Theoria

I would like to put a particular practice to a stop: all star academics (“all star” and “academics” shall be defined at the discretion of the reader) who accept invitations by various universities to give an “annual lecture” of some sort and proceed to read a lecture they’ve given a dozen times or a paper that was published some time ago. For instance, I recall Steven Pinker giving a lecture of this sort where he summarized, in about forty-five minutes, his book, Words and Rules, which was published in 1999. The lecture was in 2001 or 2002. Tomorrow night, David Held will deliver “the annual lecture in political science” at Carleton University, which I will attend because it promises a reception – free food and booze, plus the chance to see other graduate students at like dinks. Held will present a lecture entitled “Reframing Global Governance: Apocalypse Soon or Reform!” Conveniently, I am breaking off reading this lecture to make this post. I’m reading the lecture, not because I’m on a select list of people who were given the lecture beforehand (although I am told I’m on some “reserved seating list” – the hell is that?), but, rather, because the lecture was published in Volume 11, Number 2 of the journal, New Political Economy, dated June 2006. A helpful note, the one that gives me Held’s mailing address, informs me “This is the text of a lecture given by David Held at the University of Sheffield on 8 December 2005 to mark the 11th anniversary of the Political Economy Research Center (PERC).” Not that I could ever hope to persuade all stars and senior academics to do otherwise, but, if you are going to accept a free trip across the world and likely receive a decent speaking fee, could you please make the effort to give your lecture on something new? So, this is the rule I propose: anyone accepting an invitation to deliver an endowed, named, or annual lecture of any sort should present a new lecture, or they should not accept the invitation.

The text of the lecture, for those who won’t be visited by Held this year, is available here.

(Edit: five pages in to the lecture/paper and I’m reminded of an apocryphal story a friend, who was very much into Marx and Heidegger, once told me about Husserl: when reading the papers of students he did not care much for (the papers; not the students) he’d comment, “Common-sense and nothing but.” We’re I Husserl in this apocryphal story and Held my student, I’d make that comment. I clearly do the wrong sort of work: I’ll never be paid ridiculous sums of money to read an already published paper. I bet a Bourdieu-ian has done work on this sort of thing. If not Bourdieu himself.)