J.D. Connor, "Etymology" (Against)
Words don't weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living...
While I was thinking about this conversation with J.D. Connor I came up with the neologism “etymontology” which I am very proud of and wish I had invented back in the 1980s when my article on this would have really made some noise. Oh well. I was too busy watching Facts of Life reruns after school.
In any case: there are two linked questions here. (1) What do we owe in the present to the history of concepts and words? To what degree, that is, should we be responsible in our current use of those words to their etymological origins? (2) Why is one of the basic ways that humanists answer those questions so annoying?
At one point J.D. imagines a radical (“even Cavellian,” he says) version of his critique that would argue: words only mean how they’re used. Against a certain critical “gotcha game,” words would then not be timelessly and etymontologically (see?) bound to their histories, but liberated from them. If you push this you come up pretty quickly against two seemingly contradictory impulses in contemporary humanist scholarship: the desire to emphasize the possibility of radical freedom from the past (which is the work, at least when it comes to words, of so much modernist and contemporary poetry) vs. the interest in making sure that we in the present are held responsible for the past, in binding us as tightly as possible to the past so that we do not attempt, in forgetting, to free ourselves from obligation.
See you next week for another seed!
Bio
J.D. Connor is an Associate Professor in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC. He is the author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession and The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood, 1970–2010.
His work has been published in journals such as Jump Cut, Media Industries, The Journal of Visual Culture, and FlowTV, and has appeared in edited collections that include The Oxford Handbook to American Film History, In the Studio, The Films of Albert Brooks, Transmedia Directors, and the volumes on Directing and Art Direction and Production Design in the Behind the Silver Screen series. He is working on The Image of the Social, a history of the transition to late capitalism in three diagrams; Archives of the Ambient, a theory of tape recording; Comedy Equals Comedy Plus Time, an exploration of contemporary comedy; and a study of the origins of cinematic worldbuilding. He is a founding member of Post•45, a collective of scholars of American literature and culture. His website is johnconnorlikeintheterminator.com.