NP hit me with this question in a game of blog tag. NP asks,
How do you understand the relation of your own political research/writing/whatever to political practice; whether you view it as a kind of political practice itself; and to what extent do you view the separation (assuming there is a separation) between your work and political struggle to be problematic?
I feel like I’ve blogged on this before to a tiresome degree, so NP asking me is nice in that maybe I’m not as repetitive as I think I am. To me the relationship is not political or collective, in the sense that I don’t see my work in university as something which matters in the same way (according to the same criteria) as my political work. The relationship to me is personal and private, which is not to say individual - my love of bad british comedy is personal but shared, ditto the themes in my academic work. That is, to my I work on things in my academic work due largely to the experiences, questions, and values which drive and result from my political work.
I don’t view my academic work as a political practice and I don’t view the relationship between my work and my politics as problematic. I should say, by ‘academic work’ I mostly mean my research and writing. I also teach. I’d say the same of that work too. I mean, I think the values which make me do the political work I do inform my teaching just as I said they inform my writing and research. For instance, I work at a university with a lot of students who work long hours and who come from less privileged backgrounds. I work hard to teach them well - to take them seriously, to push them intellectually, and so on, and they are populations which our society has not slotted into the ‘take these people seriously’ and ‘encourage the intellectual lives of these people’ tracks. And I work to not give them bad grades because the grades have an economic impact (their loans, their scholarships, the massive amount they pay per credit). I don’t see that as political, though. I see this as me doing a good job at the parts of my job that I think are worth doing. I don’t think this is much different than what nurses and electricians with similar values to me would do in their jobs. I see my political work as unpaid - and necessarily so, because I think the moments when people get paid to do real and important political work are few and far between, and the pay is as likely to be a mechanism for undermining as for facilitating the work (this is not a claim to my own political work being ‘real and important,’ just so that’s clear).
I’ll also say that in my experience, parts of the humanities run on a claim to the political nature of scholarship. This is an enabling ideology of those parts of the humanities, and is part of what they sell (along the lines of university presses selling books on Marx). The humanities and universities are not unique here - other industries do this too, like so-called nonprofit social justice organizations. In these parts of the humanities, I think the claim to the political nature of the endeavor has several problematic qualities - among them: it enables really problematic behavior (”we’re doing it for the cause, we have to fire you/make you work harder/cut your funding” etc as well as behaviors typical of academics and other professions such as a feeling of superiority and exceptionalness), it serves as a sort of consciense wage which costs the employer very little while offsetting other aspects of the job such as low pay and long hours, it allows a sort of comfort that insulates people from pressing political issues, and it cheapens other issues.
The above paragraph is in response to Rob’s question to NP in the comments over at hers. He asks
how is it that the above question becomes not just an obvious, not just an apparently important, but a seemingly lethal question to ask of “theory” or of academic practice more generally? (…) [T]he regularity of the statement, as it were, may itself warrant investigation…
That is, I would say that the question “how is this political?” is motivated by a claim - often not made clearly and with evidence but more along the lines of a posture and a gesture - of basically “this is political.” At least for me.
Two qualifiers.
One, this is in now way an attack on theory. It’s an attack on political claims about/on behalf of theory. I love philosophy. I love Schelling. I love Quine. I love Rorty. Not for their political content, but for the sheer joy of the stuff. (Ditto my love of a lot of music and fiction and food.) Political-ness is not the only value, by far.
Second, because I expect someone will say something like this - I’m fine with the notion that there are many types of politics, ways of being political. I will say, however, that a sort of omni-politicization (a la “everything is political!” or that we can always ask about any X “what are the politics of X?”, such that for any X there is some Y which is “the politics of X”) is flattening and trivializing. At a minimum, the different meanings of ‘politics’ in each context should be treated carefully rather than all just being one thing called politics. (My sense is that ‘political’ is often used as an honorific, which is fine but it has not more to do with political as a substantive term than my use of ‘radical’ as an adjective meaning ‘really good’ has to do with radical in the political sense.) This is not to say that new uses of terms should not be invented, but I feel the onus is on the inventor of a new term to be careful to make distinctions here, given the moral stakes involved.
As a parallel, I feel the same way about metaphors of violence - “language is violence,” for instance. Fine, but the violence of the signifier is a different mode of violence than the violence of getting fired (which is different from that of getting pistol whipped), and the difference between these modes has moral relevance. JPool said something similar in the discussion here as an objection to metaphorical uses of words like slavery and rape. (Jpool is right and I need to get back to her/him after I have more time to think about the issues s/he raises.)
All of this is course contextual. There is no a-contextual (non)politics of academic work. That said, I would much rather err on the side of humility and assume the nonpolitical unimportance of my work - if I’m wrong then I’m wrongfully modest and my work has a political importance, whereas if I assume my work has a political importance and I’m wrong then my work is useless and I’m arrogant.
