This Academic Life

"I'm not brave enough for politics"

2005-06-17T14:29:00.000-04:00

There is a scene in Revenge of the Sith, immediately after Anakin manages to crash-land the burned-out husk of Grievious' flagship on a convenient Coruscanti runway, which involves an exchange between Anakin and Obi-Wan on the subject of politics. Obi-Wan has always cautioned Anakin about his political contacts and ties, but in this case he goes a little further and declares, in a self-depricating way, that he's not brave enough for politics -- so Anakin, the hero of the day, should go enjoy his "glorious day with the politicians" while Obi-Wan goes to report to the Jedi Council.

Obi-Wan's kidding, kind of. But I think that his line is entirely appropriate to a reading of the entire Star Wars cycle as an extended treatment of the dangers of combining absolute ideals and political power -- a reading which I think more than defensible, since the final reasoning behind Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader is all about how Anakin's absolute commitment to the fulfillment of his morally good ends (preserving Padmé's life, ending the civil war, creating a stable and secure society) leads him to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of sufficient power to achieve those ends. Which, of course, results in Anakin's corruption as the means (achieving power) steadily takes the place of the original ends and becomes its own justification and its own goal.

This is an old story, of course. It's been told on film before, perhaps most brilliantly in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane; Lucas includes a cinematic homage to Welles in the scenes just before Anakin and Obi-Wan's climactic lightsaber duel, employing the same deep-focus technique to keep both foreground and background faces sharp that Welles regularly uses in his portrait of the corruption of a young and fortunate idealist. And it's the plot of Macbeth, figures into Hamlet, and can be seen on display in numerous other great works of tragedy. And the message is almost always the same: politics corrupts, because its currency is power rather than ideals, so one only survives and prospers in politics by sacrificing one's ideals to practical necessities.

Pretty bleak. But I don't think that this is the last word on the subject. Not surprisingly, I think that Weber has something important to teach us here, something that has to do with the mechanisms through which the corruption of ideals happens in political life. As Weber describes the situation in "Politics as a Vocation," the corruption of ideals takes place largely when someone without the vocation for politics gets involved in political struggles. The person with a vocation for politics is a person who is capable of responsibly balancing normative ideals and practical necessities, and thus pursuing an "ethics of responsibility" in which hard choices are made and their effects acknowledged. The person with a vocation for politics owns up to the consequences of her or his actions, and does not try to mollify critics by pointing to the good goal that she or he was striving for. "She meant well" or "his motives were pure" doesn't cut it in politics -- and can in fact lead to disastrous consequences.

The problem, as Weber diagnoses it, is that people without a vocation for politics, and thus not operating according to an ethic of responsibility, get involved in things and try to operate according to a very different logic. instead of an ethic of responsibility, they act according to an "ethic of ultimate ends," according to which they take absolute ideals and try their hardest to implement them politically. Here are my ideals; let me now try to act on them. This runs into problems because exercising political power -- which is inseparable from violence and other forms of coercion -- requires you to engage in morally questionable acts. So you can't stay pure. In an ethic of ultimate ends, this trafficking in immoral activity is justified in the name of the goal pursued, which paradoxically makes it more likely to happen than if the politician didn't have such a convenient rationalization ready-to-hand. The ethic of ultimate ends thus devolves into a pure instrumentalism, in which a morally pure (and in many respects irreproachable) goal stands above any number of reprehensible acts but doesn't seem to have any ability to restrain those acts or to prevent them from occurring.

So the implication would seem to be that only those with a vocation for politics should engage in political struggle. How does this connect to Obi-Wan's line? I would argue that people with a vocation for politics have to have three kinds of bravery:

First, they need to have the courage of their convictions, a kind of inner confidence that gives them the certainty that their moral stance is in some sense correct, and thus worthy of being pursued practically.

Second, they have to be bold enough to be able to admit to themselves that they are not going to be able to get their stance enacted in any kind of a pure fashion. Compromises will of necessity be made; partial solutions will have to suffice; visions will be only imperfectly realized.

Third, they have to have the fortitude to, as Weber puts it, say "in spite of it all!" and continue with the slow boring of hard boards that constitutes the heart of genuine political struggle.

Obi-Wan is a brave man; he does face both Grevious and Jango Fett in single combat at different times, and he certainly stands up for what he believes. So he has the first kind of courage. What I think he is acknowledging in his comment to Anakin is that he lacks some combination of the second and the third kinds of courage -- in a sense, he loves his ideals too much to compromise them, and isn't willing to press on with full knowledge that they have been compromised. Instead, he'd rather keep those ideals out of the political process.

Contrast Anakin, who is for sure acting with an ethic of ultimate ends. The Sith are evil, so executing them (as he does Count Dooku) is good. Saving Padmé is good, so betraying the Jedi is justified. Palpatine has the knowledge of power that Anakin needs, so murdering Jedi younglings and trying to kill his best friend Obi-Wan is acceptable. Darth Vader, a man without a vocation for politics who is in a position of political power…a real Weberian nightmare.

Obi-Wan's admission doesn't make him a coward, however. It makes him someone with a different vocation -- a Jedi vocation. A vocation for science, actually. A vocation that is more concerned with integrity and consistency than with practical results, and leads to witnessing rather than to administering. But that's another post.

[Posted with ecto]

Top four and bottom six

2005-06-13T10:29:00.000-04:00

Because I like stalling and procrastinating a bit, here are a few things I really abhor about summer teaching and a few things that are not so bad, sort of:

Six Worst Things About Summer Teaching

six weeks to cover fifteen weeks' worth of material
two class sessions a week, each of which is three hours long: too long to lecture, too long for a single discussion
no time for students to digest material between classes -- no time to let them live with thorny problems and wrestle with them outside of the classroom
perpetual class prep, since the sessions come one right after another
perpetual grading, sometimes with overlapping assignments that need to be graded right now
students who are mainly interested in getting credit for a requirement, and bring a somewhat lackadaisical attitude to their assignments and class participation

Four and-I-use-this-word-loosely "Best" Things About Summer Teaching

ability to afford replacement furnace, since the heating element on our old one cracked
ability to afford therapeutic summer camp for autistic son
forced opportunity to update lecture slides, some of which will be re-used in Fall courses
opportunity to marvel at the fact that, even though the conditions are considerably less than ideal, a couple of students still get it while going through the courses, and come to question fundamental assumptions that they formerly held to be true

On balance, I'd still greatly prefer not to have to do summer teaching. One day, perhaps.

Now, back to grading. Sigh.

[Posted with ecto]

University for sale

2005-06-09T19:12:00.000-04:00

Ah, summer -- when the bastion of learning that we call the university gives way to a group of buildings with a prime location and decent facilities to support a slew of small conferences. And other events. Walking across campus today I had to take a different path through the quad (university's gotta have nice grassy quads, right?) because my usual path was blocked off by the some group of realtors (I think) who were having a series of game competitions: obstacle course, something involving water and a tricycle, a hit-the-golf-ball contest, etc. Behind me were several team leaders from some other competitive activity, talking about how their kids were going to do in the day's events; I didn't listen closely because I was, imagine this, walking to class and thinking about what I was about to teach. On a university campus. Go figure.

I hate being reminded that in this present culture, a university is a business like any other: taking in fees, processing bodies, making a profit or at least breaking even (hey, it costs a lot to give those administrators their exceptionally high salaries). I hate having it flaunted as I walk from the parking lot -- the cheap parking lot, since the one next to my office is too expensive for me to pay for it, and yes, we have to pay for parking even though we work here -- to my office, and have to dodge campers and tour groups and people who were entirely too peppy for 9am, dressed in matching t-shirts as they prepared to triumph in the three-legged race ... on the quad around which stand buildings that house faculty offices and classrooms.

I hate it when various forces and persons conspire to turn my vocation into a mere job.

[Posted with ecto]

On the absence of sufficient financial resources

2005-06-05T13:35:00.000-04:00

Leave it to Bitch, PhD to say what a lot of us have undoubtedly been thinking: the financial incentives in academia are seriously fucked up. Personally, I know that I am definitely doing less well financially now than I was while in graduate school; having two kids -- one of whom is autistic, which means among other things that he needs expensive therapies that our crappy health insurance package doesn't cover very much of the cost of -- and owning a house will do that, I suppose, and my university-provided "travel funding" doesn't cover more than one conference a year. To say nothing about books and other supplies, almost all of which have to be paid for out of pocket.

And on top of that, let's think for a moment about the time commitments. I have a stack of journals that must be four feet high sitting in my office; those are the journals that I haven't read, and when I say "haven't read" I mean "haven't unwrapped form their plastic, or have unwrapped and then tossed onto the pile" for about the past four years. Why is there all of this backlog? Because in addition to my regular teaching load during the year, I have to teach two summer courses just to pay the basic bills. And the rest of the summer -- all six weeks out of the year that I am not actively teaching multiple courses -- is either spent writing madly (writing a lot while teaching is, I have learned, a recipe for disaster; I can edit and revise while classes are in session, but if I try to write something from scratch I end up trying to juggle too many balls at once and usually dropping all of them) or trying to make up the backlog of other professional commitments (supervision of theses and dissertations, peer reviews, etc.). And the backlog just gets bigger and bigger.

So I ask you: how am I supposed to keep current in my field when I haven't the time to do so because I am teaching additional courses to pay the bills? And while I'm at it, where am I supposed to find the time to be a human being, see my wife and kids, and so forth?

I'm very glad that I'm not in this for the money. On the other hand, it would be very nice to have adequate finances, instead of continually refinancing the house to consolidate accumulated debt.

[Posted with ecto]

Not dead yet

2005-05-24T21:56:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't completely vanished off of the face of the earth. Between lingering Spring grading, summer teaching, and the release of the new Star Wars film I've just been exceptionally busy. I'll get back to posting in a few days, I hope. Stay tuned.

[Posted with ecto]

Politics, academic and otherwise

2005-05-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

Call me crazy, but part of the reason I decided to become an academic was because I have, in Weber's terms, a vocation for science rather than a vocation for politics. The difference involves the kind of sensibility that one brings to one's work rather than the empirical setting in which one concretely performs one's work, even though Weber does make a very big deal about the specific history of how the state developed in Europe and the implications that this specific history has for political issues. but the basic distinction between the scientist and the politician is dispositional: the politician seeks to enact concrete programs by proportionately combining categorical ethical imperatives with the practical necessities of governing (knowing when to focus on conviction, and when to focus on consequences), whereas the scientist seeks to generate knowledge about phenomena through the rigorous, disciplined application of value-laden presuppositions that cannot themselves be justified scientifically. This distinction drives a sword into the heart of Marx's dictum that the point of philosophy is to change the world, replacing it with the more Nietzschean sentiment that action cannot be rationally grounded -- and, indeed, that trying to do so would produce all manner of horrific results, since operating with a pure ethic of conviction while commanding the vast destructive resources of a modern state would invariably lead to extremely violent consequences.

