Core Post - Kumar is great and other jumbled thoughts...

There is so much that excited me about Kumar’s piece that I hardly know where to begin. Her anecdote about Derrida giving a lecture about a theory of titles as a middle finger to the administration was hilarious. Her salient genealogy of global television studies and the challenges of approaching it through standard academic disciplines was really impressive. And as others have noted, her conclusion was brilliant. And it is this paradox that she ends with that I would like to focus upon.

If global television studies is both necessary because of the pervasiveness of the rhetoric and economic practice of globalization and impossible because it will necessarily result in “unequal discourse”, then it requires of us a process-oriented methodology of intellectual examination. By this I mean that the Hegelian model of dialectical progress in thought, wherein one philosophical (or in Kumar’s terms disciplinary) mode clashes with another and through that collision subsumes much of the old mode into a new synthesis. I take Kumar to be rejecting the universalizing nature of this model and accepting that there is no universal progression of thought without a colonial power dynamic taking place, and therefore is advocating a world wherein a diversity of perspectives can exist side by side along one another, without needing to be fit into a neat “interdisciplinary” universal. This is something that I have been thinking a lot about myself, and feel vindicated to see it in this essay (assuming I am not misreading her argument).

Another theoretical possibility of this process-oriented methodology is an inversion of values whereby the means is more valuable than the end, precisely because there is no longer the possibility of an end for an end will necessarily result it breaking down, as Kumar put it. This may be another way of phrasing the rejection of a universal, but I think it is worth stating again, for if the ends can no longer justify the means, then perhaps we can rethink the dominant academic reification of competition and dialectical struggle. This doesn’t mean an end to it so much as and ethical rewiring that might mean a change in the way universities and research initiatives are funded antagonistically, which seems to me to harken back to this classical Humanist methodology. I realize that these thoughts might not make sense to anyone but me; I am writing them because they have been on my mind for months and this is the first excuse I’ve had to give them voice, so please forgive the rawness of my half-formed thoughts.

One of the reasons why I find this approach so exciting is that it allows scholars to be wrong and for their wrongness to be generative and progressive, or as Kumar puts it “where, paradoxically, it breaks down.” It may be that scholarship from an Anglo-American perspective comes to conclusions about global television, that from another perspective, say an East-Asian feminist perspective is wrong on some accounts, and vice versa, but because we can hold the impossibility of a universal account of globalization both accounts are generative as long as they are done in good faith by “extending the discipline to its dialogical limits.” It seems to me that some of the fierce debates between scholars who should be natural allies, here I’m specifically thing of post-Marxist and feminists, could perhaps be less self-righteous and more collegial. But then again maybe I’m wrong, nevertheless isn’t that ok in this brave new world?