Or, engaged scholarship. Following on from the discussion with Eli in the comments here. I don’t think there’s an a priori reason why academic work can’t be useful for important social change. I am just very skeptical about any particular claim about particular work making a real contribution, and even more so about this work making any difference to people outside of universities (or people who work at universities but are not academics). I think the burden of proof is on the people making such claims and the bar is high re: evidence.
A few more thoughts on this.
1. I think being motivated by the same sorts of values that makes one take a radical political perspective is great. It doesn’t make one’s work matter, though, except in the sense of “this matters to me.” I think often claims to radicality are more like a convoluted way for people to say they care about something.
2. I think career advancement for ostentsibly radical scholarship should send up warning signals. Something contributing to one’s own success professionally is not likely to also make a contribution to communism defined as the real movement which abolishes the present order. (Again, maybe, but the burden of proof is on those who claim such a mutual contribution.)
3. Whether or not academic work (or any work) makes a contribution to a movement or organization and what that contribution consists of is to be defined by people other than the producer of the work and who are in that movement or organization. And the perceptions of other movement actors is merely a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for concluding that a work really makes a difference to a movement.
I am particularly skeptical about claims to contributions by academics who do theoretical work (contributions in the form of theoretical work). Specifically regarding theoretical work:
4. Undermining the foundations of something conceptually is not radical on its own. Radicality is contextual. For instance, Marx’s Capital is only radical in the context of movements and organizations and only to the degree that those are themselves genuinely radical. The German Ideology, if it has radical content at all (something I doubt) has/had that content only when it is/was not consigned to a drawer and the gnawing criticism of mice.
5. In a recent review essay Scott McLemee writes of remarks regarding Hardt and Negri’s Empire that many commentators on the success of that book had “a complete disengagement from the actual efforts at thinking and theorizing then under way” within movements. “After all, in normal circumstances, journalists and pundits have no incentive to follow the debates in subterranean intellectual provinces—and the latter, for their part, tend not to send out press releases.” Similarly, people doing what is supposed to be movement-oriented academic work who do not engage with movement voices and display an awareness of the organizations and forms of thought in movements - in the particular movements they’re supposed to be contributing to - should be treated with extra suspicion.
Yes. Good post. Hm. I thought I was liberal establishment but I guess I’m a leftie.
Comment by Professor Zero — December 17, 2008 @ 2:31 am
hey nate,
Well, one thing that comes to mind is that politics and radical politics get conflated a lot in this discussion. Strikes me that the academy is always and everywhere politicized, but in a quite complicated way, because all sorts of different institutional levels have their own political processes - eg, administrative vs. faculty vs. grad student vs. undergrad vs. staff political lives are radically different; some social science faculty are deeply politically involved in Washington and policy formation and policy-oriented research (eg, Obama’s economic advisors); universities are major political forces in their communities; college students may develop political commitments or affiliations that mostly bear fruit after college; there’s serious politics of money and business esp. at the univ. of chicago where the board of trustees is 95% CEOs; etc. All that counts as the political life of academia in my view. Not to mention the individual involvement of academics in broader political contexts or movements (again, I think the vast majority of this involvement would not be radical).
So it seems to me that the zero degree of a discussion of radical scholarship is that the political world, particularly as it works within academic institutions, is deeply differentiated. A corollary of this is that the line between radical and other kinds of politics is not always clear and is probably ideologically motivated. Like, I’m doing academic union stuff here. It’s my main political involvement right now. I have no idea whether it’s radical or not — doesn’t seem that radical to me, involves a bunch of dull meetings, but I know it seems radical to my apathetic colleagues on campus. Second corollary: perceptions of radicality are not only contextual in the sense of changing based on circumstance but also in the sense of changing based on the social position, POV, etc, of the person judging. This is superficially similar to your point (3) but actually what I’m trying to say is that “radical” is a polysemic signifier that means different things to different people. (Sigh… maybe I’m a bit skeptical about the convergence of struggles, among other things.)
The second major thing that comes to mind, implicit in what you’re saying, is that the person and their work are practically and hence politically separable. Like for example, I gather that Sartre was pretty politically involved in various French political issues, but I don’t believe that Critique of Dialectical Reason had much political impact. Conversely, it’s conceivable that people with no real political involvement may write books that have major political significance. Suppose — I don’t know if this is the case but it could be — that Judith Butler doesn’t really do anything politically besides write a bunch of theoretical texts, but that these texts go on to inspire hundreds of queer activists to new forms of subversive gender politics. How does one assess Judith Butler’s engaged scholarship in that case? Or anyone else who claims political involvement?
Corollary to that: what assumptions about political mediation or political immediacy are at work in arguments over radical scholarship? Not that I dispute that there is a lot of political self-delusion among self-styled radical academics, but just because a piece of work doesn’t have a direct, immediate political involvement, does that justify the conclusion that it’s not engaged scholarship? Not necessarily, because it’s hard to assess the indirect, longer-term consequences of a text or of an action (or of an individual). I guess I’m saying, it’s not that the bar for evidence of engaged scholarship should be set high, it’s that the frame of political evaluation should be long-term and holistic (which has the ugly epistemological consequence that you necessarily can’t know whether your scholarship is politically engaged at the moment you’re doing it), and that political expectations should be set low for would-be committed academic work, at least no higher than we would set our expectations for any other political tactic. Most political projects fail one way or another; that doesn’t and shouldn’t inhibit people from having radical political hopes and aspirations, but it may inspire charity in our judgments of unsuccessful tactics.
I mean, I pretty much agree with you that most self-styled radical work doesn’t seem to have immediate radical consequences, and certainly about (1). But the conclusion I’d draw is different from yours. Rather than having an a posteriori but nonetheless rather categorical skepticism about radical scholarship, I think we should criticize it on a case-by-case and tactical basis. And try to avoid over-identifying with our scholarship, since our work’s politics may end up being different from ours as social actors.
sigh… too long for a comment.
Comment by eli — December 17, 2008 @ 11:22 am
hi Eli,
Nice to hear from you. Sorry I haven’t replied to your email re: philosophy and so on, I’ve been swamped and flakey (my students turn in their papers via email so I’m especially bad on email right now).
I’ll take all your qualifiers and caveats, I think you’re right across the board here. That said, I don’t think any of that makes claims to the radical-ness of any particular scholarship all that convincing. Re: your example of Judith Butler for instance, *does* her work inspire hundreds of queer activists? And how many are those out of the larger pool of queer activists, and how many are those out of the pool of Butler readers? I’d guess a small minority re: the first and a tiny minority re: the second. That’s not an attack on Butler, I think her work is great and to the degree that many academics matter outside the university I bet she’s one, but I’d guess that that degree of mattering is still pretty low.
Here’s another way to put this. Say someone is like “I care a lot about X” where X is some social movement or problem in society. My default opinion (which I’m willing to have changed but again the burden of proof is on the people making the claim) is to see doing academic work on that subject as little more relevant for helping the movement or fixing the problem than making fine art about it or being in a band and singing about. Now, it’s demonstrably the case that some artists and musicians really do make a difference to movements and causes by making art and music about/for those movements and causes. The odds are against that, though, such that there are other avenues for acting on the impulse to do something, avenues about which we can make more accurate prediction of success and make easier assessments of the utility of those actions. Like go to meetings and do the work as defined by the movement actors in those meetings, give money, take part in actions, etc. More often than not there’s little special contribution to be made to movements and social change by academics qua academics. (Your examples are telling, by the way: Butler and Sartre. Even if we could point to them as academics with a measure of political importance qua academics, which I still doubt, I don’t think that’s a very meaningful example because the vast majority of academics never achieve anything like the level of professional success as Butler, let alone Sartre. [Their efficacy being largely the result of their success qua academics.])
On engaged scholarship, political immediacy, etc if we can’t tell that it will have an impact except over the very long term, then what sense does it make to call the work engaged (or similar terms)? Why bother with such terms at all then?
