Carlo Rotella is one of the most exciting thinkers I've ever met. He's a professor, writer, and public intellectual, and his mind ranges everywhere: from boxing to the blues and free play to fantasy novels.
A couple of weeks ago, Rotella wrote a brilliant column in the Boston Globe about the challenge of conveying nuanced ideas in media formats which value glib summaries above all else. (Even the title -- "Why Academics Turn Into Robots on TV" -- was great.)
I emailed Rotella, and he agreed to talk some more about his ideas. I called him a few days later, and I did my best to follow his fertile mind as it criss-crossed acres of political and cultural terrain.
MB: In a recent essay in the Boston Globe, you talked about the relative absence of experts on TV and radio who are capable of articulating complicated ideas in a digestible way. You suggested that there's a "sweet spot between the eminent scholar who had so much to say but couldn't find a way to say it and the media pro who didn't have much to say but managed to get it said memorably in a few seconds of airtime."
It sounds like you're lamenting a lack of real public intellectuals. Who do you think of as the best occupants of that sweet spot right now?
CR: Well, at the risk of starting up by saying, "Well, Matt, it's complicated," let me just amend the first part of that. I think there are a lot of people who can do it on both sides. That is, there are a lot of academics who are able to talk to a general audience and who have an ambition to make things more complicated than they often come out in the press. And on the other side, there are a lot of people in the writing trades and journalists who are interested in what academics have to say, and are familiar with that world and want the academics to give them that material.
So, a lot of what I'm talking about is actually the technical difficulty of squeezing it in to the niches that are made available to do it. Even with goodwill on both sides, sometimes it's hard to do, right? So I'm not lamenting the lack of people who can do this; I'm saying that it's hard to do and it's a very specific skill, separate from having something to say. And so, it often doesn't work even when there are good intentions on all sides.
MB: So the problem is two-fold. Sometimes, media outlets aren't interested in nuanced discourse. And even when they are, there's this second challenge of actually being able to do it.
CR: Right. I'll give you an example of someone who I thought did it quite well. So when Kim Jong-Il died, there were a very small number of Korea experts who ended up getting interviewed a lot in print and on TV. (And let me just add that generally, the more capital that goes into producing whatever it is, the harder it is to squeeze in the complexity. So it's easier, for example, being interviewed for a magazine piece than it is if you're doing your 20 seconds on TV or whatever.)
But there's this guy, Brian Myers, he's at a university in Korea. I don't know him but I was very impressed by his ability to navigate exactly that tightrope that I was talking about in the piece, which is to meet people where they are and use the language that people who don't know a lot about North Korea will recognize, but to use that language to say something other than what everybody else is saying.
And what struck me particularly is that everybody who doesn't know much about Korea, which is almost all of us, was amazed and aghast that people seemed so upset that Kim Jong-Il had died. And Myers had this great line where he said, "Well, just think about a country where a lot of the work that is done by the popular culture in our country is done by official political culture, and think about all those people who seemed to get overly excited about Michael Jackson's death."
And just that line performed that difficult feat which is it's not just a sound bite; it's a big argument about what happens when official culture is popular culture. It's a big argument but the Michael Jackson reference caused the whole point to click into place. So it's definitely doable; it's quite hard to do and it's a strange little skill that's certainly not taught anywhere.
MB: You mention specifically that academics and scholars aren't trained to do this well. My sense is that much of academia functions as a relatively closed, tradition-bound world in which this skill isn't prized particularly highly. Is this the sort of thing that you think should be taught to rising scholars?
CR: At least in the humanities, I would say that the movement over time has actually been towards this kind of thinking. The professional rewards for being obscure have been reduced, I think, for a lot of reasons.
One of them, for instance, is the change in academic publishing that says that if you want to publish a book with a first-rate academic press, you need to publish something that feels like a book, that somebody can just pick up and read because they are interested in the subject. And that still drives a lot of tenure and promotion decisions -- who publishes where.
The full interview is available at The Wheat and Chaff.