EDIT:
I also want to add that I get tense in this sort of conversation when it happens in person, because I’ve had a number of experiences where academic people make claims about what is needed politically and suggest that their role is linked to their role as an academic, that is, that their political function is the same as or analogous to the role that they play in society as an academic — providing concepts, asking important questions, etc. I’m not convinced that’s the case, in that I feel like often those conversations are with people who just don’t know about a lot of important movement/political/organizational stuff that’s going on in the world (understandably - that sort of knowledge is only rewarded in an academic context in discipline-specific ways, for the rest of us it’s not part of our jobs and the job makes it hard to acquire that knowledge because the job takes up so much mental energy and time), and related to this I feel like it’s easy to fall into an implied division of labor: we academics will be the brains - or at least the reflective and theorizing part of the brains - of movements/organizations. Maybe, but there’s also a lot of thought and reflection and writing that goes on outside the academy which is as high or higher caliber as stuff done in the academy. Or rather, inside/outside the academy is not a mark of quality of intellectual work. There’s was a discussion of this at Long Sunday a while back, I said most of what I think on this in the comments there.
*
Tagging:
Tzuchien on his academic work in relation to politics, Mike and Todd on their intellectual work (theoretical for both and for Mike also historical) outside of the university and how that connects to politics, and Adam on both his academic and extra-academic work in relation to politics. I’d like to hear Ericco’s thoughts on this as well.
I don’t know Nate… Your description of how you approach your work and the decisions you make in being a teacher sound very political to me. I can imagine someone with different politics making very different decisions. I don’t see how you can characterize the fact that you identify your students as coming from a less than privileged background and teaching them in a particular way as anything less than political.
Comment by Colin Bossen — May 17, 2008 @ 9:17 pm
Fair point Colin (and I’m sorry I’ve been so crap at keeping in touch, my life will be easing up a bit in the next few weeks, then I want to catch up w/ you); I guess I’m using the term political in a very narrow sense. I would say that my work is ethical, value-laden, and very important to me. But I don’t do it for the political outcomes it may have for me. I do it for love of intellectual conversations, and for love of being part of others’ intellectual development. Along these lines, I could imagine an early literacy program or other social service programs which provide needed things to under-privileged populations (intellectual stuff is a human need too) being considered political in a sense. I wouldn’t use the term that way myself, though. Maybe what I should say is that I don’t think this has ties to _my_ politics, to radical politics aimed at building working class organization. I think the stuff I do for a living is fully compatible with a capitalist society. I’d say the same of nursing and end of life care and child care and many other things. That’s not at all to say those things are not valuable, far from it, and many people who do that sort of work also think about things like serving underprivileged populations and so forth, and they should and that’s a good thing, but it’s not what I mean by political. I’d even go so far as to say that in some contexts that can be political if there’s an organized movement to alter the balance of power around these things. I’d say that my concerns over teaching and attempts at teaching in certain ways could be political too if they were part of a collective and organized effort that tried to change institutional power relations. (I have mixed feelings on the status of a group or network that worked only to coordinate contents of teaching, I’m not sure what I’d think about that.) I think part of why I have a strong reaction to this theme is that there’s a way in which the category ‘political’ gets individualized - the way that I as one person act in front of a room full of students, or worse yet what I as one person write for my academic work, is in some way political on its own without a consideration of the context in terms of being part of some deliberately acting collective, and without sufficient attention to institutional matters (within universities, in the education industry, in society more broadly, etc). I think there’s a way that this “I am doing something political on my own” thing lines up with aspects of a common academic (and other professionals’) self-understanding of being a unique individual - uniquely unique, more unique than others).
To be really simplistic, I want to say that something political must involve two or more people acting in concert.
gotta run, my ride’s here.
mad love,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 18, 2008 @ 9:10 am
Nate if we use your definition almost anything can become political–from making love to engaging in consumer transaction to playing in a string quartet. Maybe all of things are political but I would push to come up with a narrower definition.
Comment by Colin Bossen — May 20, 2008 @ 10:08 am
I wasn’t being clear: I also want a narrower definition than that.
What I meant is that there’s an individual quality to academic work - my research, my writing, my conceptual innovation, etc - which is part of it’s not being political. Likewise with teaching - if what I’m doing is changing how I act, just me alone in front of my students, then that’s not a political thing (despite the fact that teaching involves a relationship with others). Political to my mind means a collective effort to alter power relations in society. So, a group of people deciding to teach in some way, that may get closer to political.
