Seven Red

So, this year I went to the “big” conference in my field, here in New Orleans. Every year after this conference, you get a debate of sorts on the field listservs, and it always goes like this: Do you prefer when people read their papers or speak them without reading? Or, do you prefer some other more discussion-based presentation? Advocates for whatever position – call them readerly, speakerly, and teacherly – present their cases, some counterarguments ensue, and the then the whole thing dies, only to be replayed in more or less the same form one year hence. It’s a pointless endeavor, as is so much. I thought I’d try an equally pointless classification of the different presentations, so here are the Top Twenty CCCC Presentation Mistakes.

I will, of course, have to present two caveats. First, many of the presentations I saw this year were very good. This is a list of problem presentations, not a list of all presentations. Second, I have been guilty of one or more of these myself. Maybe even most people have. Take it in the spirit of fun and don’t go getting all sniffy. Without further ado:

1. The Professional—The Professional is in some ways the best kind of talk, in the way that the high-end hit man is somewhat admirable. Or, like the Terminator is kinda cool. The Professional is written and read, but aims toward very speakerly prose. The presenter has picked it over and revised it 30 times for short sentences and clear signposting. If you look at the actual paper, it includes speaker-cues like “Slow Down Here,” and “Emphasize this Point with a Gesture,” and other such stage directions. In terms of delivery, the Professional is almost always delivered from the podium, at a steady and naturalistic rhythm, with some painfully transparent attempts at voice modulation (“Emphasize this Point with Voice Modulation!!!”). It never, ever goes overtime, because it has been practiced in front of a mirror 300 times, and timed to the half-second. Content-wise, the talk is meticulously crafted, going something like this:

Scholar Muckity-Muck 1 has written that such-and-such, while Scholar Muckity-Muck 2 has added blah blah blah, but very few people have considered yada yada yada, which is a problem (for knowledge) because yada yada. I will discuss a completely unmemorable case study (see accompanying handout for quotations) that allows us to think of this neglected yada yada yada thusly; then I’ll make some very obvious inductions thereto, because this research, while methodologically perfect, lacks any manner of creativity, courage, or insight. Thank you.

After listening to the Professional, you feel a mild glow of pleasure/pain. You learned nothing, and likely even got stupider, but at least you weren’t abused in the process.

2. The Excitable Speech—The Excitable Speech is largely a graduate student operation, although you’ll occasionally see very senior scholars do it as well. All but the most pathologically earnest junior faculty are far too jaded to give the Excitable Speech. This version of the conference presentation requires that the speaker have an almost preternatural interest in a relatively mundane subject; this level of interest requires that the subject matter be described in a manner that would make a Revival Tent preacherman blush, like “Ohmigod can you believe how cool and complicated this all is? I mean, can you believe it????” A few years ago I saw a woman gushing about the historicity of citation systems or some other such obvious notion. Apparently, the Chicago Manual of Style has not been a perpetual presence on the Earth since Creation. Who knew? The speaker’s fetish for the subject, needless to say, almost never translates, so the surfeit of enthusiasm just seems embarrassing and weird. The Excitable Speech will tend to go over time, but luckily, the graduate student’s advisor is sitting in the now largely uncomfortable audience with a hook, frowning, and will pull the excitable speaker down for a gentle, head-patting, talking-to later.

3. The Library Database—The Library Database is not so much a scholarly presentation as it is a piece of conceptual art. It asks a basic question: How many proper names of people in my field might I fit into my 20 minute talk without merely reading a list of names? Given such a question, most reasonable people would err on the side of fewer names; the Library Database rather shockingly errs toward more names—tending toward the limit of the list. Still, the presentation is impressive, simply because the Library Databaser must include a near infinite variation of signal phrases, since using “according to X” 150 times would give up the game.

4. The Body Poet – The Body Poet presentation involves a thoroughly quirky performance during which the speaker flails about or otherwise makes gesticulations similar to some sun worship ritual. Under the cringe-inducing impression that academic prose is “too rational and tied up in Western metaphysics,” the speaker has instead opted for a weirdly arranged set of poetic vignettes that also involve The Body ™, it being well-known that Western metaphysics has ignored and debased The Body ™ as a general proposition. Therefore (although the speaker will never use this hideously linear term), the speaker will “foreground” The Body ™ through the presentation, and depend on the variable associations of the audiences’ own Bodily experiences, since the space between the speaker’s and audience’s “differently located Bodies” is where “meaning actually happens” anyway. Perhaps not surprisingly, the “content” of the presentation—supposing we were authorized to accept such a loaded and conflictual term—generally involves an experimental class that the speaker taught, and the ideological baggage that caused his or her students to absolutely despise it.