Final point - I take your point about having realistic expectations across the board politically. You write that “political expectations should be set low for would-be committed academic work, at least no higher than we would set our expectations for any other political tactic.” As I tried to argue by the analogy of art and music, if anything expectations should be lower for the political impact of academic work, so low that I don’t think we should really have such expectations. Of course if there are cases of unexpected impact by academics, great, those are a welcome windfall.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 17, 2008 @ 11:53 am
Hi Nate,
Great to hear from you. I guess we should distinguish between different modes of doing engaged radical scholarship. (Sigh, in spite of my qualifications about radical being a shifty term, I guess we still can employ it and pretty much mutually understand its intended referent here.) Take someone like Marc Bousquet (a little less famous than Sartre — I take your point about that btw, but I do think I could give other examples, less famous ones). I think his work can have a real radicalizing impact on academics insofar as it convinces some of them to side with labor organizing who otherwise wouldn’t have. He does a very conventional marxist critique of academic labor in my view. So… effective engaged scholarship? Yeah, although it must be said that he is his own media and publicity operation, and if he had just published his book and done no outreach, it wouldn’t have the same effect. Outreach is an important part of engaged scholarship, for sure — we should talk about the means of transmission and exchange of this stuff, because, as you say in (4), often there’s this dumb assumption that someone wrote a critical text and just the existence of their critique makes it effective.
One other point — though I have to pack for the airport — there’s a huge difference between an academic who is already involved in some political movement and takes the time to write an immanent critique as a means of reflecting on their own practice, and someone who is basically doing some distantly related scholarship and claims to be political because of the topical similarity to something activists are talking about. Seems to me that the former case is much more likely to be effective (it already has an audience in one’s political collaborators), and, very importantly, what’s happening there isn’t that one is making a claim that one’s scholarship is political; rather, one is claiming that one’s political reflections or work are scholarship. Like, I think Bousquet’s work seems to be more like this, while an education scholar like Sheila Slaughter (who Bousquet has definitely read) writes critiques of “academic capitalism” but they are scholarly works with only faintly political engagements. See what I mean?
more later if i find time… am busy too, though less than you I’m sure since I’m not teaching.
eli
Comment by eli — December 17, 2008 @ 2:30 pm
hi Eli,
I think Marc’s work is a good example. I think what he does is important. I’m not sure that his work will convince very many people to unionize just by reading it, but I think his work provides resources to people trying to build an academic labor movement, including Marc’s own work on that front (in addition to his role as a writer, which you alluded to). But we’re back to talking about the importance of academic work as something important within the university. I have no problem with that - I work at a university, spend too many waking hours at one and even more thinking about it. Are there examples analogous to Marc’s work that takes on issues and (proto?)movements outside higher education?
As for the rest, I agree completely and the formulation of people coming out of movements vs going toward them (you put it better than that) is useful.
Gotta run, need to talk my dog and get to bed so I can spend tomorrow grading…
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 17, 2008 @ 10:09 pm
Hey Nate,
Two quick thoughts:
1) STO had for a number of years an outrageous number of lawyers as members of the group. One rule that was imposed for much of this time was that the lawyers were not allowed to claim their paying legal work as political work expected of them as members of STO, even when that paying legal work clearly had political content (several of the lawyers were civil rights attorneys). I’m guessing this is sort of where you’re headed with this critique of academic work being differentiated from movement work, right?
2) I’m a little troubled by your take on artistic contribution to social movements, which seems to me to dramatically understate the importance of the arts. Music and fine arts have been incredibly important to all social movements of the past century or longer (think, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the women’s movement in the US during the 1970’s, the early IWW, etc.). I know you know this stuff, so I guess I’m not getting what you mean here…
Solidarity,
Mike
Comment by MIke — December 18, 2008 @ 11:50 am
hi Mike,
That’s interesting re: STO. I’d say that there’s a difference between civil rights lawyers and academics, though, which is that civil rights lawyers have demonstrable positive results in a way that few academics can claim. Know what I mean?
re: music and art, punk totally changed my life. I know that Crass (though I never liked them myself) was a huge deal in England. I don’t mean to minimize the role of art in movements. Movements draw from art and that’s important. But I still think anything along the lines of “I want to make a difference in the movement - I’ll start a band!” is kind of naive and laughable and arrogant (I think it’s doubly so for people who aren’t already part of a movement), even though some minority of people do end up making a difference that way. Is that clearer?
Gotta run, Simpsons is on.
xox
n8
Comment by Nate — December 18, 2008 @ 6:00 pm
hi again Mike,
I had another thought while I was making dinner, about how very much I like Steinbeck and how I think that some of the young adult fiction my wife to read is great, where there are strong female protagonists and so on. I love that kind of stuff and I don’t want to minimize its importance. On the other hand, I think that this stuff has importance in a context - it’s not like Steinbeck was Steinbeck his whole life (in the sense of him being this great author with these great themes and all) or in all contexts, likewise with those genuinely important works of feminist young adult fiction.
That’s not right, I’m fumbling here. Let me try again.
I think oppressed and exploited people have every right to all kinds of good things, including art which reflect and enriches their experience and including making that kind of art. There’s something tremendously important about that, and about people making art that tries to be part of that. I think attempts to use art to communicate certainly values and so on are really important, like Langston Hughes’ work. That should be respected tremendously and it really can change people’s lives. But, again, I think that that’s a pretty unpredictable matter beyond the immediate interpersonal level (anyone who wants to write a novel should, but they shouldn’t expect that it will be genius or change anyone beyond the people that love them) - most writers aren’t Langston Hughes - such that “I’m going to write a novel for the movement” strikes me as a bit quixotic. Here’s another way to put it. There was a creative writing workshop for steelworkers in northwest Indiana a few years back, produced some good work. I think that’s great and there’s really a place for that, working class people are often denied that sort of thing (and are often pushed to write about their working class-ness in a way analogous to expecting women to always write about being women and people of color to always write about race, which can imply that other more universally human themes or flights of fancy aren’t appropriate for them; I digress). But I think that given limited resources and the current state of affairs (in NW IN and across the US) that our first priority should not be on aesthetic concerns. Like say anarchist group A started holding tenants rights meetings and organizing trainings attended by growing numbers of people and anarchist group B started holding painting classes attended by growing numbers of people I’d think they both were really awesome but I’d be more excited about group A’s project (unless group B’s project ended up being put to similar use).
I still feel like I’m not getting my point across well, I’ll have to mull this over more.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 18, 2008 @ 8:22 pm
Response to Nate and Eli T. 12/19/08
I love how Eli T. took the relay from my (Eli M.’s) response to Nate. I agree with almost everything that both of you said, which I found very illuminating. However, my original argument got lost in all of this, and in fact, I think that both of you unintentionally articulated further support for it (which is not to say that either of you were arguing against it). The main point in my comment was: “If most academic work is useless to movements and tends to perpetuate the unjust education system, then don’t we have an ethical responsibility to either: a) get out of the academy and devote our work fully to a revolutionary movement, or b) remain in the academy and ONLY do work that is written for such movements? And along with (b), if we wanted to sustain such projects, we would need to create the conditions for such work to be valued in the academy.” This was a bit unclear, and in reading Nate and Eli T.’s conversation, I see far greater complexity in this issue. Yet, I think my point still stands about a certain ethical responsibility for those of us who subscribe to the dual identity of “radical political activist” and “academic”: if academia sucks so bad, either we have to figure out a way to change it as soon as possible or intentionally, collectively abandon academia, destroy its organizations, expropriate its spaces and resources, and replace it with some better kinds of “higher learning” projects. Of course, as Nate says, most of us are not in any kind of material position to take up the latter revolutionary path anytime soon. However, we could be more intentional about creating the conditions and organizations for us to do that (which we are already doing in some ways…).
