A Discipline of Futures

At the University of Virginia, dean of arts and sciences Ian Baucom reminds faculty regularly that the most honorable part of our jobs is the preparation of citizens. For a dean to de-emphasize knowledge production or creativity to instead privilege citizenship is perhaps odd. A postcolonial English professor, the dean has become an ally of those of us wishing to glimpse the future of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. I like closing my eyes and doing that thinking, both because my Department of Media Studies is new at an old institution and because I have been the chair and thus in charge of defining who and what we are to others and to ourselves. So, what I write here is not an argument about the relevance of my expertise but an honest assessment of what I believe the field(s) under the SCMS umbrella should be about. I am referring here to film studies, media studies, and sections of English and communication studies. For simplicity, I call this media studies.

What these areas have in common is the unifying project of seeking to understand how technologically defined mediation shapes humans. The oldest of these fields, English, began to be formed as the publishing industry made its mark in national subjectivities and as scholars from a variety of disciplines such as theology, history, rhetoric, and philosophy formalized their common interest in books, literature, and the written text under the banner of English. In these departments, the age of the book became the age of literature, just as eventually the age of mass mediation (film, radio, and broadcasting) gave way to the first communication, media, and film studies departments, and the second instantiation of academic disciplines organized around a media technology. The intellectual concerns of these new disciplines often overlapped with English but were not fully enveloped by English. Other disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and linguistics, joined English as influencers and neighboring disciplines of the new departments.

I start with these influences and disciplinary approximations because they offer important lessons to us today, lessons that can give us clarity as to how to approach the question about the future of the discipline. Where disciplines come from matters. Just as English departments are centered on the book, media studies, exemplified by the Radio-Television-Film Program at the University of Texas–Austin, where I was trained, largely organizes itself in terms of different media. Under this organization, faculty and students pursued only a fraction of potential lines of inquiry, and the most limiting factor was understanding their specific media technology as having a discrete and even concrete nature. The book was different from film, which was different from radio, which was different from television. In the academic world in which I was trained, there were two significant exceptions to the possibility of media specialization that directly addressed the human. Thanks to the State Department's concern with communism, some were able to also embrace an area studies specialization. Thanks to the influence of sociology and the rise of new knowledges from the 1960s onward, some could also specialize in studying a group of people, such as women, African Americans, and so on. For instance, I am a Latino media scholar (although I was hired to be a Latin American media studies scholar). All these are honorable designations, but they are also increasingly unhelpful ways of understanding our specializations and the ways we should partition our disciplines and objects of inquiry. The age of computers brought the age of convergence, and today organizing our disciplines by medium makes little sense. In the future our field will necessarily always start from the complexities of convergence, which will force us to redefine most of our theories, specializations, and objects of inquiry. We need to recognize the aging of our tools, which in many instances have become blunt, incapable of dissecting contemporary media. Yet the age of computers cannot simply be defined by technologically based inquiries. Old technologies are still relevant, and new ones seem to emerge every day. If we start with media technologies, as we used to, the sites of intellectual inquiry...