums such as the International Journal of Communication to
“get even” with specific individuals rather than to reflect on one’s situation in order to formulate critical interventions and
alternatives for all the academic workers - precarious or not - in
North America and Europe.

Overall, the reflection on the university as a foucauldian “milieu of circulation” and of the subjects that exist within it could have
benefited from Felix Guattari’s distinction between individuals and the heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory flows of subjectivation that work within, through and against them and that therefore both shape subjectivities according to power relations and offer points of critical reinvention. Such distinctions, as are explored in Molecular Revolution in Brazil in order to define critical interventions in political life, would have been extremely useful for the article, in that they would have helped acknowledge the complexity of the North-American academic situation and prevented the author from assuming that the tenured and tenure-track faculty in Canadian universities, including a “particular individual” at York University
(p. 566), somehow unproblematically and uncritically agree with and embody the neoliberal ideology.

The distinction between flows of subjectivation as they circulate
among corporate entities, government and academia, coupled with more substantive and comprehensive research and with perhaps better attention to the rhetorical style of the article, would have prevented the slippage from a critique of the funding of tenure and tenure-track faculty to an attack on a specific individual. I am thinking in particular of the discussion of the TELUS Distinguished Scholars on page 568 and the easiness with which the text switches back and forth between the use of a generic plural – the “TELUS Distinguished
Scholars” – and the use of the feminine form – “This honorific title marks the faculty subject who has governed herself well, that is to say, in conformity with the academic milieu and infocapitalism”. Such careless writing and lack of methodological rigor leads one to wonder why a particular and recognizable individual is being attacked, rather than the power formations that allow for the penetration of corporate interests into academia. In so doing, the academic critique promised
at the beginning of the article slips into diatribe, and this raises,
at least in this reader’s mind, some serious concerns about the need to adjudicate such boundaries.