Liquid metaphors

I’ve been meaning to pull stuff of possible interest out of various unpublished bits of this and that I’ve got lying around (see Stuffed Voles), and John’s appreciation in a recent comment of Zygmunt Baumann’s use of liquid as a metaphor for social relations offers on occasion. I should say Baumann’s one of those guys I know a lot about second hand, admire, should have read but haven’t. The following is from a piece I wrote to synthesize what I was figuring out from doing a lot of interdisciplinary reading on identity. It’s one of the orienting sections:

The interactive field is basically an arrangement of objects in space and time. As a general principle, emerging selves and identities can be expected to expand to fit the available space within the field of interactive possibilities. This suggests a continuous structuring dialectic between expansion and available space. Like water hitting the ground, people and peoples find an interactive field already in place and flow into the basins, gaps, and cracks therein, soaking in, pooling, or running off. In general, we become what it is possible for us to become, filling the space that is there to fill. (‘Failure to become’ is hence immediately diagnostic of a saturated or blocked field in some dimension.) With this image in mind, we may think of identity as the principle that no two objects can occupy exactly the same space at the same time and remain two objects. Objects are identical to themselves, or identifiable, only insofar as they can be distinguished from other objects. “Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat” (Bourdieu, Distinction). Identity is at the core a name for differentiation.

Previous occupancy is obviously a huge advantage in the availability and desirability of space for self and identity to emerge into. Latecomers fill up the spaces that are left (finding their place in the sun, so to speak), unless they are possessed of sufficient expansive power to shove the previous occupants aside. This is as true in sibling dynamics as it is in international politics. Conflicts occur over space along the borders. When pressure is low borders are fractally diffuse and are hence readily permeable (affording the possibility of reciprocal ‘assimilation’). Borders become less fractal and more durably, linearly compressed, one-sided, and impermeable the more pressure is put on them, with results ranging from accommodation to genocide. In some sense, then, recognizable selves and identities are always signs of pressures at the
borders, without which selves and identities would tend to blur into one another. The first few weeks of a love affair should be an evocative illustration of such a state.

Selves and identities can be extraordinarily resourceful in finding spaces to expand into, although this is no more remarkable, intentional, or romantically dignified than the resourcefulness of water in finding a route to the sea. Nevertheless, the configurations produced by such resourcefulness are inherently more exotic and exciting than the comparatively smooth, placid surfaces produced by privileged access to space. Formative resourcefulness also obviously constructs more sensitivity to the way space works. It is precisely this dynamic of self and identity formation that leads critical theorists of class, race, and gender to argue that marginality enables better social theory. Of course, any constraint on self and identity formation (including, for example, a rich tradition) will tend to produce this effect, and the total privilege of unlimited space is rare indeed.

Department of Irony Department

So with an active thread in which I express doubt about celebrations, special occasions and recruiting others into displays of unqualified affirmation, today at the annual awards ceremony I discovered that I was named professor of the year at my university. The smoke and mirrors worked! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

While I was on the market I interviewed at a little alternative college within a larger state university. It had been established by counterculture hippies back in the day, several of whom were still around. Interestingly, they had hired a younger generation of lefty identity politicians who turned out not to share their gentle humanism, and the resulting transition tensions were so severe that they were unable to agree on a candidate and cancelled the search.

The hippies liked me a lot. I was later told about one of them I especially hit it off with that he was legendary because since the founding of the college he had been offered the teaching award every couple of years, and every time he turned it down. As I recall he believed that teaching and learning is a collective virtue, we’re all in it together, it is its own reward, and making invidious distinctions is beside the point. I thought, wow, that’s pure. I agree, but I’m not sure I’d turn down the award! And I didn’t.

More on teaching (social) theory

Dad happened to catch the recent theory post and sent me some quick thoughts to fill in my own, and the larger, historical context; sketch an account of enabling and disabling dynamics for big critical theory; and incidentally supply more of the granularity missing from the 25 writers meme:

“Your own early trip through theory was guided by, among others, [Peter] Bachrach, [Kyriakos] Kontopoulos, and [Chuck] Dyke. That puts you two degrees of separation from, among others, Sorokin, Parsons, Marcuse, Coser, Kurt Wolfe, Hannah Arendt, and other assorted refugees from the Weimar Republic; three degrees of separation from Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky; four degrees of separation from Nikolai Ulyanov. And your graduate career was yet to come, adding to the pantheon of your close intellectual forebears….