Now, Weber's distinction focuses on politics narrowly understood, and the topics he takes up in his famous "vocation" lectures are specific to states, political parties, and the like. But even though not every organization has the same kind of capacity for violent force (I tend to reserve terms like "violence" for those activities that, in principle, can kill you if pressed far enough, and are in fact intended to do so even though the motivation of the person engaging in the violence might not be to kill the victim -- to my mind, threatening to kill someone is violence, sparring with them in a rule-governed arena is not), organizations are constitutively coercive inasmuch as participants in them seek to coordinate action in ways that fall short of idealized rational consensus. And even idealized rational consensus is coercive unless one buys the position that somehow Reason sets you free if you adhere to its strictures and dictates; as far as I'm concerned the jury's still out on that one, so for the time being I'll stick to my earlier claim: human social organizations are coercive in principle. And as such we shouldn't be surprised that we find "politicking," power struggles, attempts to outflank and entrap and connive and ensnare and downright obliterate opponents, pretty much everywhere. Even in academia.

But this introduces a wrinkle: how can there be "science" in the sense of attentive, rigorous production of knowledge if even scientific organizations are shot through with politics? One solution would be for the administrative aspects of the scientific organization to be completely separated from the science aspects, so the scientists do science and the administrators give them the proper resources to do that. But this doesn't work, because particular scientists disagree about what kinds of tasks should be given priority and where the resources should go; resource scarcity exacerbates the problem. Add to this the fact that scientific researchers are human beings, so various kinds of petty personal grudges, feelings of marginalization or centrality, and the like often infiltrate their organizational deliberations, and you have a recipe for ongoing political clash.

The disturbing thing about this from my perspective is that the result is to politicize our analytical, theoretical, scientific "prosthetics" -- those tools, conceptual and otherwise, that we use to make (sense of) the world. Politicizing those prosthetics means converting them into weapons of war, abandoning their logical sense and their philosophical specificity in favor of their value as campaign slogans, rallying-cries, or other forms of underhanded bludgeoning. When the choice between intellectual integrity and instrumental efficacy is posed, the latter course is chosen, at least for the purpose of the struggle in question. The result is eerily similar to the "politicizing" of scientific concepts characteristic of those forms of critical theory seeking to affect the world by theorizing on behalf of some interest (often "the proletariat," but one could easily read certain neoliberal economists as the organic intellectuals of finance capital, were one so inclined), although in some ways it's even worse because sincere critical theorists try to balance their scientific and political commitments [although in my experience they are usually politicians when push comes to shove] whereas the politicizing characteristic of debate within the academy about resources and programs seems to drain our analytics of almost all meaningful scientific value.

Case in point: a conference I co-organized recently to try to flesh out the contours of a novel position in IR theoretical debates, one that would combine sensibilities that are not usually combined. After a day and a half of wrestling with the substantive intellectual issues involved, and beginning to map out the contentious commonplaces out of which such a position might be constructed, the conversation abruptly shifted when we started talking about common enemies -- suddenly people seemed very much inclined to sacrifice intellectual coherence for political efficacy, offering to build bridges to positions with very different ontologies by essentially downplaying the importance of those concerns for tactical advantages. Phase shift: we had been doing science, and then suddenly we were doing politics. (After all, politicized science is politics; just look at the evolution "debates" going on in Kansas at the moment.)

I don't want to be misunderstood here. Science, as far as I am concerned, is not a passionless effort to build consensus based on data. Rather, science is a particular kind of clash in which value-commitments are transmuted into analytical devices and then those devices square off. But there are rules for a scientific debate, rules involving the importance of coherence and consistency, the value of clarity and logical derivation, and what we might call the sovereignty of argument -- you can't win a point unless you can produce a good argument supporting it. I am skeptical that this will ever lead to some kind of Rationally Defensible Truth, but it will at least produce something like a victory for the strongest argument, with the caveat that what seems strong now may seem exceptionally weak in the future, and vice versa.

There is, to my mind, a certain kind of nobility to a scientific debate, which is why I think of it as (s)wordplay: knights facing off with weapons drawn, adhering to specific and strict codes of engagement as they seek to press their claims. Bizarre to outsiders, who might wonder why certain moves are not employed when it might seem advantageous to do so. But the effect of that deliberate narrowing and focusing of effort generates the kind of aesthetically pleasing combat characteristic of a good sporting match or an epic lightsaber duel (which is of course my paradigm case for this stuff).

So what pisses me off about academic politics is that it results in a cheapening of the enterprise of science, at least temporarily.

With sensibilities like mine I'm very glad that I'm not "in" politics. The whole "ethic of responsibility" thing doesn't sit well with me; from where I stand it looks like a set of unacceptable compromises. As an ethical matter I am certainly in favor of politicians who know well how to do this; as an interpretive matter I am full of praise for those politicians who can effectively balance and combine ethical absolutes with practical necessities (FDR being my personal favorite) while condemning the alternative (the current leadership of the US, who self-admittedly despise those living in the "reality-based community," are a great example of people who shouldn't be politicians because they obviously lack the sense of proportion that such an occupation calls for). But I am uncomfortable doing it myself, whether inside or outside of the academy. Me with actual capacity to make and enforce political decisions would be a dangerous situation indeed, since I'd most probably brook no compromise and end up condoning the worst kinds of coercion and violence in the name of my own gods and daemons. Not a good idea. So instead I'll keep serving them myself, and keep trying (perhaps in vain?) to construct situations in which other people serving other gods are nonetheless willing to enter into noble combat with me.

Maybe doing this will require some political compromises. The methodology debate got us the replacement of the existing statistics requirement with two sequential courses designed to cover multiple methodologies, including the proper philosophy of science considerations that ground each of them -- not what I wanted, exactly, but close enough for the moment. And the IR theory workshop did have a fair amount of intellectual content. Engaging in political struggle for the sake of hollowing out space for science (my kind of science, at least) seems acceptable, although I'm more comfortable letting other people do the actual politicking. And I'd be happier still if the politicking would just go away so I could get back to doing what I think I'm called to do: think, debate, teach, research, write.

So I am a political scientist who, in the end, doesn't really like politics all that much. Even worse, I'm a Nietzschean trying to maintain something like the constitutive autonomy of science, which you'd think would be somewhat difficult to do. But at least I get to have Weber (and Wittgenstein) on my team, even if I am surrounded by faculty colleagues who don't seem all that interested in what Obi-Wan Kenobi once called the use of "an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age." And I count myself fortunate in the sparring partners I have found, and trust that there will be others in the future.

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Anger, aggression

2005-04-18T23:08:00.000-04:00

Bill Amend -- modern sage -- produced a very funny comic this Sunday, at least a comic very funny to those of us proud to self-identify as Star Wars geeks. The basic set-up involves speculations about why Anakin Skywalker turns to the Dark Side of the Force in the forthcoming Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. [Note that such speculation is actually unnecessary now that the Episode III novel and comic-book has been released, so that anyone who wants to know the answer can just go read the book. I have purchased the book but have not read it yet and do not plan to before seeing the film for the first time.]

But Master Amend missed one important possibility: Anakin turns to the Dark Side because of a conflict involving the methodology course at the Jedi Academy, the one in which he is told -- to his great chagrin -- that there is only one correct way to pull the ears off of a Gundark, that his investigations into the lived experiences of citizens getting the short end of the stick in the decaying Republic aren't valid empirical claims because of the unrepresentativeness of the sample, and that sitting around meditating on the nature of the Authentic Self is an appropriate way to confront evil. "Fuck THIS," Anakin cries in class one day, and charges the professor with lightsaber drawn, "and how's this for a representative sample of PAIN AND SUFFERING??"

Cosmic balance tilts. Lord Vader, rise.

I know how he feels.

Today I have twice had to deal with the kind of narrow-minded intellectual incompetence that might well have pushed Anakin over the edge; I know that several times I had to restrain myself from letting loose with the verbal lightsaber blows. Probably a good thing, given the contexts in question.

The first one was the (in)famous Committee where we are debating the methodology requirement(s) for our Ph.D. program. Yes, today was round three (or four, depending on how we count "rounds") on the perennial problem of whether the students should be taught things other than statistics, and whether all of these things should receive equal weight in the program as a whole. My proposal, which I rather like, involves replacing the current one-semester stats course [which some of my colleagues persist in calling a "quantitative" class, completely and perhaps willfully ignoring my repeated insistence that there are non-statistical quantitative techniques and that what we actually teach here is not a quantitative class but a statistics class and that statistical inference is about case-comparison, not about whether you use numbers or not] with a year-long, multiple-methodology course which would equip students to make intelligent choices about which broad research methodology was most appropriate for their specific research question, and to be able to defend that choice on the only grounds that such choices can be meaningfully defended: philosophical, conceptual, ethical grounds. And after this course students could go out and get advanced methodological training in whatever approach was most appropriate for their dissertation research.

The Committee is largely deadlocked because those with a variety of hesitations about my proposal have formed a loose coalition. This is very weird because most of the people opposed to my proposal seem to actually be just raising some legitimate questions about the details, but when they discuss my proposal as a whole certain misunderstandings seem to creep in (e.g.: my proposal is to "drop statistics from the Ph.D. curriculum" -- not so, not so at all, I simply want to make sure that it is one tool in the toolbox as opposed to a dominating Master Logic). It is as though there were an unacknowledged position at work here: only stats count as social science, and only stats should be required of all students; if they want to do that other stuff they can do it on their own, but when it comes to their proposals they'll have to make them somehow conform to the logic of statistical inference because that's the only thing that constitutes "rigorous social science."

This seems to me to be an indefensible position, given all of the work that has been done in the philosophy of science over the past few decades. If I hear one more person say "well, we just need to have a qualitative methods course alongside the quantitative methods course," I will in fact go ballistic -- since "qualitative methods" in such a context means "small-n statistics." Rounding out my top-five list of frustrating comments that I keep hearing in this discussion:

"first we should teach basic research design, so that the students get the fundamentals" -- as though there were "fundamentals" that occurred across methodological approaches that were any more specific than general injunctions like "have a clear research question" and "don't make up your data from scratch";

"good research starts with a hypothesis and tries to falsify it with evidence" -- which is simply not true for modes of inquiry other than statistical/comparative;

the equation of "empirical" (and, as mentioned above, "quantative") with "statistical";

and the ever-popular "it takes more time to learn how to do statistics, but you can learn that qualitative stuff in much less time" -- a favorite of people who don't get math and are in some sense afraid of numbers and equations.

AAAAARRRGH.

