Academia has its own language. It is filled with code words and meandering sentences. Why say something in one sentence if you can say it in a page? Why use a short word if a long one can be used instead?
I write this half in jest, but only half. I have been reading theory and it has been doing my head in. I resisted for a long time. Years ago when I was at drama school and dreamt of being an actor, there was a course we had to do called ‘Signs and Meanings’. It was about semiotics and I refused point blank to have a bar of it. What did semiotics have to do with acting? How could it possibly make me a better actor?
I was (and maybe still am) ridiculously stubborn. I refused to sit the exam and read none of the textbooks. I could be accused of tilting at windmills, or perhaps of laziness. While I definitely have a bit of Don Quixote in me, the reason I refused to learn anything about semiotics was that I was absolutely certain of my future path: I knew that I was going to be an actor. There was no point in bothering with subjects that didn’t propel me to my brilliant career.
I got a one for ‘Signs and Meanings’ – the lowest mark possible – and I never became the successful actor I was so sure was my destiny. I wore my failure at semiotics as a badge of honour but my failure as an actor burned for many years.
Now, two decades later, I am back at university and struggling to open my brain to academic thinking. (I do think of it as opening my brain rather than my mind. I can see the wrenches and clamps, forcing open the spongy grey matter to let this new learning in.)
At first reading theory was dense and impenetrable. I’d read the same paragraph over and over again, trying to make sense of it. I had to read with a dictionary open, looking up terms in every sentence. I felt smaller and more stupid with each word I didn’t know. It takes a certain courage to admit to one’s own ignorance (at least it did for me, even if I was only admitting it to myself).
Part of the problem was that admitting my ignorance and looking up the terms I didn’t know didn’t offer any immediate answers. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias don’t explain theories; they just point you to the theorists. I’d get out a new article or book to try to understand the paragraph in the original that was giving me trouble, and on page one of that new book there’d be another incomprehensible paragraph with yet another theorist and theory for me to get my head around. I felt caught in a never-ending spiral, delving deeper and deeper into the murky depths of philosophy and academia.
But, persevere and there comes a moment where it all starts to click into place. The same theorists and philosophers are mentioned in different texts, you start to recognise them and their names bring a sense of familiarity instead of the old dread. I’ve yet to reach a point where I can say, “Ah, Derrida. I know him well.” But there are at least a few synapses firing now when I read his name and hopefully there will soon be new pathways carved into my brain, allowing the clamps to be put away as understanding blossoms.
Katherine Lyall-Watson 