Nowadays, if it ain’t routine changes rung on one of the two bells of liberalism, it ain’t theory. Occasionally, some fragment of Foucault gets a play. Are you surprised that Obama’s busily trying to recreate the welfare state fast enough so no one notices, or that we’re plopping down into what Marx would have identified as the worst of all possible systems?

Europe is a couple of generations closer than we are to a real left. The critical theorists are hopelessly wrapped around their own fannies confined to dealing with Habermas’ Kantianism, but they still occasionally remember what it’s all supposed to be about. The residual Marxists are wandering around forlornly trying to make sense of themselves in the world of Merkle, Sarcoszy, and Berlusconi, but they still retain a nostalgic sense of loss that some of them can still connect. Here in the US there are no such memories (oh, the odd blog) and no such nostalgia; and more important, not a clue about connection. Sociology was the most obvious academic victim of the cold war. At Brandeis (read “exile from New York”) I was the beneficiary of the death struggle – the end of ideology or the triumph of the will, depending who you talk to. As you said, theory decoupled from practice is meaningless, and by the end of the sixties the decoupling was essentially complete. In its place came the hodgepodge of single issue special interests you’ve talked about so many times.

Sociology, as a discipline, was enslaved to the entitlement system of welfare liberalism. There was no place for the theoretical traditions beyond the bounds of liberal orthodoxy. So the theorists died out, leaving a few semi-alienated misfits behind [including us]….”

Something for everyone here. For another current take on the fate of big critical theory, see Frames/Sing.

Meanwhile, I especially like the idea of a ‘degrees of separation’ analysis of our theoretical influences and trajectories. Anyone else want to join in with that?

Death

John Hope Franklin died the other day. He was a towering figure for whom all praise is too faint.

Professor Susurro has ably covered his inspirational legacy. Then, in a second rich post, Susurro links a discussion we’ve been having about James Baldwin’s iconic status as a marker of team membership to reflections on her disappointment that amid the general outpouring, the historians’ team has not so far stepped up to memorialize Franklin as he deserves. “As I surfed across the historian specific internet highway, I was waiting for the ‘Yay team!’ moment. I expected it. I needed it. And 2 days later… it still has not come.”

I’m sorry for that. But I must live up to my billing as a ‘cranky prof’ in Susurro’s blogroll. And in this as in so many other ways, I am a bad historian. I just don’t do memorials. In fact, I’m not big on special celebratory occasions of any kind – anniversaries, birthdays, holidays. Although I understand their ritual significance as occasions for community-affirming collective effervescence, I think we could choose better ways to do that, starting with mindfulness in all of our beings-together.

I’m especially disturbed by what special occasions tend to say about the intervening time. Relationships we value could be appreciated and affirmed more regularly. There needn’t be anything left over to say to and about each other on some particular occasion. If you like your mom, don’t let Hallmark tell you when to treat her accordingly, right? High-intensity occasions do not make up for routine neglect or worse, and because they’re asked to carry so much of the weight of what could be continuous solidarity they’re almost inevitably disappointing. As a rule of thumb, the more grandiose the occasion, the more weight of relationship it’s being asked to carry and the more prone to collapse under that weight it is. The biggest weddings are never the happiest ones. If you feel unappreciated, one party isn’t going to fix that for long.

Waiting until folks are dead seems to me like an especially perverse way to handle appreciation. They’re dead now, it’s doing them no good; and the good it’s doing us just distracts from any lesson about treating people better in life we might have learned. Fortunately, John Hope Franklin got loads and loads of appreciation while he was alive, including a lovely building at Duke named after him at which I’ve been honored to attend several conferences. Monumental architecture aside, I imagine he found some satisfaction in the work itself. And his legacy going forward will be people doing work he would have admired; but those people deserve to be appreciated for that work in their own right, not as mere means to the end of his fame.