Actually, today reached new lows, since the Committee actually asked me -- can you believe this? -- to develop an alternative proposal so that the we would have more than one reform proposal to consider. My initial inclination was simply to snap "are you high?" or something equally dismissive, since this maneuver seemed a rather transparent bit of parliamentary delaying-tactics. Like I would do their work for them or something. So I refused, telling them to articulate their own proposal; they are now going to do so. But the sheer audacity of their request still stuns me, since it represents an abdication of the basic requirement of a deliberative committee process: people bring their points to the table and discuss them, whereupon the committee votes or otherwise comes to a resolution of the issue. It's not my fault that they hadn't articulated their own counter-proposal yet; we've only been talking about this for months. Ample time for them to have come up with something.

But now we're in a holding pattern to give them time to formulate an alternative counter-proposal. Maybe at that point we can have what I really think that we need: a situation in which clear positions are spelled out, and we have a debate and then put the issue to a vote and get some resolution on the issue. I am a much bigger fan of clearly-defined lines of disagreement than I am of a less frank discussion of the serious conceptual and philosophical issues involved -- issues that cut right to the heart of the Ph.D. program's identity. So let's have it out and come to some kind of resolution, instead of continually re-treading the same ground and getting nowhere…which is wont to happen in committee meetings.

Almost turned to the Dark Side completely then. Almost did so again reading the reviewer's reports and the editor's decision on a piece that a co-author and I have been trying to get published for a while now. There was a split among the external reviewers, with the second reviewer saying "these revisions are absolutely fine, I look forward to seeing the piece in print" and the other fundamentally not getting what we're doing in the piece and disagreeing with those things that he or she did get. Decision: reject. And this for a piece that has already been cited in several publications by people (not us), and generally praised in a number of quarters.

The common thread here -- besides my repeated temptation to pull out a lightsaber and start chopping people to shreds -- is the general lack of understanding of philosophical issues in the social sciences. Reviewer 1, who hated/misunderstood the piece, seems not to have had the conceptual and philosophical equipment to really appreciate our argument, and the absurdly short length of a journal-article does not give us room to provide enough of the background. And in any event, why is it our responsibility to tell people what their argument is before we array ourselves against it? Shouldn't they, you know, understand what they are arguing? Is that really too much to ask? "Sure, we should teach multiple methodologies, as long as everyone gets the basics of articulating falsifiable hypotheses" is a contradiction in terms. "The authors can't possibly be arguing what they say they're arguing, so I'm going to assume that they are actually arguing what I think they ought to argue and then take them to task for not doing it well enough -- and ignore those places in their piece where they directly confront misreadings like mine" is a strategic misrepresentation. "No one could possibly disagree with these obvious and self-evident truths" is liberal conceit.

I tell you, it's enough to drive anyone to the arms of the Sith. Plus, no Ewoks.

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O you who turn the wheel

2005-04-13T07:05:00.000-04:00

T.S. Eliot must have lived on an academic calendar:

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

April really is the worst in the American academic calendar, I think. All of the projects that students have been working on all year start to trickle in as rough drafts needing comments -- just about the same time that book orders and other course design stuff for the Fall are due, and typical end-of-semester things start to happen (suddenly everyone wants to come to office hours to talk about their final papers, and the backlog of in-semester grading that has been piling up starts to look more ominous as the date for turning in final grades looms). It's worse for me this year because I also have an end-of-the-month conference to help plan and coordinate, an ongoing committee battle to fight, two side projects that involve extra meetings with administrators and other colleagues, and oh yes, two summer courses (have to each in the summer in order to make the mortgage payments) to prep for.

April is the cruelest month, indeed.

[The full text of Eliot's brilliant poem The Waste Land -- which is of course not about anything as prosaic as having a lot of work to do in a short amount of time -- can be found here.]

[Posted with ecto]

PS

2005-04-11T12:35:00.000-04:00

In the same interview, Robinson declares: "Numbers don't win you ballgames, I don't care what they say." Sure. Last time I looked, numbers don't even play ballgames, so they can't win or lose the game in any event. Player statistics aren't actors; they do not exercise agency; they can't be responsible for anything. Players, and teams, and umpires, and ballparks, and even the weather can be responsible for a particular game being won or lost, in that we can attribute responsibility and actor-hood to those factors without committing the kind of category confusion associated with praising or blaming "the numbers." Josh Beckett pitched a lights-out game against the Nationals yesterday; Beckett's numbers didn't do that, although they record it. Antonio Osuna has a season ERA of somewhere north of 43 (!); his ERA didn't do anything, although it certainly records the fact that he's having a very shitty year thus far.

Statistics doing things would be like structures doing things. Both baseball statistics and accounts of system structure are ideal-typical depictions of past actions; one can use these analytics to interrogate and perhaps account for specific occurrences in retrospect, but projecting them into the future -- assuming that "global capitalism" will endure or that guys who are now batting .500 will still be doing so in September -- is an assumption for the sake of argument, a kind of thought experiment that may help to illuminate certain dynamics but doesn't actually produce knowledge about the future in any definitive sense. I can account for Beckett's performance yesterday by noting that he performed up to his usual excellent level, and explore this by delving into the specific statistics about how opponents hit (or, in this case, didn't hit) against him, etc. But the fact remains that his performance, measured statistically, is just an ideal-typical abstraction useful for making sense of concrete individual events.

Numbers don't win you ballgames. True. But if you are winning ballgames, you'll have good numbers, since the numbers are just a more precise way of analyzing how games are won and lost.

Analysts always run after practitioners, analyzing what they do and trying to put it into some sort of meaningful context. That's our job. And those analyses -- particularly the ones that raise uncomfortable facts -- can hopefully provide the raw material for producing more informed, more internally consistent and more morally defensible practices.

But they still won't make you, the analyst, any better at getting the bat on the ball.

[Posted with ecto]

Fantasy baseball

2005-04-11T11:53:00.000-04:00

I have been playing fantasy baseball in a league involving some of my colleagues and former students for several years now; I never win. I usually don't come in dead last, but I've never ended up in the top three or four. (The Dean is in the league, and I usually beat him, which is the only part of the standings I ultimately care about.) I've ben thinking a bit about why, especially since the season has gotten underway and some of my high draft picks have gotten off to slow starts; while not entirely unexpected, it has caused me to reflect on my strategy and wonder about my relative lack of success.

Part of my problem, I have come to realize, is in the initial stage of a fantasy baseball season: drafting players for one's fantasy team. It's not that I don't do my homework; I know which players I want, who looks likely to do well, and what kind of balance of scoring categories I'd like to have. What I have zippo clue about is how to arrange my draft picks (this year we had a live draft; in past years we've just ranked players and let the computer make the actual selections for us) so that I get what I want. This stage requires not just knowing about baseball players and their records, but knowing something about how others in the fantasy league are likely to arrange their picks. Why? Because otherwise you can end up wasting a draft pick by selecting a player earlier than you had to. If I know that no one is likely to select Mike Mussina until the ninth or tenth round of the draft, I can wait until then and he'll still be available, which permits me to use my fifth-round pick to get someone else.

But my problem is that I have no clue what other people are likely to do. So to be on the safe side I draft people like Mussina and Rivera [his two blown saves at the beginning of the season, while a little unexpected, aren't cause for concern yet; Mo is human, after all, and does occasionally blow saves] higher than they probably needed to be drafted, leaving me with slimmer pickings when we get further down the draft order. Which is how I ended up with Milton Bradley and Doug Davis (although Davis has done pretty well thus far -- opening against weak teams will do that for you), among others.

So there's part of my problem: a lack of a "theory of mind," or an intuitive grasp of what other people are likely to be thinking or are likely to do. Individual human behavior, even individual human social action (i.e. meaningful behavior), is profoundly puzzling to me, which is partially why I'm a social scientist rather than a psychologist; psychological accounts of why an individual person did the specific thing that they did seem to me to be the slimmest obfuscation or the purest grasping at straws, and so theoretically I'm far more comfortable leaving individual behavior/action in the hands of sheer randomness and focusing on the patterned environment(s) within which that behavior/action takes place. This is not an asset in playing games, however, as I can play the board fine but am horrible at playing the other people involved.

Of course, this is not my only weakness as a fantasy baseball player. I am also needlessly sentimental in my choices, sticking with players after they cease to perform at the same level as previously, and excluding any member of the Boston Red Sox from my fantasy team (which cuts off several excellent hitters and at least one lights-out pitcher -- if Schilling actually recovers from his ankle surgery). Usually I end up with a fair number of Yankee position players; this year I decided to play the game more efficiently, didn't really rank many Yankees that highly (save Rivera and Mussina, sentimental high picks both) and ended up with a fantasy team with only one Yankee position player (Posada at catcher; would have picked Joe Mauer instead, did last year, but I was worried about his knee problems). And part of me feels bad about that! I'd almost rather have lots of Yankees and lose than have few Yankees and win -- almost. What I'd really like is to have lots of Yankees and win, obviously :-)

My final weakness as a fantasy player is that I like to imagine that I have a "feel" for baseball, a sense of who is likely to do well on any given day, a knack for putting just the right person in at just the right time … which is bullshit. Oh, I check batter-vs.-pitcher stats for some of my more marginal players, and rotate people out when they're facing someone against whom they're hitting .073 in 41 at-bats, and that kind of thing. And I play hunches sometimes, and they pay off just often enough that I keep doing it sometimes (even though they usually don't work out at all). But who am I kidding? Frank Robinson, manager of the Washington Nationals, can say things like "This game to me is done on sight and feel and knowing your personnel and having some idea about the players and the people that you're competing against." Of course he can; he's a legendary player, and he has been around long enough to develop an intuitive sense of which move is the right one at a given point in time. And I would develop such an intuitive sense how, exactly? Studying the numbers does yield insight, of course, but I certainly haven't put in the time that would really generate such a virtuoso grasp of possibilities. So I have something half-assed instead: just enough knowledge to get dangerously cocky from time to time, and make stupid moves in full confidence that I have a clue what I'm doing.

The point? Don't quit my day job ;-) and remember that fantasy baseball is a game that can be enjoyable even if one doesn't play it to the fullest.

I wonder if something similar might be true of academia-as-a-vocation. Somehow that doesn't feel right to me. I can see playing fantasy baseball "for fun," but not a performing a vocation -- not that my vocation isn't exceedingly fulfilling, but "fun" doesn't seem like the right word to describe it. I enjoy fantasy baseball, but it doesn't fulfill me. Not like my day job does.

[Posted with ecto]

Bitching

2005-04-09T02:49:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you just gotta bitch. And where better to do so than on an anonymous (or at least "discreet") blog?