The value practices of a radical academic are, as Eli T. says, relative to how we define “radical.” I assume that for most far-left academics, such as ourselves, our political values are some combination of feminist, queer, communist, anarchist, anti-racist, environmentalist, etc.. Actors in movements determine the precise articulation and prioritization of these values through discussion amongst the movement’s members (of course with all sorts of distortions of communication, such as power hierarchies). As Eli T. noted, to measure the radicalness of academic we need to pay attention to its transmission to movements that put such radical values into widespread and lasting practice – i.e., whether academic’s texts circulate to movement members and whether they are subscribed to and taken up in important ways in guiding the constitution and deployment of political identities, strategies, and tactics. Both of you have argued, and I agree, that academics are currently very ineffective on this measure of “radicalness.” With Eli T., academia as a whole is most effective at promoting political projects that are in opposition to our radical practices (i.e., capitalist corporations, statist representative politics, commodified identities, etc.). This is comparatively exponentially greater than the contributions to radical political projects by minority of academics who subscribe to such values. Even worse, these radical academics have been unwittingly co-opted into a system of work that exploits their labor to produce commodified intellectual products (i.e., journal articles and books) which bring “academic capital” for the author to help them rise in their discipline’s hierarchy as well as prestige for their institution. Such products’ use value for radical political movements is negligible compared to the cost to such movement of having brilliant intellectuals, who could be embedded as strategists and organizers, become co-opted into the academia’s rat race of competition for disciplinary measures of value (even including the subsumption of the value of “radicalness” to disciplinary measures of “quality”).
Against Eli T.’s argument that, for academic work, “the frame of political evaluation should be long-term and holistic,” I’d argue that we already have enough long-term and holistic evidence of the failure and counter-productivity of radical academic work, on the balance, to contribute anything of positive to radical political movements. Unless the value of our academic work is immeasurable with respect to metrics of “quality” that are commensurable with capital, it is going to remain subsumed in capital’s projects. Yet, the academy seems predicated on measure (e.g., grades, exams, publication requirements, collegiality, etc.), and this disciplinary system of measure intensifies with the neoliberal university (e.g., at the U of M, we have a whole administrative unit devoted to developing metrics for measuring everything else, including “community engagement,” “student satisfaction,” etc., through creating ways for all members of the university to become participants in developing these measures). So long as we continue to submit our intellectual lives to these measures, not to mention participating in their development, we are part of the problem – we are not only contributing almost nothing to radical movements, but perpetuating the system that they oppose. Our intellectual work would be “immeasurable” if we used it in militant participation in such radical movements, not only because we would not be submitting it to our universities’ metrics but mainly because, to the extent that it opposed the capitalist system itself (and the interconnected structures of racism, patriarchy, statism, etc.) it would refer to practices of value measure in a different world from this capitalist one (i.e., “another world is possible”).
Sorry for the excessively long response! Just trying to flesh out my argument about our ethical responsibility in relation to our radical politics…
Comment by Eli — December 19, 2008 @ 2:51 am
hi Eli,
Thanks for substantive comment, and nice to see you yesterday.
A few thoughts - it seems to me that implied in your comments is an idea that academic jobs are qualitatively different in some way from other jobs. Is that right? If so, then how so? I don’t really see it. I think the teaching is a lot like any other teaching, and I think the writing etc stuff is over-rated in its effects. I think that over-rating is part of how some academic work gets counted and careers get made in some niche markets within acaademia. (And a lot of academics who see themselves as radicals *in their academic work* are the very same people who play managerial functions in relation to students, adjuncts, clerical staff, and others. I sort of take it as axiomatic that radical and management are words that should not be combined.)
Part of where I see you as having an idea that academic work is exceptional in some way is in your opening question with the pair of options a) and b). As I said, I’m intensely skeptical that b) is possible, or at least I think that b) is way, way more rare and improbable and difficult to pull off than a lot of radicals who work as academics often admit to - to such a degree that I think it’s not a plausible goal. But I don’t think this commits anyone to a). I think healthcare work doesn’t build movements and largely perpetuates capitalist society. That’s not all it does, but I don’t think healthcare workers doing they jobs has any anti-capitalist effect. That doesn’t mean commies in healthcare face an obligation to either radicalize healthcare or get out. (They face an obligation to be involved in revolutionary politics and an obligation to fight for worker control on the job, but even if that worker control succeeded that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a blow against capitalism.)
Actually, let me re-frame that. I think it *does* commit everyone to a). I just think a) is not practicable for most people. There are very few if any options to actually do that. Who can devote themselves literally full time to building the revolution? Only people who don’t have to sell their labor power. Some friends of mine think paid union organizers are full time soldiers for the revolution. I don’t know what I think of that though I do think that if we could trade every radical academic in the world for a competent committed union organizer the world would better off (like if a deity was granting wishes). Even admitting that example as true - there’s arguments against seeing organizers that way and like I said my own mind’s foggy - it’s not a realistic option for a lot of people. I’d have to get divorced if I wanted to do that.
As for the overhaul of academia that you’re talking about, I just don’t think it’s possible short of larger systemic change requiring a lot of movement outside of universities. Short of that, we’ll get either a relative island of privilege and narcissism with at best negligible or perhaps even pernicious results outside the university and outside the academic jobs in the university (arguably true already for a lot of people in the upper tiers), or lose our jobs because why would any capitalist enterprise and state pay for something like that?
Two final points. You wrote “Unless the value of our academic work is immeasurable with respect to metrics of “quality” that are commensurable with capital, it is going to remain subsumed in capital’s projects.”
Maybe. I think I agree, I’m not sure. But it seems to me that this is an argument against the implausibility of being both a radical and an academic at the same time (as in, doing the exact same stuff and having it be both radical and academic at the same time). If it doesn’t fit into capitalist accounting how would it fit into university accounting (other than as privilege and distinction)? And if that’s the case then why would anyone get paid to do it? That’s part of my suspicion about academic claims to radicalism - if the work is really so earth shaking then why on earth would the people doing the work get paid what they do?
Second point, you wrote of “submit[ing] our intellectual lives to these measures.” I’ll grant that there is some part of one’s intellectual life that’s inextricable from doing academic work - doing academic work uses parts of one’s intellectual life. But I think there’s a subtle conflation of academic with intellectual here. My intellectual life is at least as rich and probably richer in the stuff that’s not functional for my academic career, and I had at least as rich of an intellectual life in regard to the things I most care and am excited about before I came to university. I definitely have had incredibly important intellectual experiences in higher education. But I’ve had them outside higher education. I think intellectual and academic are independent of each other. I also think that with regard to the left that a big piece of the left is driven in part by intellectual (and alluding back to Mike’s point before about artists, also aesthetic) drives on the part of people who don’t have other outlets for them, and that intellectual culture at the height of movements is at least as rich as official and academic culture. If anything, the flow works in the other direction - feminist scholarship largely followed from women’s movements (and there were important changes in universities following on from this, but that’s part of my point: they were changes *in universities* not necessarily changes elsewhere in society).
Gotta run
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 19, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
Hi Nate and Eli,
I am so happy to be talking through all this. Eli M., I agree completely that there are major questions about our ethical and political responsibilities. Nate, I’m not sure Eli M. has to be committed to claiming that higher ed is exceptional in order to argue that one might have either an obligation (a) to get out of it or (b) to be revolutionary within it. I mean, that’s a dilemma that ought to apply to anyone with a certain sort of political conscience. That said, I feel like our notion of commitment or ethical obligation should be less monolithic here. (This is implicit in Nate’s response but I want to phrase it more abstractly.) Being a social being is being entangled in a thicket of obligations and there’s more to ethics than a choice about revolutionary commitment. For one thing, not all commitments are political and it’s not clear that political commitments should always be prioritized. Even if you believe that politics should always ultimately be fundamental, it still takes a lot just to reproduce yourself as a minimally sane, healthy creature with sustainable relations with others, a livable cultural existence, etc, and it’s not always politically useful to burn yourself out by doing all politics and no care of self, etc. (Nate, this is like THE recurrent theme of your blog.)
And even sticking to political commitments, it’s my experience that there are often a range of potential projects available and it’s not always clear which of them is radical or how far it leads. I guess I’m saying, radical action too can become an epistemological quagmire. I said this already but I’ll say it again because I just feel that it poses such a major problem to ethical obligations about being radical. It’s not just that “radical” means different things to people of political stripes; even for a bunch of anarchists it’s not always clear what action is most radical. Take the Reworking the University conference (I’m really sorry not to have been more involved in organizing that, btw. Would like to talk about co-organizing projects or something.) Is it radical? It wants to be radical. But maybe it’s actually serving as social reproduction for a tiny enclave, or maybe it’s a trading ground where a few radicals meet a lot of liberals, or maybe it’s just self-delusion and we’re putting effort into a space for reflection that should be poured into local projects… Personally I think it’s great and it’s a political space that we desperately need. But I wouldn’t say I know that in a rationally justifiable sense. Politics abhors the certainty of a priori ethical arguments. Politics feeds on the gap between utopian dreams and practical action.
Incidentally, I feel like we hesitate in thinking through these obligations over whether to believe the ethical axiom that “ought implies can.” Do we believe in impossible, seemingly unlivable political obligations — like the choice between (a) and (b) when neither of them are necessarily economically or psychologically plausible? Or do we believe that we have to limit our commitments to the scope of our capabilities? And what about all the ways that we distort our own conceptions of our capabilities (do we need our own apartments? do we need periodic vacations from urban landscapes? etc…) Do we believe that ethical consistency is, in fact, desirable? Is ethical action even always ethical? I once deduced, age 18, that since capitalism was immoral and complicity was unavoidable, suicide was the only truly moral deed. That argument is logically sound and yet leads to an absurd conclusion. So it seems to me that Eli’s question raises some thorny meta-ethical issues. A lot of Nate’s response bears on these questions — like, can you be obligated to be revolutionary w/o having to get a job? — I don’t know if it is helpful to discuss this in total abstraction, but it helps my thinking a bit, at least.
Second point, I think we need to learn some more academic history to have this discussion with any authority. We shouldn’t go solely on our personal experience in this domain. Eli (M), I don’t feel at all ready to conclude that radical academic work has been on balance a counter-productive failure. I don’t know how much you have all read in this field, but there is actually a large literature on the history of disciplines, particularly social sciences, some of which has a lot to teach us about politically committed academic labor. I am not well read in it myself, but a book like Mary Furner’s Advocacy and Objectivity teaches us that there have been struggles over politically engaged work even as early as 1890s social science organizations. To this day, there are deeply marginalized but very real alternative methods in social sciences — I’m thinking of participatory action research (PAR) — which offer huge potential for engaged work in a totally different vein from that which we observe in, say, Butler or other theorists. There have been politically important scientific findings — there was a time when anthropologists were radicals for arguing that race had no biological basis. And there seems to be a long history of academic radicals being suppressed in higher ed — what would we make of Thorstein Veblen for instance? Never had the greatest of scholarly careers, but was a major radical theorist in the guise of a social critic, and even today non-radicals comprehend “conspicuous consumption” as a critical term. Anyway, instead of just asking ahistorically whether radical scholarship is possible, seems like we better learn about the political history of struggles over the very possibility of radical work.
And more broadly still, what if we stop viewing academia as external to other political processes? What if we view it as only partly and inconsistently autonomous from other social institutions and worlds? Does that mean that we can start to view academic politics as not only the Lord of the Flies-esque barbarism of a tiny island but as a forum in which much larger political struggles are fought? (Affirmative action, for instance.) Nate, in particular, you seem to have a view that what happens in academia is almost totally academic. I know there are times when it seems like this but I think there are many times when it seems otherwise. (Greece right now.) And part of the point of my paper on cultural crisis in universities last spring was that we need to think universities both as places of hegemonic social reproduction and as places of intense cultural fragility and struggle (most famously, ‘68). How does our view of the institutional autonomy of universities bear on our view of our political obligations within them?
I was at a workshop on radical scholarship at U of Ill.-Chicago a few months ago where I said, don’t we have an obligation to focus on reforming universities first, before critiquing and trying to change the practices of others? Shouldn’t we put our own house in order first of all? And an older professor responded, well, we have to work in many places at once, we shouldn’t expect universities to be more magically perfect than other institutions and we should simultaneously work there and elsewhere.
Not sure what I make of that exchange, but it seemed to capture something important about the range of potential ethical stances we might take. (How much room is there for ethical disagreement about this, also?) I think at some level Nate is being way too pessimistic about this: without the German university system, there could never have been Hegel, and hence there would never have been Marxism. Or maybe you wouldn’t view Marx’s work as engaged scholarship? But I think I would…
solidarity, eli t.
Comment by eli t. — December 20, 2008 @ 12:33 am
I emailed a college professor of mine who did PAR to ask what he thought about politically committed scholarship, and he said:
Don’t have time to go through all this and don’t know enough history to flesh out this story myself. Don’t think my teacher’s politics are the same as ours. Do think that there are some interesting issues raised here, and an important historical narrative to find out more about.
Comment by eli t. — December 20, 2008 @ 12:34 am
hi Eli,
Re: exceptionalism - do you think the alternatives (a) and (b) apply to anyone anywhere? If so, then maybe nothing exceptional about universities, though I think it’d be hard to really defend that claim of universal application. At least in a way that wasn’t an empty ethical gesture without attending to material constraints and thinking about what’s actually plausible.
I don’t mean to assume that the university is hermetically sealed from the rest of society, but I do want to suggest that we should have high standards of proof for any claim that academic work matters beyond those of us who work as academics. I think it’s suggestive that you bring up examples of people who were *methodologically* innovative, and don’t supply evidence that this stuff has a larger impact. There are three main reasons I harp on this. I think claims to importance in the rest of society are part of how many academics carry out their narcissism - if what we do matters to everyone else then we’re free to just talk how and with whom and about what we want. I also think it’s part of the ideology management uses against lower level employees: “what we do is so important, if you don’t follow orders you’re letting down this important thing we do.” Finally, I just think a lot of claims about the political impact and stakes of academic work - or if not claims then the emotional tenor of the conversation - just doesn’t bear scrutiny.
To put this another way, I think it’s an empirical question whether or not academic debates are “a forum in which much larger political struggles are fought”, and whether or not the outcome of struggles in that forum matter to struggle elsewhere. For instance, you mention anti-racist anthropologists. That’s great and I respect that work. How much of an impact did it have, though? Did it shape policy? Movements? Popular perceptions? That’s a particularly good example in that it’d be easy to hold up anthropologists who opposed scientific racism to the exclusion of intellectuals within black freedom struggles who weren’t professional intellectuals or who were professional intellectuals but weren’t academics.
I actually do think that working to change universities is more important (for us) than ostensibly more radical and larger scholarship (unless we can find work that really does have a big impact outside universities). I think there’s also institutional pressures against this - there’s reasons why there are more critical and left-sounding dissertations about marxist and postcolonial theory than there are about policy and practice in universities with regard to labor and students.
I also think that the other piece of this is where one puts one’s time. I think radical academics who put extra time into reading theory aren’t doing anything particularly important in a political sense in doing that (myself included). I think radical academics who work to change their workplaces are doing something analogous to other workers who do the same thing. I think radical academics who put their time outside of work into radical stuff outside the university along with other people who do work in those arenas are doing whatever other people do. I think the second and third bits are way more important than the contents of anyone’s scholarly work. That’s the other issue with this - if scholarship’s content is political then “I can’t come to the rally, I’m staying home to work on my dissertation” is potentially analogous “I can’t come to the rally, I’m going to an organizing meeting.” I don’t think it is. I think “I’m staying home” is often valid (you alluded to this re: burnout), but as taking care of one’s self, not as an equally valid contribution to political struggle. (I know taking care of one’s self is part of political struggle, but I think it’s important to make distinctions here such that taking time off from political activity is not the same as putting time in.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 20, 2008 @ 12:09 pm
Just finished my grading and am a bit dazed, plus need to get to some housework I’ve been neglecting for a while, before my friend arrives from out of town. So this may be a bit unclear, but I had this other thought I wanted to jot down here.
I’m not saying academic work including ostensibly radical academic work is worthless. I value this stuff very much. I was talking to a friend about this, he used and example I liked very much. Picasso’s Guernica is a powerful and important painting. It also didn’t change the course of the Spanish Civil War or the shape of the left and social justice afterward. With or without that painting, the Spanish Civil War would have gone mostly the same. With another 50,000 anti-fascists volunteering in the International Brigades, or without the people who did volunteer, the war would have gone quite differently as would the left and social justice afterward.
I’m really not minimizing the painting’s importance, rather I’m taking a step toward *specifying* its importance, which includes saying the ways in which it did not matter. This is not a claim to give anything like a complete account of the painting’s importance according to any possible criteria, rather just according to one set of criteria, a set which should not be used as the only criteria for judging the value of things. I’m also not trying to make an apples and oranges sort of comparison here - Picasso painting the painting and Oliver Law volunteering to fight in Spain were very different acts. I only make the comparison here because I think think there’s a sort of implied comparison like this involved in claims about radical scholarship, I’m using this example in the hope that it will show that this implied comparison is not a good one.