I’m also dubious about using death and other special occasions for team affirmation or team building. I’m pretty well in touch with my feelings and they’re generally mixed. Individuals and communities are complex things, each with its admirable and deplorable qualities. For both those reasons I’m not a joiner, and in general I think we’d all be better off with a little less joining. Again, mindful being-together is my standard. Therefore, being drafted into performances of unqualified affirmation feels like emotional blackmail to me, the ‘dead vole‘ situation par excellence. Making others feel your emotions along with you or for you is a form of tyranny, as feminists like Arlie Hochschild have shown.

An unusual example from around here may illustrate. From time to time mortuary signs show up by the side of the road asking all who pass to “slow down – death in family.” I imagine grief-stricken aunts and cousins stumbling around in a stupor, wandering into the road in transports of woe. For this I would slow down – no sense compounding the family’s loss by waffling poor old Uncle Chester. But realistically this is not what’s meant. The idea, I think, is that for a moment we are meant to share the family’s distress, join their team and express our solidarity by a brief sacrifice of our convenience.

What’s the problem? Even if one is not clear on whether the deceased or the bereaved in question are people one might have personally liked, playing along for a second is an ordinary kindness. Not even much of a sacrifice all in all, even if one believes sacrifice is a regressive, destructive model of sociability. And although we have no trouble seeing how badly teams/clans/gangs distort ordinary kindness when they are activities, faiths, genders, races, classes, nations not our own, surely these more contingent enlistments do not threaten such systematic troubles. It might even be healthy to extend our concern to unknowns in these meaningful little ways.

I’m on board with the importance of each life and the integrity of each feeling. It’s on precisely this ground that I think it’s rude at best to enlist others in these situations. As an outsider to the immediate circle of concern, I can’t figure out why I’m supposed to care more about this dead guy right here than that one over there. Why is the local woe more deserving of my solidarity than that of similarly bereaved worldwide? What makes John Hope Franklin’s life more fundamentally worthy of celebration than an Ethiopian peasant who died at the same moment? That he was a historian? It’s really just an accident of proximity, or of selective attention. Each and every instance of life and loss is just as special, and just as not special, from the very perspective that asks us to take the pain of others seriously. That’s all others, not just the ones we have affinities for or who did stuff we think is cool, let alone the ones with aggressive recruiting strategies.

Well, pragmatically a state of permanent woe for all the world’s losses is a non-starter, although Johnnie Cash made a nice career out of it. In practice there’s got to be a threshold of active concern where you say, my sympathies but life is going to go on over here. And each of us has to decide where that is, otherwise our sympathies can be leveraged against us, in each instance with equal moral force, to pull us into the vortex.

I’m not willing to withdraw my moral imagination from the fundamental equivalence of human life and feeling, and therefore I’m not willing to have my emotions dragooned into armies bent on colonizing the sympathetic commons. I acknowledge our duty of mutual kindness, and note that it is kind not to make demands on the kindness of others. For each dead person there will be a circle of immediately concerned others for whom that death will hold special meaning, for whatever reason, and we must let that be enough for us.

When someone’s grieving is not the best time to say these things. But someone’s always grieving. So maybe these things should just go unsaid. For better or worse that’s not my style, so I’m going to click ‘publish’ now and take my lumps.

25 writers

A while ago Profacero tagged me for the 25 writers meme, to list 25 writers who have been influential to me. I’ve been interested to read the lists I’ve seen, and if nothing else it’s a good advertisement for worthy authors. Like Cero I’m just going to crank out a list here without agonizing over it, and like Lumpenprof I’m just going to send a shoutout tag to anyone who wants to play. I guess the usual rule to link back here applies. In no particular order:

Lewis Carroll – Words at play.
Thomas Pynchon – Turns tragedy into farce, finds the humor in paranoia, captures the reciprocal absurdity of order and disorder.
Ursula K. LeGuin – Always so hopeful and encouraging about what we are and can become, yet without a trace of sentimentality or self-deception.
Octavia Butler – A feast for the imagination. Doesn’t let anything about what it means to be human sit still.
Erving Goffman – An evil genius. Manages to show how full of shit we are about all of it without ever descending to crass judgment like I just did.
Simone de Beauvoir – The best nietzschean of the existentialists, she spun his misogynism into the foundational text of a blisteringly anti-feminine humanism that’s still two steps ahead of the zeitgeist.
Albert Camus – When I come to conclusions without coming to conclusions, Camus is probably to blame.
Karl Marx – Maybe not a good influence, but if you want to know where my critical style comes from, this is a big part of it.
Antonio Gramsci – He said he wanted to write a long synthesis, but why? In the Prison Notebooks he covered just about everything and managed to pack more thinking into short commentaries than most people get into whole books. Today he’d be a master blogger.
Emile Durkheim – Poured philosophy into sociology without spilling a drop.
Max Weber – One of those where you can practically see the forehead bulging while he tries to say everything – everything. No wonder he had a nervous breakdown, but he recovered nicely.
George Herbert Mead – Mostly he liked to teach. His published work consisted entirely of short, highly distilled gems of philosophized self-reflection. Another master blogger before his time.
Chuck Dyke – Dad’s writing is punchy, combative and rich with allusion. If you’re willing to play rough it’s a great workout. The other key source of my critical style.
Bassett Ferguson – My grandpa loved wordplay and used language reverently, an interesting and difficult combination.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Consistently devastating, with a well-concealed tender heart. Another rough workout.
Kwame Anthony Appiah – Calls bullshit on destructive simplifications and shows how to get beyond them without hurting feelings or breaking a sweat. Class act.
Stuart Hall – Bridged Gramsci and critical race studies for me at an important time in my awakening from the dogmatic slumbers of eurocentricity. Elegantly evokes the perils of identity, its contingency and situatedness, without a touch of that genre’s usual melodrama.
Jorge Luis Borges – There’s always another way to look at things, and it usually shows up somewhere in Borges.
Kurt Vonnegut – For gentle, humane irony and the best in nonpartisan bullshit detection.
Michel Foucault – No one better for getting under the hood of power relations and truth claims.
Ludwig Wittgenstein – Late Wittgenstein is so illuminating about how language works to create and dissolve problems. An essential shot of humility any time words seduce me into thinking I’ve got stuff figured out.
Paul Watzlawick – The master of reframing, he never saw a problem he didn’t think could be dissolved, more often than not with humor and a sense of the absurd.
Anne Fadiman – Fadiman stands in for any number of excellent ethnographers who have shown me again and again how to keep after the understanding project without getting sidetracked into the judgment project. It’s a hard lesson I must constantly refresh, so I return to work like her The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down as often as I can.
Bruno Latour – Never, ever lets thinking get lazy. I’ve read We Have Never Been Modern at least three times and each time it’s like stepping into a smartening machine. If only the effect would last.
Pierre Bourdieu – I’ve put Bourdieu last because in some sense he and his workshop are my omega influences, setting the standard of adequate investigation and analysis so high as to virtually silence me. Plenty of people hate him for it, which is one way to cope I suppose. There’s shooting from the hip of various kinds, which I can do, and then there’s this, which I can’t.

A little bit of bad sounds good to – someone

Between wrapping up one search and starting another, teaching, picking at a theory-packed dissertation I’m quite enjoying, and eyeballing a stack of papers on agency to grade, I haven’t had much headspace for a full post. So this is more by way of a gesture than a completed thought, but I guess that’s what blogging is for.

I’m reading one of these agency papers, a good one which the author sets up to be an analysis of Adam Smith’s contribution to the awakening of individual independence in that fateful 1776 period. Logically enough there’s a scene-setting paragraph about the American revolution, Declaration of Independence, new world for the Brits, yadda yadda. The problem is that the intro paragraph says nothing about this context and it’s just launched into without any segue, so I think I’m going to be reading about laissez-faire and all of a sudden I’m reading about taxation without representation.

A step has been skipped. But then as if to retrace it, the author circles back and launches into a metaphor about seeds of agency watered by revolutions and technological advances and new economic theories and now we’ve got a giant plant of personal agency for the British people. Wow – but it doesn’t actually fix the setup and sequencing problem.

Now the thing is, I can easily imagine a colleague who would be so delighted by the flight of metaphorical fancy as to give a pass on the structural problem. And of course I know that the students receive a variety of instruction on how to write papers, some of it contradictory and much of it looking to them like the personal taste of particular professors. We pick our battles and we have our preferences. So is there a sense in which the plant metaphor is actually a good gambit and I’m just being narrowminded about wanting a more literal exposition?