Comment by Nate — May 20, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
testing
Comment by Adam W. — May 24, 2008 @ 3:52 pm
I am sorry Nate but I am still not buying it. Your academic work orders how you and others, your students and your peers, shape and interpret reality. Whether you like it or not I think anything that occurs in a classroom either alters or reinforces power structures in our society. If that is true, I fail to see how that is not an inherently political act. You might not approach it as part of your political work but that does not alter the fact that what you are doing has political implications.
Comment by Colin — May 26, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
hey nate,
Great topic you got here. Don’t feel like I have time to read through your discussions of radicalness in prior posts just now. But I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately. I think, on politics, we have to distinguish between “politics” as a fluctuating label/sign/conceptual category, “politics” as a differentiated sphere of social action in our society (coupled to governmental organization, state power, legitimate use of violence, etc), and “politics” in the sense of any kind of divergence from social reproduction. Or as you put this last one more narrowly, in the sense of collective change in power relations. It seems to me that all three of these can correctly be called politics and deserve pretty separate analysis. Part of what happens in academia, as we’ve all observed, is that the word ‘politics’ can drift and get applied to all sorts of different things, become a term of endearment or dismissal, a vague synonym for significance or some kind of value, a medium for performances of distinction — ‘politics’ as a term is victim to all kinds of peculiar semiotic dynamics. And when one academic asks another ‘is your work political?’ we have to ask what kind of sign ‘politics’ has become in that context. “Politics” as an appelation of virtue may be relatively distantly related to the political sphere or to collective social change.
That said, I don’t think that ‘politics’ is only a shifting signifier for distinction-making in academic contexts. For one thing, I’d argue that academia has become *constitutive* of the political sphere in certain respects: just think of the modern cult of expertise, of the ‘knowledge society’ discourse which fantasizes that universities and k-production have become central to capitalist production, of those funny consultations when journalists call up academics for “informed opinions,” of the think tanks that serve political purposes (my univ. just started the Milton Friedman Institute), of the role of elite universities in class reproduction and the making of state functionaries, of the role of students in political upheavals in the 20th century (eg 1968). Or for another example, consider Paul Wolfowitz: his politics are evidently products of his training at Cornell and U of Chicago. So it seems to me that the university institution is a major mediating site of politics now.
Also and more specifically, *some* academic research has obvious political implications (if they’re mainstream they can be called “policy” implications!). That’s not always a fantasy: just think of economics or bio sciences and their major relevance to contemporary politics! It seems to me that most fields probably have *some* politically relevant research topics, and we ought to prioritize those over other research topics that are merely personally attractive. Of course academics *can* choose to do work with no political relevance and are free to delude themselves about the significance of their work; and some fields have a disproportionate share of politically relevant research topics (better in sociology, worse in literary criticism… George Lakoff comes to mind as someone who found a politically relevant research topic in linguistics, of all places). It seems to me that the question shouldn’t be “is academic work political?” but “how is political significance distributed across and related to academic work?” and, as a subsidiary question, “what criteria should we use to choose our research projects?” Needless to say, even a highly politically relevant topic still requires publicity, translation for lay audiences, and so on, but that mediating work is far from impossible. Maybe my question for you should be, how do you choose your research project?
About teaching — again I think the question isn’t whether teaching is political but rather in what social circumstances can teaching become political. Now, given that those circumstances seem to be largely absent today I think it’s fair to say that teaching is a generally apolitical activity now (leaving aside that the maintenance of the status quo requires political struggle on the part of elites… but those aren’t our political battles). Relatedly, one has to ask when politicizing teaching would even be desirable (politically or otherwise. I quite take your point that ‘politics’ isn’t the only value or even always the highest value). Although it’s also difficult to politicize teaching insofar as the social form often ends up in contradiction to the pedagogical content.
In provisional conclusion — it seems to me that rather than trying to be too philosophical about our personal situations it might aid our analysis here to try to analyze the politics of the university and of different academic disciplines in a more comparative, global frame. The sensation of being apolitical may only be the corollary, or even the product, of intense politicization in some other academic context, no?
Comment by eli — May 26, 2008 @ 5:28 pm
hi Colin, Eli,
Thanks for keeping the conversational ball rolling.
Colin - I’ll take your point but I think we may be talking past each other. Teaching (and perhaps academic research) is political in a way analogous to how consumer choices are political. They impact the rest of the world and so on. But in so far as those remain at the level of individual ethical decisions then I think they will have little efficacy. I mean, a hypothetical along the lines of “maybe you’ll change someone” is always possible, and yeah definitely I sure hope so, but … let me put it this way: let’s say we get all our good comrades together in a room and we look at global capitalism and the various resistances to it that exist. To look at that and say “you know what would make a difference? getting academic jobs, that would be super useful to building the new within the shell of the old” would be naive at best, and probably self-serving. To use your terms, I agree that my conversations at my job order how I and others
my students and my peers, shape and interpret reality. But this happens lots of places, not just in the classroom, and this strikes me as an overly broad definition for ‘political.’ I’ll go along with you that “anything that occurs in a classroom either alters or reinforces power structures in our society” but this seems to me to be true of nearly any other location in society as well, which threatens to expand ‘political’ to a vanishing point such that me doing my job as a teacher, me doing my job as a researcher, me doing the stuff I consider my (objectively rather minor) political work, and the work of say Subcomandante Marcos are all political without any differentiation.
Eli -
No need to read all my old posts, they’re repetitive and dull. I take your point about the implication of research with structures of power and so on, that’s true and important. I’ll concede the point that in an important sense then there’s a politics to all that. I like Jacques Ranciere’s distinction between politics and police, the latter being the top-down stuff, the management of lives and all that, with politics being the disruption of management and (though R might not say so) the elaboration of autonomous forms of life against the structures of power-over. I recognize that it’s not fair to expect everyone to use the terms as I do (though there’s an interesting etymological link between policy and police, which make Ranciere more useful here I think, since you noted the policy implications of some work), but I think something like this is implied in the framing question: doing academic work as a political practice and the connection of that work to struggles. To echo what I’ve said already, I think the idea that academics bring something particularly important to the table politically is highly suspect and probably self-serving. That’s not to say that politicized scholarship shouldn’t happen, but that we should be honest about what uses it has and doesn’t have. To me, the fact that I really like the stuff is justification enough. At the same time, the idea that most scholarship which is treated as political makes some important contribution to advancing the class struggle beyond very specific institutional contexts within the university seems just plain silly to me. Like say we put on an academic conference on interpretations of Marx. How would that be political act with effects for people other than ourselves or people with jobs like ours? Honestly? That’s not to say we shouldn’t do such things, but let’s not kid ourselves about who those things are good for: they’re good for us and possibly good for our employers depending on where we work. That sort of conference drawing together people from other millieu (sp?) or similar conferences - like Finding Our Roots - http://mayfirst.wordpress.com/ - and RAT - http://www.homemadejam.org/renew/ - are a different matter in that they target different constituencies.
I need to run in a moment, more later. I’ll think more on this ‘modes of politics’ line that’s come up, I think that’s a useful way to reframe and contine this discussion.
Oh yeah - final thing, Eli, on how I choose my research projects… I picked my current academic topic because it’s stuff I’m excited about (women’s history, labor history) and because I think I have a shot at getting a job. A lot of the rest of the intellectual work I do is driven by my wanting to reflect on experiences or questions that have come up for me in my political work due to different experiences and stuff I’ve read (question like, what is the connection between housework and value production?), and by my wanting sources of inspiration like knowledge of previous radical organizations and social movements. On the latter, I’ve found about as much of this from extra-academic sources (like comrades who have been around longer than I have) as I have in academic sources.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 26, 2008 @ 6:25 pm
hey friends,
Back again. So here’s this Marx quote that I like to throw around a lot:
“how grossly Feuerbach is deceiving himself when by virtue of the qualification “common man” he declares himself a communist, transforms the latter into a predicate of “man,” and thereby thinks it possible to change the word “communist,” which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category.”
I’m happy to concede that this quote does not offer a sufficient definition of ‘political’ and that academic work can be political even though it doesn’t meet the criteria for a specific sort of politics involved in that quote. I still want to say that the definition of politics implied in that quote or something like that definition is the most important sort, and that academic work rarely if ever is political in that sort of way. That does not make it not worthwhile, but it means that the standards for saying academic work is worthwhile are other than the communist ones involved in that quote. (I’ve invoked essentially aesthetic standards - I like this, I find that exciting - and personal moral standards - this is what I think is right, etc.) There might also be other political standards for evaluation - such as, does this help get Democrats elected or will this help get good legislation written (neither of which I’m excited about), or does this help AFL and CtW unions win more gains in their corporate campaigns (which I’m more excited about but still is probably not what I have in mind, I recognize that my definition here is quite restrictive and not very well layed out). I would still argue that most academic work, and certainly the academic work that _I_ do and will most likely continue to do, doesn’t have much of a political content in either the sense involved in this quote (which is why I’m involved in communist activities outside of just doing my academic work — if doing academic work in the way that I currently do it and will likely continue to do it was an adequate communist practice then I wouldn’t bother with the other stuff I do, I wish that was the case sometimes as it would save me a lot of time) or in any other substantive sense. Doing the various things I’m supposed to do for my job is not a radical practice or a political practice, except perhaps in the expanded sense in which Colin suggested and if so in that case then I would say it’s political in a bad way: reproducing the prevailing relationships of power in society. (I think everyone who sells their labor power does this to some degree. I think some academics do this even more so, the ones in management I mean - like all people who work in management.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 26, 2008 @ 8:31 pm