Very briefly on what that implied comparison is, I think a fair amount of people overestimate the importance of their academic work and academic work they read in a way that implies a comparison to other sorts of political activity, such that there’s an implication that could make a list of contributions to (communist) political struggle, something like this: fought in Spain, organized a union, helped start a revolutionary political organization, painted Guernica, wrote a dissertation on Marx. I don’t think that sort of thing would make any sense, for a variety of reasons. The comparison implied in making a list of political actions like that would not hold. And I don’t think I’m just making this up, I think a fair amount of people in radical academic circles act like they believe this.
Anyhow, back to the main point I wanted to jot down here:
I’m not saying anything is worthless. I’m saying that there’s an (implied) appeal to the worth of academic work according one (implied) set of criteria, being radical and politically important, and according to that criteria I don’t think the work actually has the importance a lot of people seem to think it does. The importance is elsewhere, based on other criteria - being well-crafted, interesting, the product of hard work, etc etc.
Gotta go
take care,
Nate
ps- just read the quote you pasted in. I agree with the sentiment there 100%, personally.
Comment by Nate — December 20, 2008 @ 4:01 pm
hi nate,
i want eli m. to keep talking too… anyway though - lots of stuff written on anti-racist anthropology. haven’t read enough to know for sure what its certifiable political impact was but it certainly sounds like it might be very real and extra-academic. the first of these links says among other things that an anthropologist, ashley montagu, drafted a United Nations statement on race, supposedly describing it as social construct not biology. see:
http://www.understandingrace.org/history/science/critiquing_race.html
http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/an.2006.47.7.24?prevSearch=boas+race
(first things that i came across.)
my general sense would be this:
to repeat myself slightly because i still think you’re equating radical politics with all politics: i do think a lot of academics have been successfully involved in politics. the question is, though, is it ever *radical* politics that they’re involved in? this would seem to demand a more detailed accounting of what “radical politics” amounts to so that we know how to evaluate the historical evidence we can come across.
also, about PAR, my guess is that you don’t know anything about the kinds of stuff they do or the results they create. it often isn’t radical but it is very engaged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_action_research
http://www.goshen.edu/soan/soan96p.html
…
more later,
eli
Comment by eli t. — December 20, 2008 @ 4:32 pm
hi Eli,
Real quick - I don;t mean to claim any knowledge of PAR, I know nothing about it. I meant mainly that I agree with the final paragraph of what you posted, which isn’t limited to PAR.
re: the definition of radical, I’m a marxist and a communist with a strong syndicalist bent, I define this stuff in pretty conventional terms from that background. Again, not to say there aren’t other criteria of evaluation.
Gotta run again
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 20, 2008 @ 8:38 pm
Hi Nate and Eli T.,
Sorry for the delayed reply. Your conversation has really helped me refine my thoughts on these issues, not quite for getting answers but for asking better questions. The discussion has complexified so much now that I’m not sure where to re-enter it. You’ve done a great job of deconstructing my initial question (whether to get out of the academy to join a revolutionary movement or to change it?) as setting up a false dichotomy or too monolithic of an idea of ethical responsibility. In light of your discussion, I’ll now re-propose my question. Practically speaking, what frames, strategies, and tactics can we use to play the following roles simultaneously, i.e., to minimize the inconsistencies between the following projects and maximize their synergies? (note that I’m phrasing these in general terms so that they could apply to any job and institution)
— a) working in a job (currently as academics, for us) that pays us enough to live happily (i.e., enough for food, housing, transportation, etc. and without overworking ourselves to the detriment of our relationships with family and friends) and that we find to be meaningful, non-alienating work;
— b) working from the inside of our institution (currently the university, for us) to change it in ways that eliminate the functions of it that we judge to be “bad,” and promote the “good,” from the perspectives of the value practices of our “radical” ethical-political communities and movements (e.g., anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, etc.).
— c) working in our “radical” communities and movements to change the world (including the university), as well as working across our different communities and movements to develop common definitions of our “radical” or “revolutionary” values and to create collective projects that realize those values.
If you agree that all three of these roles are important for a “radical” academic, then we should articulate questions about the limiting and enabling conditions for us to perform all three of these roles synergistically. One of my main points in my last comment was that our academic work (a) can become a major limitation on our transformational work, (b) and (c), when we get caught up in the rat race of disciplinary competition for the artificially scarce rewards of tenure-track jobs. So, how can we minimize such disciplinary competition? Some possibly helpful strategies are: 1) most importantly, organize academic unions so that faculty (and grads) can gain political-economic power over the university, and thereby eliminate the artificial scarcity of funds for faculty positions (and grad student salaries, etc.); and 2) less importantly, try to create journals that upend disciplinary hierarchies and allow for valuing of academic work that is helpful for the roles of (b) and (c), thereby, blurring the divisions between all three roles. Conversely, the first of these strategies is a way that our role in (c) could be more synergistic with (a), because our radical communities and movements could help us organize more militant and effective academic unions. So, we should ask some practical questions about how to create spaces for discussing the potential conflicts and synergies between these different roles, and for strategizing about making more effective, synergistic forms of them such as revolutionary academic unions.
I like Nate’s distinction between political activity and the content of scholarly work. However, I think that you’re being a bit too pessimistic about the potential for overlap between them. You say: “That’s the other issue with this - if scholarship’s content is political then ‘I can’t come to the rally, I’m staying home to work on my dissertation’ is potentially analogous ‘I can’t come to the rally, I’m going to an organizing meeting.’ I don’t think it is.” What if part of one’s dissertation work was identical with going to an organizing meeting? This could be the case in Participatory Action Research; although it has many difficulties (e.g., problems of paternalism, colonialism, conflicts with dominant disciplinary norms, etc.), these difficulties could be viewed, not as necessarily damning flaws, but as problems to be overcome (while simultaneously grappling with the tensions between the three roles above). For example, one of the most successful revolutionary social movements in the world today, Brazil’s MST (over a million people reclaiming and collectivizing land), uses the Pedagogy of the Oppressed type of popular education that seems to be a major part of Participatory Action Research (see http://www.mstbrazil.org/20030217_582.html ). Of course conditions are very different in Brazil from the US, but I am interested in the possibilities for adapting PAR for our purposes (which many people have tried with varying degrees of success).
You guys made many other insightful points that I’ll have to address later…
Comment by Eli — December 22, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
hi Eli,
Happy holidays! I’ve got to get to something else but want to put this quote up here. Real quick before that, not engaging with everything just one thing, you ask “what if one’s dissertation was itself organizing?” That relies on the whole thing I’m questioning in this post. Until I see evidence that it’s possible - not logically possible, but plausible in a way that is not analogous to the occasional fast food worker who ends up a CEO as often get used in arguments about class mobility - I’m going to stay skeptical.
What I mean is, I think there are cases where academics are able to do good things with their work, for other people in universities or for people outside universities. I’m all for that; I realize my remarks here probably sound like nothing’s possible for people who do academic work. But I think these cases are really rare, often over-stated, and if they really got common then funding would get yanked in a heartbeat. (The other possibility is to get involved in things like Midwest Academy, the Highlander School, the Organizing Institute, labor education programs etc…. I’m all for those and sometimes consider working as a labor educator, but those aren’t universities, are often staffed by people who come out of movements, not academics, and they get little academic funding; none of which is surprising I think, given the way capitalist society operates.)
I also think that emphasis on the occasional exceptional radical accomplishments of a few folk as if they’re universally - and individually - accessible can easily occlude the many negative functions of our work as academics. I’ve had conversations with academic people where they talk about the content of their work - which they don’t say is radical but I think it’s implied - then they turn around and say very conventional and I think pernicious things about students, in a way that suggests to me that they’re not sufficiently concerned with trying to minimize their contribution to capitalism (and I do think qua academics the task is a matter of minimizing damage rather than active emancipation, so I guess I am pretty pessimistic when it comes to the politics of our profession).
Somewhat related, here’s the quote I want to put up. “Marxism itself has no immunity to this process [of commodification]. (…) It too is a commodity - a brand in the marketplace of affiliations.” Critics concerned over this worry about “the idea of Marxism as an apolitical concept (…) the evacuation of its political content, the abstraction of Marxism from its significance as a political project, and the resulting loss of its capacity to mobilise political action and all that entails” (p28 in Marks, International Law On The Left). It seems to me that depoliticization can take the appearance of politicization, and most of what I’ve been trying to argue here is that the political piece for academics, like everyone else (the radical political piece, as Eli T has noted I don’t distinguish those here, it’s radical politics I’m talking about) is most viable off the clock.
Gotta go. I’ll get in touch when I get back in town, we’ll go climbing again.
take care,
n8
ps - I’ve been reading this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_action_research - and would be up for reading and discussing more.
Comment by Nate — December 25, 2008 @ 3:31 pm
hi Nate and Eli,
Eli, I pretty much agree with your latest comments — I mean I do think they pretty much capture the dilemmas we face. Though I still think figuring out what is effective radical work poses epistemological problems that we haven’t worked through yet.
Nate, if I can say this as gently as possible, I feel like your argument is starting to take on this self-defeating quality, something like, radical academic work is generally impossible, and if there are counter-examples, they only serve to reconfirm your view of the systematic or structural implausibility of such work. As if you’re arguing that, by virtue of the very exceptionality of the exceptions to the rule (that there is no radical scholarship), the rule holds.
I want to stress that I think your argument has a really great and important dimension, which is to stress how claims of radicality become self-serving markers of distinction within involuted disciplinary subcultures, how they serve our narcissism, how they occlude still deeply authoritarian and even reactionary pedagogies and institutional practices, how marxism can be “commodified” (duh), etc. This “diagnostic” part of your argument I really like: I think it points to something we have to guard against and may even want to occasionally denounce in others (though denunciation isn’t always the most effective tactic, I fear).
But I think you go wrong in making a logical leap from (a) diagnosing the pernicious effects of claims of academic radicality in academia in general to (b) concluding that WE as individuals have no, i.e., effectively zero chance of doing radical scholarship. Radically engaged scholarship tends to be structurally foreclosed; that doesn’t mean it is impossible. To press the point home, I would point out that if you lived by the defeatist logic of structural implausibility, you would certainly not waste your time with any kind of radical political involvement in this country.
Along these lines, I think your analogy with class mobility arguments is only superficially convincing. Of course the commonality is that in each case, an exceptional event can be used to legitimate a belief in the general plausibility of such events, which remain structurally unlikely. But I don’t think any academic radical (if any exist) is expecting radicalization of scholarship to be a systematically widespread process in the way that some people apparently believe that whole social classes are climbing the social ladder. The whole hope is just that it will remain a difficult but possible individual option for us, probably not for huge numbers.
Listen, I basically agree with you that radical scholarship is rare, potentially delusory, and not going to be rewarded on the clock. I just don’t think it follows from this that we personally can’t try it, via PAR or other routes (I do agree that a radically engaged pure theorist is an absurdity). One’s discipline matters A LOT here, I think, since doing engaged research presupposes a discipline that permits projects that happen off campus (so, probably not literary studies or astronomy). My sense is that in anthropology it is definitely not stigmatized to do engaged research as such — it may not be institutionally rewarded, you won’t get paid for it per se most places, but as long as you publish regular scholarly publications, you can do engaged research. Put it like this: of the set of all possible respectable anthropology research projects, a large number of them have potential for political engagement and one can certainly pick one of those. Is your background more in history and philosophy? It figures that you wouldn’t have much exposure to actual engaged research in that case.
Take a recent example, David Graeber. Surely you know his anarchist anthropology ( http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm14.pdf )? His latest stuff is an ethnography of the Direct Action Network in NYC and a bunch of essays on radical politics. Got fired from Yale but got a job in London. Writes social theory about value, which is how he keeps his anthro cred, but also does direct action. Says some stuff very similar to your observations about faux radicals here, but with a somewhat more cheerful outlook about the peripheral acceptability of academic anarchists:
http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=davidgraeber
OK, this may be the last of my counterarguments against your skepticism… to be clear, I am not arguing that radical scholarship is the best political tactic, that it is institutionally rewarded for its political aspects (though research can be polyvalent and one can work out its political aspects while getting paid for the scholarly side), or that it is straightforward or unproblematic. I’m only arguing that it remains a practical possibility worthy of further exploration and that its implausibility is not an argument against it. Yes, it can lead to distinction fetishes and narcissistic delusion, but I regard that as a tolerable risk.
Comment by eli — December 28, 2008 @ 3:22 pm
hi Eli,
I think in terms of actual practices, like our opinions about what people should and shouldn’t do, we disagree little.
But I’ve yet to see any evidence that any of the stuff you’ve mentioned has really made an impact, neither you nor Eli M has presented any that’s compelling. On the other hand, as you point out, I don’t have much evidence for the efficacy of anything I think of as more important (with the exception of the labor movement).
So neither of us is convinced by the other. You’re for people trying to do radical work despite the risks. I’m basically for that too insofar as I have a general view that folks should try to do what makes them happy, but I don’t think that work will matter in the way its producers are likely to think it will. What this amounts to then, I think, is a suggestion that people not make claims that something they’re doing is all that radical or important except with some sort of evidence in mind. Not really a particularly important point, I guess, but I’m okay with that.
Your post implies shifting the discussion from academic-or-not to distinctions within possible academic practices. I think that’s going to be more fruitful. I still think - and your post suggests the same - that my assumption - that any example of scholarship won’t actually be radical despite claims otherwise - will be right more often than not, more than its opposite would be. And actually, I don’t really assume that. I just assume that until I see some evidence otherwise.
I also should say, I tried to make this clear but I don’t think I really did, I’m all for people making attempts like you suggest. That’s great. I think those attempts are mostly going to fail to really be radical. And I think those are mostly about people doing things they think are important than about what movements need and things that will make a big difference in the world (I think I made more of an impact as a professional organizer than as a professional academic, and to the - sadly, high - degree that I put my work as an academic above my work as a volunteer organizer I think I fail to help out as much as I could/should). But folks should do things that are important to them. Failing to be radical is hardly the worst thing one can do. (Ostensibly radical scholarship is pretty much irrelevant in my opinion, not harmful.)
Last thing - you wrote that in anthropology that engaged research “may not be institutionally rewarded, you won’t get paid for it per se most places, but as long as you publish regular scholarly publications, you can” carry it out. Fair play. But in what sense then is the work engaged scholarship? Is it engaged because it’s about radical stuff? Like, is an ethnography of an anarcho-syndicalist union’s organizing drive engaged research just by virtue of its subject matter? (I’m not against that kind of object choice, I’m all for it actually.) Is it scholarship because it’s by an academic? What I mean on the latter: I take it as axiomatic that movements and organizations produce knowledge as part of their working existence, knowledge which plays (or is inherent within) various important functions. To the degree that academics play a role in producing knowledge which is functional for a movement or organization, then I’m okay to call it engaged (or willing to consider the possibility). That doesn’t mean that academics qua academics have any greater ability to produce such knowledge than anyone else does, though. (Three of my favorite examples of non-academics producing important knowledge as part of movements and organizations - CLR James produced fantastic work as an independent scholar connected to the global trotskyist movement and organizations and global black liberation movements; Raya Dunayevskaya produced important work about Marx and Hegel as part of heterodox marxist circles and organization; in that same milieu Martin Glaberman produced material about autoworkers and unions that people use today in workplace organizing.)
Happy holidays,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 28, 2008 @ 6:46 pm
Actually, let me qualify everything I’ve said here by saying the following, and if anything I’ve said contradicts the following then I take back whatever it is I said.
We basically agree on little - radical scholarship is unlikely, fraught with risks and false starts, but should still be attempted if people want to do so. Beyond that, I think the bulk of our differences is one of taste or gut feelings - you’re more excited than I am about some work, etc.
That’s my take on this conversation. Is yours basically the same?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 28, 2008 @ 6:55 pm
yep.