1) I hate inconsistency. The ongoing methodology struggles around here -- which are actually about to end, because the important Powers That Be have already weighed in on the side of methodological diversity instead of forcing students to suffer through irrelevant statistics courses that have no relevance to their research projects -- seem in part fueled by a characterization of me as the evil corruptor of the youth. You see, somehow having me around here diverts people from the True Path of Science-with-a-capital-s-and-a-large-quantitative-data-set. And this comes out in very odd ways, such as in the following scenario: a student presented a summary of her work in progress, work that involves a method of data-collection not unlike mine (find documents, read, take ethnographic reading notes, study for emergent themes and commonplace tropes/gestures). Opponents of methodological diversity have a tendency to say that I don't do "empirical work" because I don't run regressions on large data-sets. But the audience made no such comment about the student's work. My students, and I, are regularly accused in this ridiculous manner, so I am perplexed as to why this student (who is not one of my students) was able to do basically the same kind of work and not be similarly confronted. I wonder what it is that I am doing that seems to strike some of my colleagues as "unscientific."

2) trying very hard to get out from under the massive backlog of work built up from earlier this semester, and increasingly frustrated by a) how little time I have to do anything during a given week except the things I have already scheduled (classes, office hours, outside of class time spent working on class-related stuff, basic triage of academic e-mail) and then by b) how much more crap builds up in the meantime. It's April, so all those "get me a rough draft by the end of the semester" papers are starting to pour in; plus the "can we have this review by the first of May" commitments from months ago are looming, along with the "it's recruitment season and since you don't have tenure you're kind of required to participate in the ongoing effort to convince kids to come here" luncheons and appearances and the like. I can't quite shake this feeling that if I had more time I could do this better…but then I look at it in a more detached manner and realize that I'd need so much time that I'm never going to get it. Let alone get enough time to spend the time reading that I really want to spend, and then write some stuff…there isn't enough time, period. There's never going to be "enough" time. I wonder if there'll be more time one of these days/semesters/years?

3) fucking Yankees spent way too much money on Jaret Wright, and he didn't get out of the fifth inning, and now the Yankees are being clobbered by the goddamn Orioles.

Sigh.

All right, enough bitching for now.

[Posted with

ecto

]

Bill James, f**king genius

2005-04-04T10:38:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the best concise explanation of "analyticism" as an approach to knowledge-construction that I have ever read:

"I believe in a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand. Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world—a paradigm, if you will—and we need those, of course; you can’t get through the day unless you have some organized way of thinking about the world. But the problem is that the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it that we carry around in our heads. Many things are real and important that are not explained by our theories—no matter who we are, no matter how intelligent we are.

As in politics we have left and right—neither of which explains the world or explains how to live successfully in the world—in baseball we have the analytical camp and the traditional camp, or the sabermetricians against the scouts, however you want to characterize it. I created a good part of the analytical paradigm that the statistical analysts advocate, and certainly I believe in that paradigm and I advocate it within the Red Sox front office. But at the same time, the real world is too complicated to be explained by that paradigm.

It is one thing to build an analytical paradigm that leaves out leadership, hustle, focus, intensity, courage and self-confidence; it is a very, very different thing to say that leadership, hustle, courage and self-confidence do not exist or do not play a role on real-world baseball teams. The people who think that way . . . not to be rude, but they’re children. They may be 40-year-old children, they may be 70-year-old children, but their thinking is immature."

Read the complete interview here.

In other baseball news, the Yankees returned to their usual form of beating up on the Red Sox last night, led by the bat (3-for-5, 1 HR, 3 RBI, and a 1.8 OPS) and the glove (stole a two-run home run from Kevin Millar in the second inning with a perfectly-timed jump at the left-field wall) of Hideki Matsui, behind a typically impressive outing (6.0 IP, 5 H, 1 ER, 2 BB, 6K) by Randy Johnson. God's in her Heaven and all's right with the world :-)

[Posted with ecto]

Basic cable

2005-03-28T10:23:00.000-05:00

As my readers know I turned in my book manuscript to my editor last week. (Thanks for the congratulations, everyone!) Yes, it's still too long, and yes, there'll be additional rounds of editing. but the important thing is that a professional milestone has been reached: the all-important First Book is well on its way to actually appearing in print (November-ish, the folks at Big University Press tell me). And just in time for my tenure process, which gets underway in September; with any luck I'll have page proofs to send up the chain of command with the rest of my file.

[I've been thinking about whether it's possible to summarize the book for those of you who don't know me personally, but do so in such a way as not to completely give away my identity. Obviously I can't give you title or publisher, but I can safely say the following three things about the book: 1) there's a chapter on Weber's concept of legitimation in which I argue that such an approach handles agency and causality better than just about any alternative I know of; 2) the empirical "meat" of the book is heavily archival, relying extensively on close readings of historical documents in order to establish that … well, something that has been overlooked or downplayed by previous scholarly accounts of the process and historical period I'm interested in … is in fact both present and important; 3) neither Henry Kissinger nor Samuel P. Huntington are likely to be pleased with the argument, and I'm kind of bummed that George Kennan died before the manuscript was completely ready, since that means that I'll never be able to ask him what he thinks of it. I'd say more, but I like to keep this blog discreet if not completely anonymous…]

After I turned in the manuscript I hosted a Very Important IR Scholar for a talk and a subsequent dinner-party, and both events were debuts of new material that he'd not performed publicly before. Got lots of kudos and compliments from high up the chain of command for that; plus, it was just a massive injection of intellectual stimulation of the sort that is sometimes hard to come by around here because of the policy-world center of gravity of the school.

So last week was a pretty good week.

This weekend I was visiting relatives -- not academics, not intellectuals -- and they were more impressed by a relatively minor side-show that happened last week too. In fact, they were more impressed by this than by almost anything else I've done in my career. A basic cable show sent a crew to my house to interview me about American foreign policy during the historical period that I have been researching; they asked questions for about forty minutes, had me do some voice-over recording for some footage of photographs, and fished for good quips and sound-bites about two minutes of which are at all likely to end up in the final cut of the show. It was pretty cool, both from a technical perspective (taping reaction shots was intriguing, as was talking to the producer/editor about how he planned to assemble the footage later) and from a participant-observer standpoint (the hierarchy between techs and on-air hosts, and the inversion of that hierarchy in all kinds of subtle ways, was fascinating: the hosts were kept out of the room until the techs were done setting up, and the very vocabulary of their speech changed when the hosts were brought in; the hosts then "directed" the action while the techs supposedly followed orders while guiding the action along the lines that they'd previously worked out among themselves, and I'd been privileged to hear that because I established myself earlier as someone with a bit of technical knowledge about filmmaking and most clearly as not a professional interview subject or media personality, so that script didn't come into play). Plus: hey, it's TV! I'm on TV! Cool.

But to listen to my relatives talk, it was like everything I've been doing for the past decade or so has been mere temporizing and preparation for this, my actual debut. Never mind the peer-reviewed journal articles, the leadership positions in professional organizations, the classroom teaching (including several university awards), the mentoring of students, etc. None of that made as much of an impact as this minor TV appearance, during which I was largely called on to give canned answers and unqualified generalizations to lend an air of "scholarly respectability" to the program. My relatives pressed me for information on when the program would air, said that they'd told all of their friends and acquaintances, and congratulated me … as though this were some kind of major professional accomplishment!

The discrepancy between the reward-structure inside and outside of academia never ceases to amaze me. I was much more happy about Very Important IR Scholar's citation of my work (three times!) during his talk than with my brief brush with basic-cable fame, and submitting a book manuscript seems to me far more a reason to celebrate than taping an interview for a television program. I can see how the TV thing might be more accessible to people outside of the academic/scholarly context, but remain somewhat baffled about how much of a big deal my relatives were making about it when they seem not to recognize any of the other, more centrally scholarly things I do. I wonder if part of it is that they work jobs while I try very hard to live in a vocation, so they don't regard professional successes as all that noteworthy. I wonder also if it's just that people who aren't academics or around academia have a very hard time picturing what it is that we academics do, so that other activities that fit better into established scripts ("television appearance") look more important and praiseworthy than others.

I certainly didn't mind appearing on the TV program, and was quite interested in the gig. But I am a little frustrated that in a week of such intellectual and professional high-points, the kudos I got from my relatives were all about such a comparatively minor spin-off.

[Posted with ecto]

Done!

2005-03-21T11:53:00.000-05:00

472 pages. 106,000 words -- about 16,000 over my contract and 6,000 over the amended verbal agreement with my editor. But it's DONE, and being shipped off to the press this afternoon by FedEx. Of course there'll be more edits down the road, and the looming horror of copyediting, but here's what's important:

I wrote a book.

Wrote.

Past tense.

Phoning it in

2005-03-17T13:58:00.000-05:00

The damn book editing is taking longer than expected. Go figure. It'll be done Sunday; it has to be done Sunday. Finally.

What is strangest for me is the fact that since my attention is on the book, I feel like I am somewhat sleepwalking through my other responsibilities (including classes, meetings with students, departmental politics, etc.). And I hate that. I hate being so distracted. Just one more damn reason to get this thing off my plate…

Seven down…

2005-03-13T18:28:00.000-05:00

Seven, count them, SEVEN, edited book chapters! Ha ha ha! ::crash of thunder::

Yes, I watched a lot of Sesame Street growing up -- back in the good old days, before Elmo came along and ruined the whole show.

Now, about that Conclusion chapter I have to write (gulp) tomorrow…

Editing a book manuscript

2005-03-12T08:12:00.000-05:00

Four chapters down, four to go -- including that annoying little still-to-be-actually-written "conclusion." If I don't sleep between now and, say, Tuesday, maybe I can get it all done on time…

Conferencing with kids

2005-03-07T14:17:00.000-05:00

Just got back from my annual Major Professional Conference, which was in Hawai'i this year (sure beats Chicago or Montreal for weather conditions in late February!). For the first time I was accompanied by my wife and kids, which produced some interesting modifications to the conferencing rhythm I have developed over the years (about nine now, if you count debate meets and model UN sessions in high school and college, and that one "literature and language" conference I attended as a college senior, as preparatory work instead of as the real thing). "Interesting" in the properly ambiguous sense: not wholly worse or wholly better in comparison to my established way of doing these things, but different in significant ways.

I am still trying to sort out how much of the difference with this conference was due to the Hawai'ian setting as opposed to the presence of my kids. Obviously it's configurational, and in that way it makes little sense to try to distinguish the independent impact of either of those factors in anything except a purely analytical sense. But having some sort of ideal-typical specification might be helpful for planning purposes, and this won't be the last conference where my family comes along; hence the exercise seems worthwhile.

Having kids along seems to have altered my conferencing practices in the following ways:

1) lack of sleep. Okay, so my usual conferencing style involves a minimum of sleep anyway, but that's because I am running on intellectual adrenaline and bouncing from stimulating conversation to stimulating conversation (some of which happen during panels, and some of which even happen during panels I am attending -- but most of which don't). Plus, there is some "down time" during the day when I skip a panel session to sit and read or check e-mail or work on discussion comments or whatever. And I generally make up for that lack of sleep, especially for a conference a plane-ride away from my house, on the flight home, but that didn't work this time (see below). Having kids around at a conference is different because non-conferencing time is not down time, but deal-with-the-kids time -- even though my wife certainly handled the lion's share of that task. Dealing with young kids is exhausting, and after a day of panels and meetings, a couple of hours of going to dinner and then putting them to bed is even more draining.

Now, this would not have been anywhere near as big a deal if we'd been able to get a good night's sleep a couple of times to compensate. No such luck: between the time change (-5 hours to Hawai'i, which is a coming-home-from-Europe-quality jet lag) and my son's general proclivity not to sleep well at night (which is made worse in a hotel room where mommy and daddy have a bed just a few feet away…hey, I'm awake, why don't they wake up and take care of me?), I don't think that we got a single uninterrupted night of sleep during the whole week. This will probably improve as the kids get older, and things might have been better if both kids hadn't been sick the whole time. Speaking of which:

2) illness. Both kids had horrible head colds most of the week; my son's turned into a nasty ear infection about mid-conference, necessitating a trip to the local clinic and a regimen of antibiotics. Taking kids out to dinner is always an experience; taking sick, cranky kids is even less fun. But my two least favorite things about having sick kids on a quasi-vacation are a) the fact that sick kids don't want to do anything except stay indoors and watch TV while drinking juice, which made things great fun for my wife and also caused me to feel somewhat guilty when going off to conference knowing that they would just be stuck in the hotel room all day, and b) the fact that sick kids tend to pass their diseases on to others in their immediate vicinity, especially when those persons have stressed systems from jet lag and lack of sleep and the like…so what I first thought was food poisoning when I contracted it during the conference now appears to be (since it has persisted right up to the present) a form of the stomach bug that my son had last week.

Let me just say for the record that playing discussant after a night of stomach and intestinal ailments is not fun. Long plane flights with such issues are equally not fun -- and they certainly aren't made any easier by an energetic daughter too wound up to sleep much. Earlier in the week we did manage to do some things with the kids, and I took my daughter for a hike up Diamond Head one morning (my son wasn't feeling up to it, and I could put my daughter in the backpack kid carrier and just go, which was the only way she could have done the hike). But hopefully they won't be sick at future conferences.

3) pick-up dinners. One of the conferencing dynamics I am quite used to is the pick-up dinner: people finish the last panel, head to the bar, and then a group decides to go out for dinner together and departs -- and usually ends up back in the bar more or less intact several hours later. [Good conference hotels are defined, IMHO, by a centrally located bar with decent drinks and service. If you can get pub food there, so much the better: one-stop shopping for evenings when leaving the hotel is not in the cards.] Tossing kids into the mix changes this dynamic, especially with picky eaters who don't want to eat Indian or Thai or much that is more exotic than, say, hot dogs or pizza or chicken. Plus, kids at dinner is usually somewhat challenging under the best of circumstances -- and these were not the best of circumstances, given illness and the like.

I don't think that this will present much of a problem when they get a little older, although it will require a little more coordination (not sure that the kids hanging out in the bar before dinner is always the best of options, so maybe linking up with them on the way to dinner would be better) -- no problem since the invention of the cel phone, as long as we all remember to keep them charged…

Looking back over these points I am struck by their negative tone. Wouldn't I rather just not bring the family along, and conference the way I always did before? Well, for one thing, I'm not sure how we could have possibly been able to afford a trip to Hawai'i had it not been a work-related expense that can be partially paid for out of my university travel funds. And having the family there meant that I could go and do things with them, such as the aforementioned hike up Diamond Head (perhaps the best non-conference-related thing I did in Hawai'i) and several hours over several days spent on the beach. It also meant that none of us had to feel as frustrated or guilty about going off and doing fun things while the other person was working as sometimes happens when I go to a conference by myself and leave the family at home.

It was also nice to have my wife meet my colleagues at other institutions, people whom I generally only see at conferences but who constitute my primary intellectual community, for reasons that regular readers of this blog can probably suss out for themselves; putting faces with the names is always good, and above and beyond that, occasions for my wife and I to simultaneously be involved in adult conversations with people other than each other have become much rarer since we first had kids. For all of the difficulties involved in juggling kids at dinner and while hanging out between or after panels (the Tapa Bar was open to the outside, so it didn't become overly smoky or crowded -- hence congregating there with kids didn't present as much of a problem as it might have at other conferences), the payoff was probably worth it -- and those difficulties are likely to diminish as the kids get older.

Hopefully they won't be ill next time, either.

More reflections on the conference as the week progresses; got to go deal with the 300+ new e-mail messages now. Sigh.

[Posted with ecto]

Around the horn, 20 February

2005-02-21T10:34:00.000-05:00

Today on TAL we start a new feature: a quick round-up of a couple of newspaper editorials that pissed me off philosophically and conceptually. Not substantive criticism, but simply an ongoing catalog of places where public intellectuals and other commentators engage in analytically dubious reasoning. Not surprisingly, expect to hear a lot about methodology here…

First off comes this editorial about social security from The Washington Post. The substance of the article is a fairly interesting comparison of the terms and metaphors that FDR and GWB use to talk about the Social Security program, noting that where FDR characterized the program as an obligation, GWB talks about "ownership." Lots of examples ensue. So far, so good -- and then there's this bit of wisdom: "How we talk about policy says a lot about how we think about it." Which means what, exactly? We can take Bush's public statements as indicating something about his genuinely-held personal beliefs about Social Security? The fact that there is controversy about the language deployed in the debate about Social Security indicates that we "think" different things about it now than we did in 1935? (And who's this "we" who was thinking things in 1935 and is still around to think things, collectively, in 2005?)

What we have here is the classic balk committed by liberal individualists who are trying to be social constructionists, in which public articulations are reduced to epiphenomenal indicators of the subjective beliefs which are supposed to really drive behavior. Although the author seems quite sensitive to the nuances of the public debate and to the different kinds of programs envisioned by the FDR framing and the GWB framing, what is missing is any real sense of the dynamics of framing itself, and hence any real explanation of why the debate now seems to be about ownership and individual retirements when once upon a time it was about the obligation of society towards its retirees. Implicitly, standing in place of any kind of defensible explanation, we have the vague notion of "thinking," suggesting that this shift is due to "us" changing "our" (collective?) mind. What about the mutations of discourse that make such a shift possible in the first place, and the concrete deployments of cultural resources that produce this shift and not others? In short, what happened to the politics of the debate about Social Security?

Second, this gem of an editorial (also from the Post) suggesting that we would have better intelligence estimates if analysts would assign a numerical value to two aspects of their analyses: their confidence in the quality of the evidence that they've used, and their confidence in the conclusions that they've drawn from that evidence. This is basic conditional probability reasoning, the same sort of thing that fuels expected utility forecasts (in which one separates probability of occurrence from payoff amount, and then multiplies down the probability tree to give expected values, and repeats for each step of the process involved). And if this would generate reliable numbers, then yes, we could use Bayesian and other statistical techniques to determine which estimates were the best ones to use as a guide for policymaking.

One small problem: the numbers involved in this procedure are meaningless. The author says that his modest proposal is based on the success of "data-driven analyses" like those used in sabremetric baseball management and on Wall Street. But a key difference is that in those relatively closed social environments, the numbers in question are generated by the process under observation, like the movement of a stock or a player's success at getting on base. What the author proposes is instead like asking scouts to estimate how confident they are in their projections of a player's future performance, which is precisely what traditional scouts have been doing for years -- albeit without trying to assign precise numbers to their level of confidence (which strikes me as more honest than pretending that one can assign a precise number to a subjective level of certainty). The author's other misleading parallel concerns the prominence of Bayesian techniques in modern spam filtering software; Bayesian techniques rely on a massive amount of data (including a massive number of judgments by individual end users about what constitutes "spam"; filter components are weighted based on the relative frequency of some user's designation of particular kinds of e-mail as "spam," and do not rely on the user's determination that a particular piece of mail is 40% likely to be junk…which would be a meaningless determination in any event) so that updates of prior probability estimates are meaningful, as opposed to simply representing the needless quantification of a hunch. Once again, this works in relatively closed social systems characterized by repeated acts, and is not likely to be revealing in other settings.

All four of the regular readers of this blog will know that when it comes to baseball, as well as other relatively closed social systems (or social systems that can be safely presumed to be approximately closed for analytical purposes, of which I'd argue that there are considerably fewer in political and social life than we'd like to think), I'm a big partisan of quantitative/statistical/comparative techniques for knowledge-construction. I'd much rather rely on numerical data when managing a baseball team (even a fantasy baseball team) than on "hunches" and "feelings" about particular players (with the exception of Mike Mussina, whom I always rank higher up in the pre-draft order than his numbers merit; I've seen him do enough amazing things in his career that I generally think he's worth the risk. Let's not forget that he threw six perfect innings in the ALCS last year against the eventual champion Boston Red Sox, and has twice carried perfect games even deeper, once coming within one out…). Why do I do this? Because the numbers are meaningful in baseball, just as they are meaningful if one is trying to ease traffic congestion at a busy intersection. But numbers like the ones called for by the op-ed author are meaningless. The fact that the Holy Writ Of Neopositivist Social Science -- a.k.a. King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry -- also calls for such likelihood estimates on the part of researchers doesn't change the basic issue: such numbers can tell one a lot about the analyst, but I would be seriously skeptical that they can tell us diddly-squat about the analysis. And I am 1.0 confident in that conclusion.

So much silliness, so little time -- since I have papers to grade and papers to write. So these two will have to suffice for today.

[Posted with ecto]

Technically conservative

2005-02-18T10:43:00.000-05:00

At a meeting of a subset of the faculty in my department on Wednesday, the issue of faculty participation in the annual recruiting of admitted students was brought up. Faculty complained that they didn't like being gathered into a room for the traditional "phone bank" with people from financial aid and student advising present to answer picky technical questions; they also complained vociferously about the fact that phone calls were problematic -- the student was often not home when the call came, etc.

So I brought up what seemed to me a perfectly obvious solution: IM. Faculty doing the recruiting would simply make their screenname and a block of time available; they'd then jump online from wherever in the world they were then, chat with interested students (who would initiate conversations themselves, thus guaranteeing that they were present and available), and have ready-to-hand a list of screennames and e-mail addresses to refer the student to for issues involving specific AP credits and the like. Plus, students these days grow up with several IM chat windows open on their screens at once, and it's a medium with which they are very very comfortable. So our making ourselves available would signal a certain kind of approachability and tech-savvyness as well -- an added bonus.

I might as well have have grown a second head right then and there, or proposed offering all of the students drugs and alcohol in order to secure their enrollment. A series of typical skeptical/dismissive responses were in evidence: the condescending half-smiles, shakes of the head, wide-eyed incredulity, verbal replies that deliberately tripped on the technical terms in order to generate laughs ("so when I, what do you call it, 'sign on,' then the thingamigummy starts working?"). The general tone was that of the pat on the head that precedes the admonition for the kids to run along and play quietly.

There is a very high level of what we might call technical conservatism in academia; academics as a group are very resistant any of these new-fangled things like e-mail and blogging and IM. This is not to belittle the small minority of academics -- of which I am one -- who are relatively tech-savvy and responsive to these alterations in pedagogical practice. Full disclosure: I didn't use IM regularly until a couple of years ago, and only started blogging in earnest last Spring. And I caught both viruses from students, but in a way did so deliberately -- I want to reach students where they live, and that means not just being able to drop pop cultural references from time to time. It means participating in the form of life of students, mutatis mutandis (and figuring out precisely what has to be changed and what can be preserved intact is a nontrivial endeavor), seeing how they world and what can be done to introduce divergent elements (uncomfortable facts, logical rigor, an analytical sensibility) into their cosmos. So I consider my use of IM, my blogging, and the like to be ways of developing a pedagogy -- at least in part. [There's a geek-cool aspect here too, of course, and I think that my geek credentials are quite intact.]

It sometimes seems to me like my more technically conservative colleagues are implicitly picking up on this broader pedagogical and philosophical issue, and that their resistance to e-mail and IM and the like (even extending to visual slide displays generated by Keynote or PowerPoint -- I fail to see why those are any different from writing on the chalkboard, or using transparencies or even paper handouts) is in a non-trivial sense a resistance to students. if one is going to resist students, why in God's name does one take a job in a situation where students are omnipresent, and in fact constitute the raison d'être for the organization? Just go work in a think tank someplace, or produce policy briefs in an office in your basement. Sheesh. Our job, the thing we get paid to do, is to teach students. And resisting the form of life of one's students seems to be an abandonment of this charge in one of two ways:

it could be an implicit or explicit judgment that the students' form of life is somehow wrong and needs to change (e.g. Allan Bloom's rant in The Closing of the American Mind about how portable music players make students incapable of appreciating the serious silence that is essential for real thinking, which of course bears more than a passing resemblance to Socrates' rant in The Republic about how the poets are corrupting the youth with their fancy language and tales of sex and violence…anti-hip-hop crusading, anyone?), which abandons teaching in favor of training and drill. And I am not a trainer; my job is not to force people to live in a certain way. Gurus and prophets do that; teachers should avoid such an abuse of their authority.
on the other hand, it could be simply a way of turning students away -- "leave me alone except for these very few, minimal, constrained kinds of interactions, which take place exclusively on my terms." Again I wonder: if you hate students so much, why put yourself in their path all the time?

Maybe this problem will ultimately be solved by a generation shift, as older folks retire and are replaced by people of my generation who grew up with computers. But will this mean that in twenty years there will simply be another clash involving different technical apparatuses? Perhaps. But I would like to think of myself as the sort of teacher who would be able to remain in touch with whatever the form of life of my students is. Indeed, I can't really imagine exercising this vocation in any other way.

[Posted with ecto]

Mortgages

2005-02-14T12:18:00.000-05:00

This morning my wife and I refinanced our house again. Rates are good, the housing prices in our region are absolutely insane and show no signs of coming down to earth at any time in the near future, and let's be honest here: assistant professors don't make gobs of cash. At least not compared to what comparably-educated people make in the rest of the job market. Factor in the need for my wife to remain home to be a full-time case manager for our autistic son, and you have a "structural deficit" -- one that we were meeting, as many Americans do, with credit cards. And it was getting quite out of hand. Hence the refinance, and the new home equity loan, and a variety of other financial jiggerings to keep us solvent.

On paper, assistant professors are reasonably well paid at my university. Now, when we factor in the actual working hours, plus the need to do a lot of stuff on one's time "off" (like summers -- even though I have had to teach two summer courses a year since moving down here in order to pay the bills), it works out to a pretty raw deal, which is one of the things I always make clear to those of my students who think that they have a vocation for the academic life. One does not get rich doing this. One does this because one can't imagine being happy doing anything else long-term. It's that calling, that perverse inner drive, that keeps one slogging through.

I find it fascinating that we've built a financial system in which the restructuring of debt can save the borrower so much money in monthly payments; our refinance this morning actually increased the aggregate debt load, but shuffled things around such that we owe less per month. The motor of such a thing, of course, is the expectation of dependable future income and dependable high home prices, both of which are arguably traceable to the Protestant Work Ethic (tm) that sustains the level of marketization that is required to sustain such a system. [I am setting aside for the moment the issue of whether the Protestant Work Ethic was causally responsible for erecting the present system, or whether it was the most significant cause; the fact is that some such notion -- and arguably the Protestant Work Ethic is only one of the commonplaces tossed up by the same discursive formation that brought us the Inherent Justice Of The Free Market and the Blessings Of Deregulation Of Basically Everything -- provides the legitimating framework for the system as it is now, which is more than enough for my purposes.] So it makes sense to sign papers for a thirty-year commitment to regularly pay back a massive loan, and for there to be legal penalties if one fails to follow through; both of these institutions instantiate the same basic arrangement of commonplaces, and are sustained by the deployment of that arrangement in multiple fora.

I also find it fascinating that the signature means so much to the process; we must have signed our names hundreds of times over the course of an hour and a half. My personal favorite is always the signature that affirms that this is my signature; coming in a close second is the form that says that we will work with the lender to adjudicate any typos and other ambiguities (which is itself, of course, ambiguous about what constitutes a "typo" and what constitutes an "ambiguity"). Both are aporia moments in the process, I think: places where the apparent solidity of the legal and financial arrangements fall apart and have to be smoothed over by an almost purely arbitrary political action. Language tripping on itself, so to speak. And as usual, when I make a crack about the irony of those forms, we paper the cracks over with a chuckle, a shake of the head, and a move on to the next form in the sequence. The ways in which social action produces the effect of solidity are endlessly fascinating to me…never moreso when I find myself in the thick of them.

Of course, analyzing them like this is perhaps a way of bringing some psychological balance to the fact that we just committed to assume even more debt, and distancing myself from those aspects of the situation -- like when I translated the Yankees' loss in the ALCS last year into an extended meditation on randomness versus contingency. But that explanation would get us into territory that I am not really all that comfortable entering; personal motives aren't my business.

[Posted with ecto]

Dysfunctional Families

2005-02-11T17:08:00.000-05:00

There are times when academia reminds me of nothing as much as a dysfunctional family. Elephants in the middle of the room are ignored in a determined fashion; people lash out at unusual provocations, then apologize afterwards as though that somehow justified their earlier aggression; and pettiness reigns in interpersonal griping and struggles, although never acknowledged as such and more often masked (badly) by appeals to more respectable standards. Add in the enmeshed character characteristic of any situation in which your standing and in many cases your continued employment is contingent on the opinions of your peers, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Two brief illustrations, shorn of names and other identifying markers.

1) I have a colleague at another institution -- a female colleague, which is important -- who was hired two years ago; her university has a reappointment process every two years of pre-tenure service, so she was up for her 3rd and 4th year reappointment. This colleague of mine is, frankly, not the best classroom teacher; her student evaluations generally reflect this. But she's taking steps to improve. Anyway, she has had run-ins with her department chair -- also female -- over the past two years; such run-ins generally take the form of snide comments about how my colleague dresses, passive-aggressively phrased as offers to take my colleague clothes shopping. No shit. Pressing a little further, we might note that the department chair is only an Associate Professor after almost a full university career, and seems to feel that my colleague threatens her somehow, since she's still young and about to publish a number of very interesting articles -- which are consistently belittled by the department chair in subtle ways (since a frontal assault won't work; my colleague's work is very very good within her subfield, as vouched for by senior people in the field).

The upshot? The department chair recommended against reappointment, spinning the bad teaching evaluations in the worst possible light and downplaying my colleague's efforts to make improvements in her classroom technique. Ridiculous, right? No, wait, it gets better: the college committee to which the files are submitted next disagreed with the department chair and recommended reappointment. So now it goes to the dean of the college, who has two opposite recommendations and no clear guidelines for choosing between them. And I suspect that my colleague's fate at that university will depend on a whole series of personal ties between administrators and professors -- processes that play out without anything resembling oversight, and processes in which petty personal griping seems to play an inordinate role.

2) Speaking of petty personal griping: I am evil, at least according to one of my colleagues here, and my evilness manifests itself in my corruption of the youth (the PhD students) away from the One True Path Of Social Science, which involves an emphasis on "empirical" (read: statistical) work with "policy relevance" (read: problem-solving dissertations that seek to tell policy-makers precisely what to do about North Korean nukes or sub-Saharan African poverty or whatever) as opposed to my colleague's ultimate term of derision, "political theory." [Parenthetically, my work is not "political theory" in the sense of consisting largely of discussions of classical texts and the subtleties of their arguments; half of the book I'm finishing is archive-based historical reconstruction, which looks like "empirical work" to me. but I already ranted about this here.] I know that I am evil and reprehensible because said colleague called me on the phone yesterday to bitch at me for fifteen minutes about how I was using the "wrong" standards to evaluate PhD students for admission to our program -- and then apologized today in a backhanded sort of way, saying something to the effect of "yeah, I was angry, but I'm over it now." And this makes it okay to call me up and yell at me how??

Backstory: said person a) blames me for corrupting two of her PhD students; b) thinks I'm a bad influence because more of the PhD students are attracted to the kind of work that I do than they are to the kind of work that my colleague does; and c) disagrees with my vision for what our PhD program is supposed to be about. But do we actually have the argument about that issue? No. [Although we might finally be having that argument at the next committee meeting. After I've been pressing to have that discussion for five years.] Instead, there's petty personal shit, passive-aggressive tactics, an allergy to conflict that involves substantive disagreements, and veiled -- sometimes not so veiled -- reminders that I don't have tenure yet.

See? Dysfunctional.

[Posted with ecto]

Revolt of the Primitives

2005-02-05T14:05:00.000-05:00

Dean Acheson was the U.S. Secretary of State around the time when Joe McCarthy started whipping up his anti-Communist campaign. Acheson, along with President Truman, and Acheson's former boss George Marshall (of The Marshall Plan (tm), only the most effective piece of anti-Communist foreign policy in history), was a prominent target of McCarthy and his cronies allies, and was regularly vilified as being a closet Communist sympathizer, un-American, and so forth. In his memoirs, Acheson memorably refers to the McCarthy interlude as "the revolt of the primitives," a term I find altogether apt.

What was "primitive" about McCarthy? Contrary to what various right-wing wackos might claim, Acheson's objections to McCarthy do not involve any supposedly archaic character of values like patriotism and the need to defend the integrity of the American Way of Life (tm; I probably owe royalties to someone -- hasn't the RNC applied for a copyright on these words? -- for using the phrase, but unless and until they sue me I should be safe). Acheson was a patriot, a firm believer in the inherent rightness of American (and Western, and liberal) values; hence his accusation of "primitivism" can't apply to the content of the McCarthyite charge. Rather, I think that Acheson was objecting to the form of the campaign: its hysterical tone, its deliberate oversimplification of complex issues, its bold-faced nativism. In short, the narrowness of the accusations and the manichaean character of the proposed solutions: yes or no, right or wrong, loyal American or committed enemy of all that is good.

Welcome back to the 1950s. The new primitives -- we might call them techno-primitives, since they work via the 'Net and the vast swirling morass of Talk Radio -- are apparently in full swing, targeting Ward Churchill for excommunication from the body politic. According to an article in The Washington Post [free subscription required], the Chancellor of the University of Colorado has launched an investigation into Churchill's "lectures and publications" which is is "the first step…in the legal process required to fire a tenured professor." At issue are comments that Churchill made right after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 2001, in which he said, among other things:

As to those in the World Trade Center…Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Harsh words. And offered as part of a harsh essay demanding that Americans examine the record of their own country in committing war crimes, murdering civilians, inflicting harm on others -- and that they do so before blithely condemning the terrorist attacks as uncivilized acts that justify any and all methods of reprisal, as though the United States had never perpetrated acts just as violent.

But it is important to note that Churchill's point is not "fuck America, go terrorists!" but instead "America brought this on itself by acting in similar ways at various times in history." His tone is acid, accusatory, deliberately provocative and designed to piss people off; his rhetoric is overblown, his analogies are slippery [Eichmann was a bureaucrat participating in an enterprise the declared intention of which was a Judenrein Europe; arguably, there's a significant difference between the culpability of such a person and the culpability of a person who accepts the unintended consequences of their day-to-day actions], and his overall moral calculus relating guilt and reprisal is questionable. And this is the point of the exercise, I think: to provoke complacent readers and listeners to re-examine their own firmly-held assumptions about, well, everything. [And is it really any more extreme than identifying a group of countries as constituting an "axis of evil"?]

Churchill's writings are designed to provoke debate, discussion, conflict. He is up-ending the apple cart, and trying to cast some doubt on the self-confident narrative of America in which we are the divinely blessed Good Guys who can do no wrong as long as we follow our Manifest Destiny to bring light to the nations, by force if necessary. In this way, he's a moral philosopher, fulfilling that essentially Socratic function of serving as a stinging horsefly on the ass of state. Don't like what he's saying? Argue back. Debate with him. Give good grounds for maintaining that the United States didn't deserve what it got, that terrorism should be an unacceptable mode of warfare, that the subsequent operations in Afghanistan and Iraq were justified. If you are so confident that you are correct, you should have no problem adducing such reasons.

By characterizing Churchill as a moral philosopher I am deliberately withholding the label of "social science" from his oeuvre. That is because I do not think that his work (and admittedly, I have read comparatively little of it, so I might be entirely wrong about this) seeks to apply an ideal-typical analytic to a set of empirical data in a rigorous manner so as to produce "objective" (in the Weberian sense) facts. Rather, he makes use of empirics to illustrate his broader practical-moral claims, which is what any good moral philosopher or cultural critic does. He's not a scientist -- I don't think that he wants to be -- and so it would be inappropriate to evaluate his work on such grounds. Rather, like a law professor asked to reflect on a Supreme Court decision or a business ethicist asked for a reasoned stance on the acceptability of certain accounting practices, Churchill is contributing to a public debate by forwarding a stance -- one among others -- that responsible citizens should confront.

Except that the 2005 primitives are seeking to fire him instead.

I find the idea of an investigation into Churchill's lectures and publications somewhat ludicrous. What are they planning to investigate? Last time I checked, a tenured professor can't be fired for making claims with which people (especially powerful people, or a majority faction of the people) disagree. I don't know precisely how scholarship is evaluated within American Indian Studies, but my sense is that the field deliberately tries to relax or erode the politik/wissenschaft boundary that is constitutive of the social sciences. So going after Churchill for being political won't wash (unless there is some hidden clause of his contract that prevents such activity; when I was an adjunct professor at a University In New York City some years ago, a condition of employment was the signing of a small white card that was basically a loyalty oath committing me not to speak against the Constitution of the United States or against the Constitution of the State of New York…and this was in 1997(!)), and going after him for not adhering to the standards of his field won't either. So all they could be investigating is whether he is saying things with which they agree, which is very scary shit indeed.

We too often forget that the point of university education is to promote thinking: critical, creative, independent. The precondition for doing so might be a damning critique of what is held sacred, so that the mind can widen a bit beyond the simple repetition of stock phrases from childhood. Churchill can be read as raising extremely "uncomfortable facts" with which Americans generally should have to grapple; in this way he contributes to the overall process of education. [Parenthetically, if his classes were premised on his students coming to agree with his point of view, that would in my opinion be a violation of his academic vocation; promoting thinking and creating disciples are different enterprises. What he does outside of the classroom, or outside of his professional interactions with students, is a different matter entirely…as long as we're willing to accept moral philosophy and cultural criticism as valid scholarly enterprises, which is a whole different issue. For now I'll just assert that the socially surplus character of higher education allows it to support such initiatives, and point out that if it didn't, radically dissenting voices would in all likelihood be completely silenced, and our public discourse would be poorer for it.] Shutting him up is a profoundly primitive response: see fire, fire hot, run away or smother quick. But under no circumstances should you try to learn from the thing that makes you profoundly uncomfortable; no, that requires entirely too much flexibility of mind, too much appreciation of subtlety and ambiguity, too much questioning of the comfortable narrative of moral superiority that legitimates your actions.

I am not saying that Churchill is correct. I am saying that Churchill should be debated with. The primitive response, although simpler and cleaner, could only be justified if its central claim to moral superiority were true -- and how would we know that if the debate was not allowed to take place?

[Posted with ecto]

Beware of Universalism

2005-02-05T12:53:00.002-05:00

Forthwith, the op-ed nobody wanted, apparently because I'm not a household name. I do not think that the State of the Union speech allayed any of my fears.

Beware of Universalism

Commentators poring over Bush’s second inaugural address for clues about specific policy initiatives are missing the forest for the trees. Major public speeches are better understood as efforts to affect the terms of political discourse, establishing the general framework within which subsequent debates will be carried out. Tone and vision are the critical issues here, not detailed proposals.

Seen in this light, the ominous thing about Bush’s address is its unabashed moral universalism. Bush proposes to confront “every ruler and every nation” with “the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right,” and to devote America’s “considerable” influence to this cause. Absent from the speech is any set of criteria that would underpin a decision about where to commit American resources, or any declaration of principle that could counterbalance the open-ended universalism of advancing “freedom…the permanent hope of mankind.”

This universalism is by no means a novel development in the rhetoric surrounding American foreign policy. A half-century ago, President Truman used uncannily similar language in calling for a commitment of resources to the struggle against Communism: “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms…we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.” Perceptive critics like Walter Lippmann promptly critiqued the open-ended character of this Truman Doctrine, pointing out that if taken to its logical conclusion it implied American intervention into every corner of the globe to ensure that freedom was being adequately promoted and defended.

The problem with universal declarations of principle is that they brook no compromise and envision no deviations. Imported directly into politics, they produce what Max Weber called an “ethic of ultimate ends,” according to which the purity of one’s motive trumps any considerations of practical effect. Hence, moral universalism as a framework for policy leads to a situation in which the ends justifies the means and any commitment of resources of any type is acceptable in pursuit of the ultimate, absolute goal. It also allows the enactors of such policies to evade responsibility for the consequences of their actions, as long as they can demonstrate that they were sincere in their efforts to advance the cause of the universal principle.

An ethic of ultimate ends also permits its adherents to avoid the real work of politics, which involves bringing moral principles into dialogue with the practical requirements of governance and administration. Such a dialogue necessitates a deviation from the purity of universalist declarations, and a tempering of categorical declarations with a measure of prudence. A universal declaration of principle sits uneasily with such prudent tempering, however. Unless notions of prudence and judgment remain a part of the public framing of an overarching political goal, advocates of tempering universalist goals can be easily vilified as traitors to the cause. The seemingly inevitable consequence is an unchecked rush to commit resources to the campaign, culminating in overextension, exhaustion, and perhaps even the discrediting of the original goal as its advocates fail to deliver on their grandiose promises.

This fate can, however, be avoided. The Truman Administration wisely spent the weeks and months after Truman’s speech qualifying and rolling back the open-ended, universalist character of the commitment to defend freedom globally. Secretary of State George Marshall, among others, quickly reassured Congress that certain areas of the world were more vital than others, and that the United States was not about to bankrupt itself by committing resources to every local conflict everywhere around the world. Over time, administration representatives defined a set of core interests and laid out concrete proposals (such as the Marshall Plan) for acting on those interests. These prudent moves involved tempering the universalism of the Truman Doctrine with public commitments to fiscal responsibility, the efficacy of different forms of aid and intervention, and the necessity to consult and cooperate with allies—not simply to evaluate them in terms of their fidelity to the cause, but to collaborate to enact policy in a genuinely multilateral manner.

Let us hope that the advocates of the Bush Doctrine display similar wisdom in the weeks and months ahead.

21stCWeber is a relatively unknown Assistant Professor of International Relations; he blogs sporadically at thisacademiclife.blogspot.com.

[Posted with ecto]

Running with a knee brace

2005-01-28T15:17:00.000-05:00

I. It's gotten very cold in the mornings around here lately; yesterday when I went out it was 19 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was a bit of wind. Brrr. But it's amazing what an extra pair of nylon pants and a good pair of running gloves can do for you -- not to mention a nice hat made of synthetic insulation material. Cold at first, but gradually it gets okay, and the even more pronounced absence of people because of the cold is also very nice. (I don't like seeing people around when I run. I'd rather run in as deserted a landscape as possible, like that nice beach in Den Haag…)

Not sure if it's the cold or what -- maybe it's the exercises -- but my knees are doing much better than they were previously. My routine now is to put on a brace (the left knee is getting that support these days; it was the right knee before, but they seem to tag-team from time to time) when running, ice afterwards, and do leg lifts and such in the intervening time between runs. Yesterday I was able to run harder for longer than I had in a while, and didn't feel significant pain. In fact, I felt so good that I considered taking off the brace altogether. Running without a brace. I hardly even remember what that is like. I've gotten so used to having the brace on that sometimes it feels weird to be walking around campus without feeling that pressure underneath my kneecap.

So just for the heck of it I took it off. Tentative step. Two. Three. Then a brisk jog. And a little bit of a run…ow, ow, ow. Slow to a halt, put the brace back on. Stretch my leg muscles again. Walking; a little pain but not too bad. Jogging is okay. Running -- not speedy, but certainly faster than a walk or jog -- also fine. A little twinge, some soreness, but nothing horrible. And no real pain afterwards, either.

