Quantum change
23:46 on Thursday, May 27, 2004 • Responses off
A week ago, I became a fully-qualified doctoral candidate of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With the help and support of friends, colleagues, professors, and family, not to mention the months I spent preparing, I passed my qualifying exams with flying colors.
All this basically means is that the academic institution has granted me the privilege of laboring for two years over a 300 page document, sending me further into debt and—no doubt—unspeakable despair. So as distinctions and privileges go, this one proves dubious at best, but no less significant (to myself, anyway). The passage into candidacy moves me from the realm of “assignments” to the land of “my project(s)”, and I’m very excited about this transition, because while my course transcript certainly bears some relevance to the issues on which I work, it in no way represents the kind of work I want to do nor the field in which I want to work.
What field? I think the colloquially accepted term in the academy is “new media” or “digital media”, but to say it has congealed as an institutionally-recognized field would be distorting reality. Most people working in this field are doing so under the auspices of departments of literature, art, creative writing, computer science, and even the outer fringes of fields like anthropology, history and philosophy. That makes sense to me, really, as the kind of work I’ve been doing in preparation for the exams and in mapping out the plans for my dissertation involves skills and theories from almost all of these fields. Whether it’s possible to overcome the institutional inertia embedded in these parcels of intellectual real estate remains to be seen; historically, the battles between what constitutes one discipline and what constitutes another have been vicious and petty, and it seems to me that the kind of interdisciplinarity perhaps intrinsic to the study of digital media can’t help but step on this sense of ownership. It’s clear to me, though, that the academic humanities need mechanisms to make their work relevant to a world which, in its blind and orgiastic relationship to commodity culture, has largely forgotten about humanistic endeavors. I think digital media fills that gap pretty well, don’t you?
To date, I’ve used “resonance” as an alias for most of my web-endeavors. My reasons for remaining largely anonymous for so long center mostly on my desire to keep my personal and professional lives separate, though I’d be lying if the allure of operating behind an alias hasn’t also played a role in my pen-name endeavors. As responsibilities mount, though, sustaining both an online and offline life becomes more and more impossible (and less and less desirable). Furthermore, the reality of academic professionalization demands that I start building an online presence attached to the same name that appears on my C.V., and I might as well make use of the little cultural capital I’ve accrued through this website over the past few years.
So hey, my name is Narayan Nayar, and welcome to my website.