OK, that was my parody of the moment when someone asked Joe Biden if he could ever give a succinct answer to a question and he just said ‘yes.’ But yes, I pretty much think we agree on the basics, disagree on enthusiasms. Sigh…. the narcissism of small tactical differences strikes again. Sorry if I got too grumpy in the debate.
I still want to expand on the hypothetical engaged ethnography of syndicalists; I think it will clarify somewhat. Like you, I gather, I don’t think any research is radical simply because it happens to be *about* radicals. What I imagined was more like the scenario where one does, say, PAR with syndicalists — which as I understand it goes something like this: you agree on a research topic where your expertise as a social scientist might be useful to the people you’re working with, like say doing an ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics of recruiting new members of a political group (a major problem for many small leftist groups and unions like ours) that might shed some light on how to improve things. The idea would be that ethnographic modes of observation or analysis might help to bring about more effective political praxis. That to me would be engaged research — and let me add, to clarify, that I would expect the hypothetical researcher to end up writing some more scholarly piece of analysis that would end up in a journal, and that would satisfy their (presumed) need to produce publishable research. (Yet another distinction: the research *process* can have political impact without the subsequent *written product*, say a scholarly article, having much political significance; or there can be multiple ways of presenting one’s findings, some for a political audience, some for a scholarly one.)
Or if you’re a union organizer, I think there can be a role for someone to do research on the internal workings, politics, economics, etc of the work organization you’re trying to organize — politics takes a lot of background research sometimes. Apropos of academic unionizing, there was an interesting piece of research from Cornell that argued that grad student unions on average don’t increase costs to the administration. If that’s true it could be a really politically useful fact for our campaign. (We’re not sure it is, though.) Or there was another researcher who studied grad student unionizers and discovered a really interesting divergence between the organizers (who were mostly leftists and viewed their work as a political commitment) and their membership base (who weren’t political and viewed the union as a means of getting wage increases, better health care, and other bread and butter issues). That fits us perfectly and suggests that we should figure out how to work through that divergence between organizers and membership. Etc. Again, is this research as useful as someone going out to sign up new members? Not directly, but — and this speaks to something that came up when you said you would trade all the radical academics for a like number of organizers — I think we need a division of political labor and expertise, and research is part of that task. Again, of course, mostly it’s not academics that will do the research, but if an academic happens to do it, that to me counts as radical scholarship. I quite agree with you that you don’t have to be academic to produce knowledge, but some academics do have useful skills. (I think on second thought that I was slightly too quick to dismiss radical theory just above, but I am much much much more skeptical of it than I am of something like PAR that actually involves working on the ground.)
Anyway, does this give you a better sense of more plausible forms of engaged research? I’ll try to assemble more of an archive of examples of this work — it’s just not my specialty but I really do think we will find much more than you are expecting, even if most of it is probably involved with race, gender, education, indigenous people’s rights (a huge applied anthro topic), and other things that aren’t marxist-syndicalist. And I think we should look at the Handbook of Action Research, (eds. Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury) for more examples — I haven’t but I’m told it’s the best guide to that lit. Will check it out next time I get to the lib!
one final thing. I do think real evidence should be required for claims of political involvement. Absolutely! Though in your view, do the examples I just mentioned from our own union count as evidence that the scholarship in question is engaged? And at any rate, I don’t think I happen to be in circles where that kind of false claim circulates very broadly… most academics I meet have no pretentions of extrascholarly significance. OK. Case closed? Though it would still be worth working through some examples when I find some good, well-documented ones…
happy new year,
take care, eli
Comment by eli — December 29, 2008 @ 11:32 am
one last thought — what about chomsky’s stuff on media or on history, or howard zinn, or finkelstein? politically engaged research??
eli
Comment by eli — December 29, 2008 @ 11:47 am
aha, and another really interesting example: peter singer’s philosophy of animal rights, which seems to be practically foundational for the contemporary animal rights movement, such that practically everybody i’ve ever talked to seems to have read him and is influenced by his arguments? seems like a tremendous piece of engaged theory… according to his wikipedia article, his influence is exaggerated, but it seems pretty substantial to me.
Comment by eli — December 29, 2008 @ 2:02 pm
Yep, ditto on Nate’s assessment that we all generally agree on the difficulties of effectively radical scholarship (and on the need to be vigilant about critiquing the reactionary effects of most of academia and deflating false pretensions to radicalness) while we differ in our relative enthusiasm for possibly effective approaches to radical scholarship. I also agree with Nate’s call for evidence to back up any claims of particular scholarship’s radical impact, but with the caveat that such evidence is often very hard to assess. Eli T. presented one reason for this difficulty: the distinction between the process of doing the research and the final product (and also possibilities for presenting that research in non-academic forms). The process of the research could have radical effects (e.g., PAR research with a union on problems in membership recruitment - talking through their issues with them, producing helpful data), while the scholarly paper published on the basis of this research may never make it out of academic circles.
Another obstacle to assessing evidence of radical impact might be that radical groups often do not cite their sources (unless they are documenting their struggles well or if they are interviewed - which gives another reason for ethnographic research on such groups). But maybe this problem can be overcome if more radical activists become bloggers… Speaking of which, Eli T., can you give us the citations for the articles on the low costs of grad student unions and on the divergence between organizers and membership base? Thanks.
Eli T.’s question about the impact of public intellectuals like Zinn and Chomsky raises another aspect of the difficulty of finding evidence of radical impact. From my personal experience, both of those authors have had a pretty radicalizing effect on me, but I don’t think that I could describe any direct connections between reading them in high school and my current involvement in radical activism. Rather, reading them gave me a disposition toward critical thinking about politics, society, and history. Yet, this is not to say that we could not still attempt to make an assessment of their radical effectivity. Perhaps one way to do this would be to survey a bunch of activists/organizers who we consider to be pretty effective in creating radical change and ask them what, if any, academic authors they have found influential in radicalizing them.
I think that another interesting question that’s come out of our discussion here is the differences between academic disciplines in both their pretensions to do radical work and their abilities to do this effectively. Eli T.’s discipline of anthropology seems to have developed a niche where academics can possibly do such radical work in effective ways while being rewarded for it. I imagine that sociology, geography, and some of the “studies” also have created such radical niches (my discipline, political science, has very marginalized radical niches within each of its sub-disciplines; I assume that history does too - e.g., with the ‘radical history review’). I’d be really interested in reading self-assessments of the ‘radical effectiveness’ of this work across different disciplines, comparing different methods in relation to different research objects and contexts. Do you know of any cross-disciplinary studies on this question (perhaps under the name of inter/post/anti-disciplinarity)?
Thanks for keeping this discussion alive! So long as we continue to live the balancing act of academia and activism, I don’t think we’ll ever rid ourselves of these questions.
No war (but class war) in the new year,
Eli
Comment by Eli — December 29, 2008 @ 2:51 pm
hey friends,
As usual, I don’t have time to do this justice, but can’t resist. Re: the use of the ethnography for the anarchosyndicalist union, I’m sure such a thing could be useful, I can see how PAR might be useful too. The Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina do collective research with different groups in social movements, emphasizing process and emphasizing that the participants define the outcomes. That seems reasonable to me and could indeed prove useful. A better way to state my point then might be this:
there are criteria and methods of evaluation with regard to professional success for academics, and there are criteria and methods of evaluation with regard to utility for movements and organizations. To my mind, achieving according to the latter is what matters most, politically speaking. I imagine we’re on the same page here. I also think that these two sets or types of criteria are not likely to overlap, except in rare situations, and are more likely to be in tension, contradiction, or at least mutual indifference. What I meant (though I didn’t have it this worked out) by my skepticism was that I don’t think it’s likely that one can perform one action or set of actions which satisfy both sets of criteria at the same time - such that one is simultaneously and via the same actions a radical and an academic. (That the two hats are one hat, or that the two tracks are one track; sorry for the mushy metaphors, best I can do.) Is that clearer?
