Distillery: a Response to Kinohi Nishikawa

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Compression counts, and not just for poems and tourniquets. In "RT = Endorsement," Kinohi gives us a version of academic Twitter as the distillery of good scholarship and good sentence-craft, not—as some may fear—a jostling marketplace of raw ideas, not a base carnival of pseudo-intellectual barkers, still less the slaughterhouse of critical prose or deep thought.

Reading Kinohi's three examples, I am convinced. Each tweet encapsulates a complete scholarly argument, and each argument implies a network of cultural exchange. Each sentence has a plot with a hero, whether it's a writer, a publisher, or a group of archivists. Kinohi compresses media histories into scholarly nuggets, capturing a whole life cycle of African-American letters, a whole circuit from writer to reader, with many vital agents of distribution, evaluation, and preservation in between. These infrastructures of black artistic and intellectual life could easily escape—have escaped—the notice of inattentive readers and traditionalist critics. Kinohi wants to make sure they don't. He grabs our attention with a quick story and an arresting image; he rewards it because he knows what he's talking about. Years of legwork and groundwork have given him the credibility to compose a line that is no sound bite and the capacity to deliver it in resolute, unpretentious prose.

That certainly matches up to my own sense of how we write well: working for years to understand a problem, a text, a writer, a movement, a collection, then distilling that understanding into lucid prose to capture what is most urgent and most essential about the object of study. For me the most important four words in Kinohi's piece at first seem gestural but take on weight and urgency: "those issues are there." Something important is at stake in Kinohi's scholarly work. Whether he does the work or not, whether the work takes the form of a tweet or an article, no matter how distracted his readers are, no matter what is changing in our professional and media landscape, those issues are there. His brief for contextual detail—the thing that makes scholarship scholarship—works best when paired with his brief for public engagement—the thing that makes scholarship widely legible.

Kinohi's modest and earnest remarks here are in fact rooted in a fairly iconoclastic stance within his field. His Twitter practice takes its motivation from the mode of genealogical recovery already encoded in his research: pay attention to this, not that. Find what is there to see, to read, to remember in black culture and bring it back into circulation rather than "bemoaning the incompleteness or partiality of the black archive." If generic social media risks a division of attention and a dilution of context, then Kinohi wants us to reconcentrate our minds by insisting on material, historical contexts tagged in Twitter. For Kinohi, I think, it comes down to the value of a high build ratio between process and product. How long did it take William Melvin Kelley to live and think and see and read enough before he could pack his understanding of an entire historical and social dynamic into the single word "woke," which he put into the linguistic substrate of our culture until the times demanded that it rise and multiply? How many other terms of liberation and totems of oppression flew over Kelley's transom and were filtered by his writing? How many years did it take for him to become the writer he was, living at some angle of remove from the mainstream arbiters of white publishing and the proponents of black aesthetic radicalism? And, to take the point to its logical conclusion, how many years of training and reading did it take for Kinohi to be able to compose the deceptively simple sentence displayed in Figure 1?

Kinohi's ethic is a work ethic. He has internalized the peer review process so thoroughly that it becomes operational before he tweets. In his ethic of scholarly responsibility, good tweets have somehow to contain the full ontogenetic germ of the scholarship that gave them life, must point to the historical detail and underlying conceptual stakes even if only in silhouette. You may have noticed that, about 300 words back, I started overusing the word "work." I did that because writing well, in "RT = Endorsement," and perhaps in all of our work, is less about the sprezzatura of academic style than about the hidden labor of research, the hours it takes to write well and mean it. Kinohi pays his respect to the craft of W. M. Kelley not just by studying him and distilling his own craft into a pocket homage, but by asking us to think about what we can do with Twitter to advance what matters most to us as scholars.

Doing this, Kinohi steps right through the gauntlet of inhibitions that probably keeps many academics from taking Twitter seriously: the fear that brief equals shallow, that true knowledge requires the longueurs of a citational apparatus, that nonspecialists can't get what we mean. In fact, all of the other contributors in this cluster are also unjamming the rules of good scholarly writing: Sarah breaks the levity/gravity barrier to reveal the critical edge of empathetic wit; Fran writes her way past the humanist logic that makes us divide cowritten texts into whole integers of attribution such as 1, 2, or X; and Irvin, in his imaginative recovery of dialogue, finds a new technique to mark and fill archival absences.

For Kinohi, a well-written tweet doesn't merely advertise for the argument. It is the argument. Such a tweet can only come after great labor and laborious refinement. It's the end of the scholarly trail, not its evasion; the concentration of knowledge, not its etiolation; it's a record in prose of the moment when you finally know what your work is about. The scholarly article can be reduced in scale to 280 characters, but it cannot be reduced in kind to some other form of writing, such as the journalistic. Kinohi's work ethic, of course, is also an aesthetic. Like most aesthetic practices, it depends on a beautiful logic of compression. Language, we know, gains force with density. Why should that be any less true of critical prose than of lyric poetry? If you put hours and years of your life into acts of scholarly devotion—and if you are willing to distill the almost infinite compass of history, literature, and culture into ordinary scholarly prose, willing, that is, to press the fruit of the world's letters and archives into a 7,000-word scholarly essay, why stop there?

Jed Esty is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Unseasonable Youth (Oxford, 2012), and "Realism Wars" (2016).