5. The Old Fuck-You—My personal favorite, The Old Fuck-You is almost always presented by a meticulously dressed male under the age of 40. It involves berating the entire field of composition for general ignorance and political complicity, going about this task—seemingly nonsensically—with copious citations of Gilles Deleuze, almost all of which will be drawn from the sections of Mille Plateaux clearly written by Felix Guattari (the speaker will always use the French title, though he doesn’t speak French). If the speaker is especially adept at The Old Fuck-You, he will rely instead on “relatively obscure” authors drawn from the footnotes of Mille Plateaux, like Gabriel Tarde, Elias Canetti, or Gilbert Simondon, the fact that nobody in the room has the slightest clue who these people are standing as prima facie evidence for the presenter’s dubious point. The presentation will invariably end with some unnecessarily provocative and smugly unsupportable challenge, something to the effect that Blood and Guts in High School is a fascist novel “par excellence,” or that Peter Elbow fulfills the legacy of Jim Crow.

6. The Bait-and-Switch—A common tactic when a speaker hasn’t completed the research proposed damn near a year ago for the conference, The Bait-and-Switch will often start with “This is going to be a little different from the proposed title,” by which the speaker means that it’s on another subject altogether, likely drawn at random from a pile of unformed writing that the speaker had at his or her disposal. Another clear sign of the Bait-and-Switch is “The new title is X.” Needless to say, this change of subject disrupts the cohesion of the panel, so The Bait-and-Switch speaker will almost always appear second in a group of three, just to make sure that the panel as a whole makes no sense whatsoever. The third sign for The Bait-and-Switch will be the pissed off faces of the speakers co-panelists, who are silently fuming that the speaker couldn’t get his or her shit together, again.

7. The Caveat Lector—The Caveat Lector is savvy approach to the problem of having no presentation to give, and is thus usually deployed by assistant and associate professors. Where less experienced members of the field will panic, and default to The Airport Special or The Shuffle and Skip (see Part 2), the experienced conference-goer will know just how much time can be wasted with a droning, meandering explanation of why his or her presentation has “shifted somewhat” from the initial proposal. The sheer length of this improvised apologia really distinguishes this species of non-point from The Bait and Switch, which may not even mention that the presentation bears no resemblance to the proposed title. The Caveat Lector speaker goes the other way, presenting such a detailed list for why his or her presentation isn’t as advertised that by the time the actual research presentation makes its appearance, the audience is too exhausted to notice that it is really only about 1 ½ pages long, and was likely drafted in the coffee shop that very morning, and printed up in the hotel’s inordinately expensive business center.

8. The Winking Muckraker—The Winking Muckraker presentation relies on an assumption of almost uniform political belief in the audience, specifically, a version of 60’s liberalism that snorts loudly at the very mention of George W. Bush. Rather than present on a scholarly topic, the speaker of The Winking Muckraker strings together a series of outrages committed by conservatives, and links them by the thinnest thread to some classroom event or other. The tone of the presentation is always sarcastic, which is fine, since the statements are such well-honed claptrap that everyone to the left of Jonah Goldberg is forced to nod knowingly.

9. The Human Shield—Under some utterly unjustifiable fund granting mechanism, some assistant professor has managed to drag five or six undergraduate students to the conference. This is a great event, because now the audience can listen to voluminous praise of said professor, but from the “authentic voices that we usually don’t hear,” that being those of our students. Do not suppose that The Human Shield constitutes some special panel or other during which conference-goers can engage in the illusion that their students are connected to their pedagogical projects in some complex way. No. The Human Shield takes place during a regular panel, meaning that the presenter and his or her five students are allotted the fifteen to twenty minutes usually reserved for an individual talk. Needless to say, they go on for fifty minutes or more, and nobody can say a damn thing about it, because that would be yet another instance of “silencing our students,” a very big no-no, at least in public. The co-panelists are, of course, beside themselves with rage, and anyone in the audience with a lick of sense is embarrassed for all parties, but – strangely – the presenter who trucked in the students thinks he or she has accomplished something novel, extraordinary, and truly progressive.

10. The Shuffle and Skip—Given approximately 10 months to draw the most important points from a 20 page paper, the speaker for The Shuffle and Skip has managed to pick up a ballpoint pen and draw a rough box around a number of seemingly random paragraphs. The speaker reads the introduction to the paper – an operation that takes about 11 minutes – and then begins reading paragraphs at random, announcing from time to time and with increasing frequency that he or she will be “skipping this part.” Whatever brief, brief flashes of logic existed when the speaker circled these various paragraphs suddenly seem more tenuous as the clock ticks away, and the moderator holds up the “X Minutes Left” sign. To make matters worse, 10 months were apparently an insufficient amount of time for the speaker to add page numbers to the draft, so the flipping between sections searching for some overarching logic on the spot is further complicated as pages get switched around, and the speaker must spend now precious moments seeking out the concluding paragraph, which the audience is at this point dying for.

Don’t forget to catch Part 2, which includes, among other categories, The Technophile and the And-Another-Thing!

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