Textualized Absence as Professional Practice

Julian Markeis Textualized Absence as Professional Practice (on Terry Caesar, Conspiring with Forms: Life in Academic Texts [Athens: U of Georgia P, 1992]) I wish this wonderful book could be read by all who really care about the academic profession. Terry Caesar interrogates in eight essays eight discursive practices that are deeply symptomatic of the profession, yet are never discussed even in this postmodern era of alert self-awareness. Four of his "forms" are in fact academic texts—the letter of recommendation, the acknowledgement in books, the letter of application, the Ph.D dissertation. The other four are textually-saturated practices or categories—composition studies, the annual MLA meeting, the white male, and the second-rate university. All eight are tacitly interconnected in the underbelly of the profession, and all invite some form of ideological exposure as sites of surveillance and subalternity , interpellation and positionality, power and hegemony. Caesar emphatically declines that ideological invitation even while remaining "very conscious, writing each of these essays, of wanting to expose something. But what precisely?" (xii)—and therein lies his value and power. Not only does he know that what doesn't get talked about can be as important as what does (at a time when, as he says, even PMLA publishes articles on cookbooks). He also sees that its importance lies initially in just talking about it, and in literally interrogating what has been overlooked, or taken for granted, with questions for which reflex answers are not available: "Do acknowledgments get longer as knowledge gets more specialized? Perhaps" (39); "Do these men take themselves to be white males in exactly the ways they are categorized to be? Who knows?" (121); "By knowing that difference [i.e., between first- and second-rate universities], however, what precisely does everybody know, and what does it mean in daily, experiential terms to know it?" (150). Two revelatory words of Caesar's title are "conspiring" and "life"—words of concrete agency in active experience rather than passive positioning subject to abstract power. 'Tm very insistent about wanting to represent experience as experience" (x), he says in his Preface, and also, "I deliberately intend the following essays to be a testing of exactly what sort of discourse about American higher education ... is possible once what is left out of 'political language' is restored" (xvii). Well, the discourse that's possible is a distinctive blend of anecdote with analysis that can sometimes meander and sometimes marginally fuss or whine, perhaps in simply being true to itself and in 312 the minnesota review default of becoming more political. But in Caesar's hands it is overwhelmingly a productive, carnival discourse that makes you squirm while you laugh because it consistently succeeds in representing experience as experience. That also makes it hard to get your hands on a manner to do itjustice , at least for this reviewer. In fact I had a two-week bout with writer's block right after the preceding sentence, unable to see how I could represent Caesar except by admiring quotation, until I decided I was myself conspiring with a form. He proceeds neither by narrative expansion nor linear argument. His blend of anecdote, analysis, and open-ending question attains its clarity and force through concentric accretion, and one must look not for theses and articulated sub-topics but for nodal ideas, themes and variations, points of departure and convergence. The third key word in Caesar's title is "texts," and almost all his essays are variations on the textual theme announced in the opening paragraph of the first essay: "What I want to study is less the profession , however, than its confidential, but far from confident, textualization of itself as revealed in letters of recommendation"—recommendations for grants and fellowships as well as jobs and promotions ^—which he also calls "so apparently indispensable because ... [they] may ultimately make very little sense as texts" (1-2). In Caesar's rendition, our lack of confidence in writing and reading texts that are professionally indispensable but make little sense as texts extends to the letter of application, the acknowledgment, and the Ph.D. dissertation, as well as the institutional discourse about composition and gender. It is an organic...