I don’t think so. I’ve assigned this as an analytical essay and that’s what I’m teaching. There are certain readers for whom literary considerations will trump expository ones, and in some contexts that’s defensible. There are many others for whom it won’t, also for good reason. On the other hand, there are few or no competent readers who will fail to appreciate an accomplished analytical exposition. The standards are transitive one way but not the other.

I think it’s a good idea to teach reasons, not rules or tastes. So for the reason that the standards of sequenced expository analysis are transitive whereas tastes in metaphors are not, I’m going to call a foul on this particular move and press forward boldly with teaching a kind of writing that will be recognized as good by all but the most narrowly idiosyncratic reader.

Teaching (social) theory

A series of posts at scatterplot about how to teach sociological theory have been helping me bring together a passle of observations collected lo these many years about the place of theory in sociological practice. Sociology is a richly theorized discipline, with great scope and diversity and some of the best achievements of the human mind over the last several hundred years at its disposal to make sense of our doins at various levels, from various perspectives, and with various agendas. But like historians with our similarly (and overlappingly) rich conceptual resources, sociologists are quite commonly functionally unfamiliar with the tools of their trade. In practice the craft of sociology, like history, is regularly done as if there was one clear and correct way of understanding the world. That so much good work is done in such an artificially impoverished conceptual environment is a definite testimony to the value of pragmatic closure and the efficacy of distributed networks.

In his post “how would (do) you teach theory,” Shakha smartly distinguishes theory as “a process that every project engages in” from “a ‘classic’ Marx, Weber, Durkheim course with a few moderns thrown in… [that] makes theory seem like a subfield of sociology (or intellectual history).” The disciplinary mischief is already embedded in the latter idea that theory can be cordoned off as a separate activity from practice.

I’m not in a position to do a rigorous metasociology, but I do have some anecdotal observations pointing at the general hypothesis that many sociologists would rather eat bark (this particular study might be difficult to get past my Research with Human Subjects committee) or hire an illegal alien than do theory themselves. When I was wandering in the academic wilderness I hooked up as an adjunct with the Sociology department at one of the Cal States. The chair was a pragmatist who had courses to plug faculty asses into and little use for field labels – he just wanted to know what I could cover and since the history of social theory was my bread and butter, I told him all the theory-laden stuff: stratification, gender, popular culture and of course, the theory course. So I taught all of those courses and each was equal parts how to do this and how to think about this, which was apparently an unusual mix. The department’s regular faculty were not lining up to teach these cool courses, which did surprise me a little. Oh well, more for me! as my mom used to say about asparagus when I turned my nose up at it as a kid.

The departmental theorist was in the process of retiring and so in due course, all having gone well, I was invited to teach the two-semester graduate theory sequence. Again there was no competition from the regular faculty. Why became a little clearer when a student from another Cal State an hour or so away showed up for the second seminar. It turned out her department’s regular theory seminar was so narrow, perfunctory and generally hated as a bitter pill that she’d asked around and been told to come up to our joint to check out the new guy who was doing all this cool stuff — like teaching a diverse and living theoretical tradition the students could become actively part of, thinking of theories as useful toolboxes rather than corpses to dissect and memorize, encouraging open inquiry rather than narrow indoctrination, enjoying theory and making it enjoyable. Craziness!

When the permanent theory position came open I was invited to apply and made it into the final three with two other candidates whose degrees in Sociology were obviously superior to mine in History, but who were generalists with little detectable record or vocation as theorists. I was selected by the committee and confirmed by a large majority of the faculty; then, in an intriguing imbroglio that made the CHE, the search was cancelled by the Dean and I bumped over full-time to the Human Development department where I had also been adjuncting (the theory search was joint with HD). While there I applied for several other positions seeking a theorist nationwide, and made a couple more short lists. If I’d kept at it I’d probably be in a Sociology department by now.

Well, I think I’m pretty schmart and at that time I was hot with current pertinent teaching experience and research plans. But still, for a guy out of field like me to be in play past the first cut says something about what kind of meat is on the hoof in Socioland. At scatterplot Andy Perrin notes that UNC, a major research and graduate program, has only recently and minimally populated its graduate theory offerings. Despite a fine faculty presumably with some theoretical savvy, one course covers everything – in contrast at UCSD I took standalone seminars on Durkheim and Weber – but this must hardly be unusual if the pickins are so slim on the job market.

Where all the theorists at? It may well be that a dedicated theorist and theory programme is a bit of a luxury, or perhaps even a privilege. This is true in History as well. Another related part of the problem is probably the dismissive association of Sociology’s classical theories with Dead White Men, which is true and understandable but shortsighted. Standpoint and postmodern successor theories are exciting but can seem to carve up the theoretical landscape into a confusing dispersion. Back in the workshops part of the problem is the predominance of plug-and-play microsociological research programmes and the easy availability of big datasets for conventional quantitative crunching. And part is the intuition, emphatically maintained by Pierre Bourdieu for one, that theory divorced from practice is a monstrosity. Finally, as a commenter notes at scatterplot, each sub-area of sociology has its own theoretical approaches, so the big syntheses are not always directly pertinent.

Ideally, then, theory would be taught not (only) as standalone classes but as tools or orientations within every single class in the curriculum, by whole departments of sociologists who have become sophisticated theorist-practitioners in the open quest for knowledge. Marx, Weber and Durkheim would come up in the flow because they help to understand how some stuff works and/or offer models of how to figure stuff out, not merely because they’re founding fathers.

But as you know, Bob, in practice this is not necessarily what happens, so we’re probably stuck with standalone theory seminars taught only exceptionally by someone with a vocation for theory, which dumps us right back into the situation my student at Cal State was in, which means another generation of theory-averse sociologists. But that’s a shame, because having a good theory means having some feel for why things happen as they do. In principle, people well-trained in Sociology and therefore well-practiced in the sociological imagination would be unusually difficult to surprise and baffle with the ordinary businesses of life in society. Even if emotional, moral and ideological responses remain strong, there would be a mediating buffer of understanding, or at least a swift and decisive ability to generate understanding on the fly in a range of robustness beyond folk mystifications, vulgar monocausals and crass ad hominems. How might theory be taught to support this even in the current regime, and to break the cycle of theory abuse?

As usual, I think the answer starts with thinking about what we actually want the class to accomplish and throwing out coverage as a priority. There’s no reason to think that knowing the contents of lotsa theories has much to do with being able to deploy them to answer questions or solve problems – it’s just a bunch of Trivial Pursuit answers. Do we really need people who can repeat Marx’s theory of surplus value or DuBois’ theory of double consciousness but default to ad hominems about greedy capitalists and white privilege when it comes time to explain the financial crisis?

Squack! Iron cage! Iron cage!

Andy is right that some kind of snappy patter about the canonical theorists is good to have at the ASA and cocktail parties, but this can be acquired by a quick spin through Wikipedia or a couple of overview lectures. Otherwise, leave theories as (dead) bodies of ideas to the intellectual historians, as Shakha says. This takes the bitter pill version of the class out of play.

Beyond this silliness, the value of a quick tour is to get students oriented to what resources are available for various kinds of projects and to foreclose narrow cherrypicking. They don’t need to know specifically what Durkheim said about this or that; they need to know the general contours of his work so they know to go to him when durkheimy questions come up. Then, I think a good pedagogical trick to cement the connection is to get right down to cases and make durkheimy questions come up. Here Andy’s problems approach looks good: if we’re interested in the structure/agency problem for example, Durkheim has lots to offer throughout his oeuvre. So to get specific we might want to go to Durkheim on moral order, social solidarity and collective effervescence if we’re trying to make sense of group behavior and ritual at college basketball games or self-segregated cafeteria seating. But then the next trick would be to process the same case through, say, Marx, Goffman, Foucault, Butler, Weeks and hooks to show what resources each theory brings and what understandings it enables.

Because the students need to know how to do this once the class is over, it’s of course incredibly important for them to do it in the class. Doing is a different practice than absorbing and repeating. Demonstrations and lectures simply confirm that theory is something mysterious and alien, the segregated province of unfathomable geniuses or bizarre geeks. For this reason I find it helpful to start out with the notion of default theories (roughly, what Gramsci called ‘common sense’) as a way to recruit students to the idea that theorizing is something we all do, and that it might be better to do it more intentionally and reflectively. It can be especially valuable in this respect to do lots of brainstorming theory-construction in class, using guided discussion to dope out how theories are built and tested. Plugging in existing theories can then be a supplement to a more fundamental pedagogy of theory construction, and particular students can be delegated to do further reading and bring it back to the class for report and recursive elaboration.

Ultimately there’s no substitute for careful study and understanding of whole theory-complexes. Theories are more than tools or lenses; at their best they express comprehensive understandings of the world that can’t be disarticulated without violence or boiled down to their usefulness for this and that. This kind of understanding takes devoted study over many years. Attempting to simulate that in one or two short semesters is neither necessary nor productive.

“That’s just stupid-butt, and everybody knows it.”

This is the shorter version of what Rachel told me when she read the ideology, pt. 2 post on how to write and place academic articles. She kind of went on a stomp about how Graham’s advice looked pretty good to her and maybe if I followed it rather than picking at it, I’d get more of my smartness out into the world; which she is kind and partisan enough to think of as an unqualified good.

We talked quite a lot about the world of art, which is also full of crap pumped out on the theory that getting stuff out there is the way to get stuff out there. Rachel doesn’t like looking at buckets of landscapes in lurid purple acrylic any more than the next guy. She especially doesn’t like the awkward polite conversations with those artists when they want to go on about how great their stuff is. But she noted that there’s a large market for bad landscapes, and that it’s part of what enables a smaller market for good art. She talked about the status dynamics of connoisseurship, which is always dependent on a contrast space in which what’s good becomes evidently so only in relation to what’s bad. She was partly mollified on these points by my second post in the series.

Gamely trying to wiggle me into shape, Rachel pointed out that good stuff doesn’t get done unless you’re doing stuff in the first place, to which I had no good reply. She agreed with Graham that what he calls ‘alibis’ and we call ‘getting in your own way’ are always available in paralyzingly high quality standards. I agreed from ample personal experience, but objected that there’s no reason to believe in an alchemy where a recipe for crap suddenly produces a gourmet delight, nor that the world is a better place with more crap in it. She talked about painting landscapes as part of a process to master the craft. I pointed out that artists who are going to be good later very quickly stop painting ‘just’ landscapes; their mastery of the form involves questioning and putting twists on it right from the start. She had to agree with this.

Granting finally that Graham was offering a paint-by-numbers for philosophical landscapes, Rachel pondered the propriety and utility of saying so. She’s polite about other artists’ landscapes as a matter of professional and human courtesy. I pointed out that Graham was not just practicing a style, he was offering to teach it to others. If the style is objectionable, all the more so its propagation. Rachel admitted that she knows some very bad artists who are quite successful teachers, to the general detriment. But she doubted that their eager students would have received a better instruction successfully and supposed that talent will eventually find its outlet.

Continuing on the theme of critique, its utility and grounds, Rachel noted that no one is so reviled in the art world as an art critic (warning: incredibly tasteless Kliban cartoon) who can’t actually do art. She wanted to distinguish doers from thinkers about doing. I pointed out that like Graham, what I do is think, so if thinking doesn’t count as doing we’re both hosed. Nevertheless, I’m vulnerable here since one of my objections to Graham’s paper recipe was that it depended on a kind of ultimately arbitrary and self-referential thinking about thinking about thinking, which means all I’m doing is thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking.

Chastened but not defeated, I held out for the utility and propriety of critique even in such rarified atmosphere, on the grounds that if standards are available at all, less bad is good. I suggested that there are four main ways of identifying and publicizing the good, the first two involving critique (understanding a full critique to include both criticism and appreciation, as I learned from Marx and think was the case in my post): critique of others’ methods; critique of others’ content and conclusions; pointing at something better; doing something better. And while I grant that the latter two are by far the best, they’re not always immediately available or well-targeted. Marx never did finish Capital.

Rachel and I didn’t exactly agree in the end; she still thinks I should be writing and publishing more, by any means necessary. Which would be fine with me, I’m just not drawn to pumping out crap and fortunately I don’t have to. But writing these posts did cause a stimulating discussion with a delightful smartie, not to mention the great online commentary; so for me, that purpose at least has been well served.

Correlation(ism)

Is this helpful?

Shopping at the black box store

Continuing the topic of the last post on how to write and place an article: Even though Graham’s original post bugged me when I first read it, and I’d been chewing on it in the back of my mind ever since, it still took writing, finishing and posting my response, then having it in mind while I read and wrote some other things, for me to figure out what was bugging me. It’s this: Graham is right about all of it; and I wish he wasn’t.

Graham’s post describes the world of publication in the nth turning of the post-Gutenberg/Martin Luther revolution. Just as the Pope said, easy publication combined with freedom of individual conscience was a recipe for disintegration, a long slide into personal idiosyncracy and facile partisanship. A billion infallible Popes with a billion personal Jesuses. (I’m collapsing a complex and contradictory history. Nor was there a prior golden age of intellectual harmony – see Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms.) And Graham says, jump on in! I’m ventilating my personal take on stuff every chance I get, and so can you!

Well that’s nice, and it certainly makes for a lively variety of intellectual products to choose from. Not that it’s obvious why we would read any of them, since our own opinions are sovereign; but it’s fun to have other kids in the sandbox with us and to pick at our small differences. No surprise that the reading culture consists largely of self-confirmation and superficial rejection. You can write like this all you want: nobody’s going to read you if you don’t serve some purpose of momentary affirmation or strategic demonization. In fact you’ll get read that way whether that’s how you write or not.

Graham’s a very smart man. He understands this all the way, and has drawn the pragmatically right conclusions. He has no illusions that he’s writing for a universal audience — he’s part of a community of like minds, people who have been trained to request his brand by name at the supermarket of ideas; anything beyond that is reception serendipitity, an impulse buy. He doesn’t waste time with unsympathetic readers or ones whose premises are distant enough to require significant labors of translation. He’s selling toasters, if you want lampshades that’s not his department.

In his new book (I’m holding out for the final version, this pre-pub snippet is courtesy of Frames/Sing) Graham calls the object-products of our intellection “black boxes,” as I understand it not just in reference to a culture of thin and idiosyncratic reading but to a more final sealing and receding of objects from each other:

Black boxes face two primary and opposite dangers: too much attention from other actants, or too little. When a black box receives too little attention, it is simply ignored. This is actually the fate of most of the objects in the world. We are surrounded by trillions of actants at any given moment, and overlook the vast majority of useless flies and beetles that swarm amidst our more treasured objects. Most patents are for inventions that never catch on in the marketplace, or are never even built. Most novels and scholarly articles go entirely unread: not criticized, but simply overlooked. Black boxes go nowhere if they fail to become obligatory points of passage for other entities. The second danger for black boxes is the opposite one—that of gaining too much interest in the form of skepticism and scrutiny. (Prince of Networks, unpublished PDF, 45)

This is an interesting metaphor to me, because in my dissertation I used it to characterize marxist approaches to revolutionary consciousness and suggested that its darkness contributed to enabling some pretty serious errors and atrocities. Perhaps a more transparent and reflective sort of thinking (not to mention a more glassy set of metaphors) might have contributed to a more humane revolutionary practice?

There’s nothing like gulags or cultural revolutions at stake in Graham’s work, but he accepts as a fact things about how we think and relate to each other I’d prefer to keep problematic. More to the point here, Graham identifies the central dilemma of highly-enabled personal expression: when everyone gets their say on whatever grounds they happen upon (which are then hidden inside a black box), the market is flooded with product and reception becomes a permanent clearance sale.

Of course we can let the market take care of this. Crap will find its pricepoint. But I can’t help thinking about the anxiety created by the inflation of publication requirements for academic employment in this environment (publish or perish), or the time, money and headspace I’ve wasted reading well-marketed crap pumped into the void of substantive standards described by Graham in his post. Don’t be anxious, he says, you can just pump out some crap! Which responds kindly to the first problem at the expense of the second.

I do think Graham describes a kind of occasional writing that’s much better suited to the blog medium than to formal publication. There should be a place for flapping our gums. But somewhere between that and brutal exclusionary dogmatism there has to be a place for thorough work according to standards; standards with some power to enforce quality even at the expense of quantity, and therefore standards that have some power to compel serious people’s attention, so that their products “become obligatory points of passage for other entities.”

I note in posting that kvond has just now made some similar points in a comment on the last post.