More from me later.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 29, 2008 @ 10:29 pm
The two hats metaphor helps clarify things a bit - there are two distinct sets of criteria for professional success and radical movement success. However, as I argued in comment #17 above, that dichotomy is too limiting, because there are really three hats (or two hats and a balaclava), which I described as our three roles of: a) working as academics within our professional and disciplinary norms, b) working to change the academy, including its norms, and c) working as activists in movements. On this more complex view, you still are correct that in the current configuration of academia we are not likely to have overlap between the normative criteria for (a) and (c). However, there is still a small space of overlap, relatively larger or smaller in different disciplines (e.g., maybe larger in anthropology where PAR is valued and can earn professional advancement). Then, on my “three hats” view, we can ask how we can use the balaclava of changing the academy (b) to increase the space of overlap of (a) and (c). (E.g., by organizing an academic union that allows academics more resources and power, so that they’re not caught up in competition for scarce rewards, and then they can do more work on activist research projects and promoting alternative journals that value such projects).
I hope that I’m not sounding too utopian here… I’m just trying to sketch possible hopeful avenues for change (and to offer another justifying frame for our academic union activities).
happy holidays!
-Eli M.
Comment by Eli M. — December 30, 2008 @ 12:07 am
hi Eli,
Fair point. I’m hesitant about claims to wearing more than one hat at the same time, though, particularly in regard to b). I think a lot of the history of the left and the labor movement has involved a recurring theme of sectoral interests being passed of as universal interests - one stratum of the working class claiming to act for the whole class, or marxists talking that way, etc. I think there’s a similar dynamic in a lot of academic-speak already, in that what we do is supposed to be universally important, good for all of society. So I’m quite nervous about claims to overlap particularly between b) and c), probably even more than I am about a) and c). That’s not to say we can’t or shouldn’t pursue an agenda along/under each set/type of criteria, but that we should carefully scrutinize claims to fall under more than one type.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — December 30, 2008 @ 1:15 am
hi Nate and Elim,
I completely agree that there are different and frequently contradictory criteria of evaluation in different institutional/political contexts, and that, with possibly a very few historically interesting exceptions, a single action is very unlikely to maximally satisfy both such criteria. Nate, I really like this revised formulation, which seems to me much easier to think about than the general question of whether radical scholarship is possible. I still think, with Eli m., that there’s a space of possibility, although a tiny one, for hybrid actions, like PAR, in which the research process is a mix of ethnography and political involvement, where one’s praxis itself is designed to yield both a political and a scholarly result. (Come to think of it, I have a friend here who works with the MST in Brazil and I think his stuff is pretty hybrid. Have to ask to be sure. He’s in anthro and social work. Might be good example for us to chew on.)
Anyway, I also wanted to draw out out a new dimension of the discussion that’s emerging: the relation between one’s (radical academic) *activities* and one’s *identities* (which is invoked by the “hats” metaphors, or talk about being “simultaneously and via the same actions a radical and an academic”). Seems to me that one’s identity can be pretty distinct from one’s practices… eg, I’m doing union-related stuff, but would almost never call myself a union organizer. It’s not very useful in talking to depoliticized grad students to project any kind of political identity, in my experience. Anyway, claims about social identity, either as activists or as academics, are always fraught with all kinds of tensions and dynamics about securing influence, group membership, authority, etc., and it seems to me that, in evaluating radical scholarship, we might do well to ignore whatever identities people claim, and just evaluate their work. Or at least, evaluate their identity claims separately from their work. This would definitely apply to leftist academics’ claims about their interests being identical with those of the working class at large (nate, do you have a good example of that?).
Citations… the thing about grad student unions being fairly wage neutral is by Ron Ehrenberg from Cornell. I think this is the relevant paper, if you look at the section on grad student unions:
http://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/forums/pdfs/EhrenbergExc91802.pdf
The other source was: Rhoads, Robert A. and Gary Rhoades (2006). Graduate student unionization as a postindustrial social movement: Identity, ideology and the contested US academy. In The university, state, and market: The political economy of globalization in the Americas. R. A. Rhoads and C. A. Torres, eds. Stanford, Stanford University Press: 279-298.
Rhoads and Rhoades, it turns out, have published some other articles on grad student unions (see Journal of Higher Education 76(3) and Review of Higher Education 26(2) for more info; haven’t read it all myself).
Comment by eli t. — December 30, 2008 @ 12:52 pm
a couple of things on the ‘empirical details’ front — an animal rights friend of mine says that in his view Singer isn’t actually all that widely read in that community, and that to the extent he’s influential, it’s because his philosophy of animal rights is objectively true and in agreement with basic human intuitions about alleviating suffering. (sigh… i guess the mark of the truly committed is a belief in the *objective* truth of one’s political doctrine.) so, seems to be not as good an example as i would have liked.
and graeber answered an email of mine to say that he thinks the best radical research is extra-academic (cites colectivo situaciones in argentina) but that anthropological research has been central in developing a political imagination, or more specifically, a sense of possibility about alternative social orders. that’s a more mediated kind of political effectiveness, like that which eli m. mentioned about chomsky’s impact for him, which maybe we should think more about too.
Comment by eli — January 1, 2009 @ 2:30 pm
hey gents,
I think Chomsky and Zinn are wicked important. Zinn totally had a huge impact on me, like pretty directly. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be who I ended up being and wouldn’t have done the political stuff I did without his work. (Likewise with John Stoltenberg… and Propagandhi!) I may be splitting hairs here but I don’t see their work as academic work, though, or at least not their important work. Chomsky’s a linguist and that’s what he’s rewarded for academically. To some extent, his success as a linguist affords him the room to do what he does politically. In terms of his political writings, though, I don’t know that he’s much different than journalists like Robert Fisk or independent writers like Staughton Lynd (Lynd’s probably a better parallel because he makes his living as a lawyer and so has some independent income which allows him more freedom in writing, Fisk can probably do what he wants now too, my point is that it’s different or can be different when it’s your livelihood). It seems to me that part of what we’re talking about is the role of cultural/intellectual production. That’s another thing, I think. Related, but not the same as cultural/intellectual *producers* nor the same as professional cultural/intellctual producers, nor the same as that subset which academics comprise.
On that, Eli T, if David means that anthropological *type* research has been important re: political vision and hope, I agree entirely. If he means that professional anthropologicsts have been important in that way, I’m sure they have for some people but that definitely doesn’t speak to my experiences or to many people I know, as far as I know my close friends’ and comrades’ intellectual-political biographies. (I think again here I’m hung up on constituencies….)
Re: Singer, I think Singer’s a good example of an academic pursuing a topic that matters to him, and trying to do some small part, battering down arguments against the positions he opposes. That’s great, even if his impact beyond the university is small or hard to measure. I think that’s probably most of what most academic folk are likely to achieve.
take care,
Nate
ps - Eli M, I’m getting on a bus in like an hour and a half to head back to the cities. Let’s go climbing again soon, give me a shout.
Comment by Nate — January 2, 2009 @ 10:18 am
pps - I had a dream last night that I was at some meeting and someone made this joke:
What do you call an academic who is relevant to the rest of society?
Noam Chomsky.
Not sure what to make of that.
Comment by Nate — January 3, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
And another thing…!
I just remembered a line from an interview with Michael Hardt and looked it up. The interview is here - http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns61/hardt.htm - and here’s a quoted bit:
“Toni [Negri] in particular seemed to think, and he still seems to think, that he can have his political life and his intellectual life completely wedded together. I liked that idea. They seemed to me quite irreconcilable at the time, and sometimes still do.”
I think there’s some resonance here with Nick’s recent discussion of ontology and politics (part of a conversation which I’ve only partly understood and thus only partly followed) here - http://accursedshare.blogspot.com/2009/01/some-notes-on-ontology-and-politics.html
I also think there’s another issue related to this - Hart speaks of intellectual life and political life. Some of my political work is boring, at least intellectually boring, but that doesn’t make it bad politically. Some of it is incredibly intellectually satisfying, which doesn’t make it good politically. Some of the intellectually exciting bits of political stuff is at least as high quality and satisfying intellectually as the better moments of my formal education. And some of my formal education hasn’t been all that enjoyable or worthwhile intellectually. That’s the other bit - there’s three terms, intellectual, political, and academic. They overlap but aren’t identical and in my experience anyway the relationship between any two terms is characterized by tension, contradiction, or problems at least as often as it’s characterized by reinforcement, mutuality, or benefits.
Comment by Nate — January 20, 2009 @ 12:34 pm