Indagando a aceleração da produção acadêmica com bom humor: Uma visão do sul [Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada]

Questioning the acceleration of academic production with good humor: a view from the south

Wolfgang Klein (1989) came up with a proposal that was both funny and reasonable for tackling well-known academic demands for accelerated and increased publication. Writing to German-speaking scientists in 1989, Klein diagnosed that the technologies and policies of academic writing were much more focused on facilitating scientific production than favoring time and conditions for reading it. Resulting from regimes of capital circulation in the academic field, the demands of writing and publishing provoked in Klein similar anxieties to those we feel today. In a playful way, the author remarked that “a day still has only 24 h and, even as we sit here and write, new photocopies and essays and books are continually arriving and piling up on our desks […] until we decide they’re outdated and should be sent to the archives.” At once playful and serious, the author anticipates current technological innovations, such as the use of artificial technology in the production of scientific texts.

But while in Klein’s day, the available technology and policies facilitated (or at least privileged) writing, the same could not be said for reading. “Nothing of the sort,” the author adds, “[is] available to readers.” Klein’s solutions for the lack of time and conditions for academics to read are evidently playful. Some of his hilarious suggestions include encouraging “truly relevant insights” to “fall back on cuneiform carved in stone with hammers and chisels”, and stipulating that a scientist in Germany must only write a maximum of 30 pages a year.

As editors of Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, a Brazilian journal that aims to advance and democratize knowledge in the fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, we would like to suggest taking Wolfgang Klein’s discourse seriously. In our commentary, we would also like to draw attention to reading constraints that Klein’s critique did not mention, but which disproportionately affect those located in the South of the Equator. Let’s begin with the dimension of humor in Klein’s text. To do this, revisiting the work of a pioneer in Brazil on ordinary language use and humor is a good start. Rajagopalan (2000) suggests that the humor in the writing of John L. Austin – whose main philosophical treatise’s title reads like a self-help manual, How to do things with words – does not amount to “adornment” or “moments of diversion meant to prepare the audiences/readers for … plough[ing] through the deep waters of serious philosophy” (p. 308). On the contrary, “humor and seriousness go hand in hand” (Rajagopalan 2000: 308). The reasons for taking humor seriously are various, including that the dimensions to which both are conventionally associated (i.e., seriousness tends to be attributed to logical discourse and humor to affection and pleasure) are often contextually intertwined. Rajagopalan (2000: 287) adds that humor tends to present an “appropriate incongruity” between the humorous text and its context. In registering the incongruity between text and context as belonging to the realm of the non-serious, the reader may be “disarmed” and thus enjoy, instead of just assessing as logical, the critique that the joke poses.

Before Rajagopalan, Bakhtin (1984) had already pioneered a study on François Rabelais and the culture of popular laughter. In analyzing popular festivals, Bakhtin argued that humor temporarily suspends social norms and hierarchies, enabling the reversal of roles and the subversion of an established order. Bakhtin (1976) cites, for example, the metapragmatic discourse of a master of popular humor, Nikolai Gogol, for whom “laughter is more significant and profound than is thought” (cited in Bakhtin 1976: 27).

In light of this, we can see that there are many appropriate incongruences and suspensions of the status quo in Klein’s text. Klein describes scientists as almost incommunicable beings, or well educated and highly experienced people, who talk a lot but do not listen to one another. His “depressing observation” – for instance, that it is impossible to read everything that is produced in a field – are both amusing and tragic. The unilateral acceleration of production leads to an increase in writing, but does not solve the problem of the lack of time (and conditions) for reading. In view of this, Klein calls for a different temporality. In recommending that scientists use “[g] oose quill and hand-rubbed ink on parchment” in order to “retard the production process”, he is advocating for a slower and, by extension, more rigorous science, insofar as reviewers would have time to “carefully read [the candidates’] work”. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the pleasure of reading Klein’s text is that his comic solutions to real problems can lead the reader, through the suspension of the established order, to look critically at unequal regimes.

But the academic world is larger than the German academia that Klein addresses. Technological innovations and the neoliberalization of science are also different today. Scientists nowadays are not only busy writing, but also taking on heavy teaching loads, bureaucratic obligations and funding disputes (Graeber 2018). In addition, capitalism, which emerged in synergy with colonialism, unequally distributes not only the possibilities for reading pieces authored by fellow scientists, but also to have one’s writings read in other parts of the globe (Borba and Silva 2024). In the field of sociolinguistics, the journals that publish texts that become the global canon are usually in English. Although edited and revised by academics who are not paid for their editorial work, these journals tend to be hosted by commercial publishers that restrict access to reading. In a search we made on the Portal de Periódicos Capes, which provides scientists based in Brazil with access to some academic journals, we found that Brazilian sociolinguists have access to only two of the six best-known English-language sociolinguistics journals.

Yet this obstacle to access has never halted academic reading and writing in Latin America. Well-known strategies in Brazilian peripheries – such as gambiarra – are equally perfected by academics. Gambiarra refers to the creative, often improvised solutions people come up with to solve everyday problems, especially when resources are scarce (Windle et al. 2023: 284). In Brazilian peripheries, where access to formal services may be limited, people rely on their ingenuity to make do with what they have. Gambiarras may involve repurposing materials, rigging together broken items to extend their use, or finding unconventional and creative ways to address needs like electricity, water, or transportation. These practices highlight the resilience and resourcefulness of people living in the periphery, where gambiarra becomes a crucial survival strategy. In peripheral cultures, gambiarra is more than just a quick fix – it is a way of life. In a transperipheral academia, scholars may improvise different gambiarras, for instance by building networks of collaboration with people from different parts of the world to gain access to academic papers, institutional technologies, and other vital resources for producing scholarship (see Windle et al. 2020). Further, the highly qualified production in sociolinguistics (and beyond) in Latin America is generally made available through open access. One example is the Scielo collection, which hosts Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada. Initiated in Brazil, Scielo is a public platform for hosting top-tier journals, with a rigorous process for admitting and maintaining periodicals (cf. https://scielo.org/en). The collection currently hosts journals from thirteen countries in Latin America, as well as South Africa, Spain and Portugal. It is a Global South effort that has democratized scientific reading by providing free access to original scholarship in several languages. The Scielo consortium demonstrates that it is possible to use public resources in democratizing access to science.

We wanted to celebrate the anniversary of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language by doing what we have done above, that is, by suggesting some alternative paths to the incommunicability exposed in Klein’s text. As Briggs (2007) suggested, to talk about (in)communicability is also to talk about ideological representations of the mobility of discourse. While some discourses are projected as communicable (i.e., able to travel through different circuits, often posed as “transparent” and effective), others are subjected to erasure. In a playful and proactive way, Klein points out that, in a system of scientific (in)communicability, while some practices, dispositions and genres are rendered communicable, others, such as reading and other less hurried ways of doing science, are relegated to incommunicability. We have pointed out above global inequalities that tend to make Latin American production incommunicable, at least to the ears and eyes of the Global North. To paraphrase Borba and Silva (2024), who recently criticized the Global North’s epistemic record on trans activism as biased towards English, possible alternatives for expanding sociolinguistic repertoires include policies for translating, circulating and reading “relevant research published in other languages on lesser-known venues” (p. 2). We hope that Klein’s serious jokes, as well as our questioning of unequal scientific regimes, may inspire the collective, democratizing and (why not) humorous efforts of the next fifty years of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language and the sociolinguistic field at large.

Daniel Silva and Viviane are co-editors of the journal Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada.