Academic Fashion: System and Practice

Good structuralist that for a time he was, Roland Barthes argues that in order to understand any particular instance of fashion it must be understood in relation to the system of constraints, social and linguistic, technological and ideological, which affords it meaning in the first place. “Every utterance” in a fashion magazine, Barthes writes, “constitutes a system of significations consisting of a signified whose terms are discrete, material, numerable, and visible: the garment; and an immaterial signified, which is, depending on the case, the world or Fashion” (25). It is in this manner that one could speak of academic fashion as a kind of code that supports, informs, and undergirds every scholarly activity, from choosing a dissertation topic to presenting a paper at Congress. It’s the felt presence of such a code, unexpressed yet making expression itself possible, that might make one think twice before putting a word under erasure in the high Derridean manner, much as an earlier generation might have felt equally hesitant about referencing Campbell’s theories of the hero’s quest. And it is this same code that today affords a certain glamour to animal studies, eco-criticism, or the connections between literature and neurology, making such topics seem both “timely” and, in the most overdetermined word in the academic lexicon, “relevant.”

There is, however, another sense of the phrase “academic fashion” that I want to consider here, one that understands it less as a system that allows one’s scholarship to seem either in or out of its critical moment and more as a distinctive ensemble of practices, a characteristic manner of study, and a relation of time to modernity. Let me begin by describing my own practices, or at least those that went into the writing of this position paper. When I received the invitation to participate in this esc forum, I began with a little etymological research, keying the phrase “academic fashion” into Google Books to see how it had been used in the past. Knowing that the search engine would give me the most recent occurrences first, I tried limiting the results to works published between 1800 and 1900, hoping by that means to dislocate the term from its contemporary association with vestimentary codes and practices. Scanning its database of more than ten million books in less time than it took me to sip my morning coffee, the search engine reported 204 instances of the phrase in the nineteenth century. In many instances, “academic fashion” referred to just that, the academic garb worn by fellows and tutors, most especially when they were attending a college meal or delivering an after-dinner speech. Such garb, of course, meant that academics in the nineteenth century never really had to worry about fashion in the manner we do today; their robes were never strictly in or out of style, though occasionally their facial hair, apparently, was. Mutton chops seem to have been no less of a mistake than the mullet was a century later.

But there was another way in which the phrase was used that struck me as more promising for our present purposes. In several instances, the term “academic fashion” referred to a particular manner of writing, speaking, or acting. In some of these instances, to treat something in an academic fashion was to consider it without practical or real world experience of the matter, to see a problem merely in the abstract. The connotations here were usually derogatory, derived from the assumption that academics are wholly removed from the real-life concerns of ordinary people. But sometimes to treat something in an academic fashion was to consider it at great length, or in a scrupulously detailed way, going deep into the intellectual history of the subject and tracing its philological development over time. It is in this latter sense that J.E. Marr uses the phrase in 1896. In an address he gave to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Marr begs to be pardoned for treating his “subject in an academic fashion” but explains that such a manner had been dictated by the...