Reductive Research

I'm continuing to work my way through Wendy Belcher's workbook for academic publishing and have found much helpful advice.  Still, I have noticed a theme that is increasingly disturbing me: the reductive modus operandi of academic research culture.  Successful writers, Belcher tells us, know when to stop reading.  Fair enough.  They also know how much to read, how to mine sources for only the relevant bits that can go into their own work, and how to "reduce articles to their essence", and how to read whole books in 45 minutes (!).  As journal articles and books proliferate to an incredible degree* in an age where publishing records determine job promotion and retention, professional quality research must bow more and more to summary and reduction, rather than deliberative study.  How can we study when there is so much to plow through just to cover our bases?

I already feel compromised when I merely mine a book for what interests me, rather than attend to the argument of the whole as something worthy of study in itself, regardless of whether or not I can use it.  I see the same in academic seminars: we tend to ask questions that feed into our own pet interests, rather than engage in a proper discussion about the paper just given and its own interests.  I myself have often asked questions that went something like, "You said x which seems to relate to y [which I happen to be interested in] in z way.  Do you think that's true or can you say more about that relationship in light of x?"  Most junior scholars blow this question (and I truly don't mean it as a trap), and senior scholars tend to brush it off...perhaps rightly so.  I have rarely sat in on discussions in academic seminars that were lively and engaged around a more or less single topic of study, rather than a wide-ranging conversation.

So I am as compromised as the rest of us, but I think what I really want to do is study, not merely collect and collate and create some new idea out of all the old ones.  The question is, how do I study when I am under the pressure of time to produce and participate in precisely the culture that militates against study?  I don't want to reduce others' nuanced thoughts and work to a paragraph abstract, any more than I want my hard labor so reduced.  Yet, that is what we are taught and encouraged to do.  More and more I am grateful for the stability in my teaching curriculum, which furnishes an opportunity to truly study, widely and deeply, in some of the texts that best reward that kind of patient work and attention.

* Lindsay Waters talks of a near 100-fold increase in academic publishing in the last 50 years or so, if I remember rightly. I'll go hunt up the statistic, but it was quite shocking.  Simultaneously, where humanities books used to sell a minimum of 1250 copies, now publishers are lucky to sell 275 copies.  There are just too many books and articles driven by the need to keep a job, and not by the fruit of deliberate study.