And you may ask yourself, Well? How did I get here?

Hello all. Please forgive me yesterday's absence and the lateness of this post. I was temporarily derailed by some family news, but am back on target today.

Reading back through my old papers is a bit surreal. My official "senior" year was 2006-2007, and by that time I was playing in up to five bands at once in and around Boone. The number of classes I took each semester grew smaller and smaller until I decided to just focus on paying rent and bills with music money and stopped taking classes altogether. As a result of this time lapse, it's a task in and of itself to reacquaint myself with my own concentration.

This is what my detective work has yielded so far:

I called my concentration "Philosophy and(/of) Education." Basically, in my first four years at Appalachian, I took it upon myself to become as immersed in Watauga College and the Interdisciplinary Studies department as the faculty would allow. Interdisciplinarity (which I see Blogger STILL fails to recognize as a real word!) seemed so naturally superior a concept/framework/approach to knowledge than that of the traditional disciplines, I wanted it to be the launchpad for the academic career I was then dreaming of pursuing.

Everything I studied centered around the concept of critique. Interdisciplinary Studies--perpetually hung up on exactly what sort of "field," if any, it actually constitutes--offers a position from which to pursue not only new knowledge, but new knowledge-formations. It is an ideal, in a sense, which meets the ground primarily by 1) offering an approach to problem-solving that integrates established discplinary perspectives in hopes of producing more comprehensive perspectives and better solutions (its pragmatic advantage), and 2) standing in critical relation to other knowledges (its philosophical dimension). I took Watauga College to be a critique of everything non-Watauga College at ASU; this was what led me to the study of the Learning Community movement. Learning communities and interdisciplinarity were the two pillars upon which my Serious and Practical Training for the World of Employment were going to be based. This was the "...and(/of) Education" part of my concentration.

Then, there were the...well, I suppose you could politely call them "professors." I preferred to call them Existential Crisis-Inducers, myself. These were the Jay Wentworths, Bud Gerbers, and Richard Carps (::shudder::) of IDS; the Kim Halls of P&R; the James Ivorys of English; the Diane Mines-s of anthropology, etc. And you, Derek Stanovsky: you and your goon Karl Marx played a huge part as well. These people would not let the philosophy student in me die. Nay, they encouraged him to grow, to read, to write, and to become more and more enchanted by the day with all of those hypnotizing Ism-s: feminism, existentialism, historical materialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, etc.

This was the Doug that never slept, that wrote final papers ten pages too long and turned them in two months too late. This Doug became fixated on Foucault and the problem of discourse and agency; he wrote about it in every class he could for at least two years. When this Doug finally took a few semesters' worth of regular (read: Anglo- or "analytic") philosophy classes--on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language--he labored to collapse the whole edifice around the feet of the fools who continued to publish in the field. He was, shall we say, less than successful in meeting his goal (though he made a few very good points along the way). This Doug believed that meanings are unstable, that language, culture, and history determine what it is possible to think at a given moment, and that Mind is a social phenomenon we are "in" rather than a thing each of us "has."

I found it self-evident that these two Dougs shared common ground with respect to their perhaps apparently unrelated interests. The University is where Knowledge's ultimate arbiters call home--they are the Ph.D.s whose expertise is sought, whose pronouncements are gospel, and whose bickering (okay, "journal publications and conference debates") actually constitute their respective fields. On the other hand, this Knowledge is believed to be but momentary crystallizations of rhetoric and temporary conceptual alliances amid much larger historical-epistemic forces, the ultimate natures of which are simply not available to us in the present. The form of the University, then, is by definition mutable over time. It is in light of this that Academia can be seen to be one of the most conservative of society's institutions, since its constant dissolution and reorganization is least appealing to those whose job it is to know things professionally.

UFOs present an impossible subject for today's universities, which are the embodiments of our present states of knowledge. To "study" UFOs is therefore to critique the institutions which continue to claim ultimate social legitimacy with respect to knowledge, but which are so clearly impotent to understand what is perhaps the most empirically-persistent nonexistent phenomenon in human history.

...UFOlogy as Learning Community...?