So my running will be brace-assisted, at least for the foreseeable future.

II. Working through my book manuscript, trying to meet the 1 March deadline for the final copy -- and to meet the word length restrictions. I'd actually never put the whole book together and done a word count, so I figured that I should probably do that to give myself an idea about how much flexibility I had with the Conclusion. So I dutifully unformatted the EndNote bibliographies, to avoid inflating the word count with each chapter's references, and then totaled up the count for each one. Hmm. 12,000 here; 16,000 here…19,500 for one of the heavily archival chapters…grand total: 110,000. 110,000.

Panic. Contract says 90,000. I have to lose 20,000 words??? How the heck am I going to accomplish that, especially since the conclusion still isn't done?

Hurried e-mail to editor at Big University Press. His reply: 110,000 is too long; try to cut about 10,000 words at least; and oh yes, the intro chapter that I slaved over last weekend still sounds like a dissertation to him, because it features too much discussion of existing accounts and not enough of my own original stuff. My first reaction is to dash off an e-mail about how the reviewers wanted me to locate myself in the existing literature, which requires some discussion of their work. Then on the drive home I think it over.

After dinner I discuss it with my wife, who provides a reality check in the following two ways: first, my editor is not trying to ruin my book, he's actually trying to help me get my stuff out there, and after all he's a professional so his advice should be taken seriously; second, reducing the discussion of other literature actually would produce a more readable book. (My wife is not an academic, so she can provide reality checks like this, pointing out that not everyone in the world wants to wade through a longish discussion of why IR realists, liberals, and liberal-constructivists are actually on the same side of some social-theoretical debates about the location of causal mechanisms, as opposed to evolutionary realists who are more like structural or even Gramscian marxists…okay, I get excited by these things, but the rest of the world? Even the rest of the field? Perhaps not quite so much.) After some resistance on my part (telling an academic that some of her or his work is really interesting, and some is just internecine warfare of interest only to technical specialists, is always a tricky operation; major bonus points to both my wife and my editor for undertaking the operation :-) I decided that they were right, and came up with a radical suggestion:

Delete the second chapter. That's the "IR theory" chapter. Don't bother trying to revision the field in this book; save that for elsewhere. When I pitched this to my editor, his reaction was better than I could have hoped for: since he has an option on my next single-authored book, he proposed that we make that an IR theory textbook of sorts, and put the excised material (suitably rewritten) in that book instead.

Still feel a little weird about doing this. IR theory is a very comfortable set of props for me, a cast of characters with whom I'm pretty familiar and in terms of which I can most directly characterize those debates in which I'm engaged. I do not think that my stuff is going to be all that exciting for non-specialists, so the principal impact -- initially, at least (I do have these delusions of being read one day in general social theory classes, much like Weber is … hence my username …) -- is likely to me among IR theorists and other IR scholars. And if I don't point out explicitly what I am doing, how do I avoid being mistakenly assimilated into positions with which I disagree?

My editor says that I have to stop reaching out for other literature as something to lean on. I may have developed my stance by arguing with these people and their writings, but it does not follow that I have to lead my readers through that whole process in order to make my point.

Hmm.

III. Right before the conclusion of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein comments that readers should discard his chain of reasoning after following it: "He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it" (§6.54). The process of achieving an insight, especially an insight about the process of achieving insights, is not essential to the subsequent communication of that insight -- or even to having the insight itself.

Then again, Wittgenstein did publish the Tractatus. And it withered away about as much as the post-revolutionary Soviet state did. So maybe the ladder remains useful? Maybe we do need markers of process, traces of the twists and turns that a train of thought took? (Of course, they needn't be right in your face all the time; footnotes are perhaps sufficient, along with brief discussions at more appropriate points in the text, and something short in the conclusion about where my book might fit.)

So was Wittgenstein wrong? Can one run without a brace?

If we could always remember the insights, then maybe. But we fall back into the world, with its metaphysical commitments and its essentialist restrictions. And we forget. The theory, the process, the brace: these keep us healthy, stop us from straining too much, and make it possible for us to keep on running.

In a sense we are marked by how we got to where we are. And it's important not to forget that. But not everyone has to be led there by the same pathway. The knee brace helps me run, but what matters here is the running, and the openness to which it gives rise. The rest is filler, in a way, and can be safely cut in order to make a 250-page book: still hefty, but manageable.

[Posted with ecto]

Oh, come ON

2005-01-28T12:27:00.000-05:00

If I hadn't read it in the paper -- and seen the pictures, for crying out loud -- I wouldn't have believed it:

Dick Cheney, Dressing Down

Please. Who wears a ski cap and a parka to a ceremony commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz??

Having just been at Auschwitz six months ago, I can confidently say that it is not the kind of place you want to wear informal clothing to in general. It's far too somber for that; too many ghosts still on active duty.

This is the kind of thing that gets the U.S. in image trouble with the rest of the planet. Empires are supposed to at least be dignified; what's the point of overwhelming power if you can't at least be ceremonial and impressive about it?

Yet another example of the incredible bipolarity of this Administration: they are very sensitive to nuances of image at home, and almost completely tone-deaf abroad. One wishes that they'd be a little more balanced.

[Posted with ecto]

Expand and Contract

2005-01-16T15:08:00.000-05:00

After two years, I think that the search committee here has finally found a candidate whom we want to hire. I've not been on the committee, not officially, although I've been keenly interested in their deliberations and have often made my opinions and preferences known to the members.

Last year there was a split in the committee, with two candidates -- one of whom was my favorite, and would have made a great colleague who would have underscored a particular substantive and theoretical direction for the program; the other of whom was a real piece of work, someone who didn't understand their own argument, and someone who would have been a real methodological imperialist to boot -- receiving support. I intervened as forcefully as I could to stop my least favorite from being hired, making my displeasure known as bluntly as possible (even saying at some point that it would be preferable to hold the search open for another year than to hire that person); from later reports I guess that my efforts had something of an impact, allowing those on the committee who also opposed this character to cite my issues with the candidate as evidence that the candidate would not be a good fit for us. Of course, in fighting a rearguard action I did rather undercut some of my effort to hire the other candidate, I think, but at a certain point it was clear to me that my favorite candidate wasn't going to be hired (opposition from higher up the food chain too -- and we can't make hires without the support of those holding the administrative reigns) so preventing things from getting worse seemed preferable to trying and failing to make things better.

Now, the subtle politics of intra-departmental maneuvering seems to dictate that such an intervention should be avoided if possible, but I felt very strongly about not hiring someone who would make it harder for me to do my job on a daily basis. However, I knew that since I had basically blown my reserves on last year's search, I would have to be more careful about intervening this year. I resolved only to fight defensively -- i.e. to only make a big deal about a candidate if it was a similar situation to last year. Fortunately, it wasn't (although there was apparently a move to put the same person back on the short-list again this year -- I mean, really, the chutzpah of some people! You lost already; deal with it and move on. Sheesh).

This year three candidates were brought in for interviews and campus visits; all three came last week, one after another. Quite a whirlwind. I attended meals with all three, and one job talk (couldn't make the others due to prior commitments); I figured that would give me enough information to determine whether there were any really bad eggs in the bunch (to mix food metaphors a bit). There weren't. We had one candidate who really didn't have much in the way of theory in the project, and who couldn't really engage in theoretical debates; seemed like much more of a policy activist, and Lord knows we don't need any more of those around here. And then there were two, and quite a contrast they made: one intellectually fascinating, mind rushing in many directions at once, with a big-think project about reconceptualizing the nature of the international system; the other a more "normal science" type, doing work that synthesizes some extant stuff rather than really breaking/creating new ground. but extremely well-published and a nice person to boot. Also, neither were anything like methodological imperialists; both were intrigued by my description of the proposed new year-long Ph.D. "multiple methodologies" course, and I got the sense that both would be allies in that fight.

So the choice became: do I support the more intellectually interesting candidate, or do I support the more mainstream one? Do I actively support the mainstream one, or just sit back and let it happen without objecting? Politics, politics. Given last year's events, I decided that I needed to support the mainstream candidate, especially since it looked like the committee was going that way anyway. (Had it been evenly balanced I might have thought about the issue differently -- but not necessarily. One must conserve one's resources for really important battles, after all, and in this case the mainstream candidate was hardly the worst thing that could have happened.) So I wrote a note to the committee expressing what I thought was a balanced opinion: I liked the big-think candidate on intellectual grounds, and the mainstream candidate's argument was somewhat incoherent, but the program could use someone as professional as the mainstream candidate to underscore our direction as a scholarly program instead of a policy-recommendation shop or a haven for sloppy ideologues. Getting the "social science" aspect of what we do solidified seems to me to be quite important, given the ways that I think that such a commitment can be utilized to create space for rather radical, but still systematic and empirically-focused, work -- both in the local context and in the wider discipline as a whole. So in that sense the mainstream candidate might be a good choice even if I didn't have this specific history here with respect to search committees.

Hence, my vote: hire the mainstream candidate, despite some of that candidate's logical and theoretical problems. (The candidate's discussion of teaching also won me over, as we saw eye to eye about a classroom being a place where students should be encouraged to grapple with the material on their own. Always nice to have a supporter on that score as well.)

So the department is about to expand.

In other news, I got my book contract in the mail on Friday from Big University Press; I have it on good authority that this makes tenure a virtual lock for me next year, so hooray me! Now to re-negotiate the number of free paperback copies I will get upon publication, and see if something can be done about those foreign royalty percentages…

[Posted with ecto]

Defenses

2005-01-12T18:28:00.000-05:00

Had a dissertation proposal defense this morning -- student doing an interesting project on mechanisms of social service provision in conflict areas. My interest in this is because of the methodology (go figure), which is processual all the way through: different social arrangements of brokerage affect the shape of the conflict. The student had a reasonably sophisticated way of describing the contexts within which social service provision takes place, although the mechanisms could of course have been more clearly specified; this kind of research operates interpretively, inasmuch as empirical research is expected to inform a better formulation of the analytical categories in a kind of process of hermeneutic updating.

The problem is that people who aren't familiar with this kind of approach assume that an initial specification is some kind of testable hypothesis -- as though the point of an analytic were to compare it to reality and see whether it corresponded. Please. These are very different methodological approaches; hypothesis-testing is a dualistic conception whereby empirical facts are thought to falsify initial guesses, whereas analytical interpretation is all about developing categories that make sense of complex situations by deliberately oversimplifying and abstracting. Trying to shoe-horn approaches into boxes where they don't fit annoys me to no end, and this did happen this morning to some extent -- both on the verbal level, as examiners kept referring to "variables" and "hypotheses" when such terms weren't really appropriate, and on the more serious conceptual level, as when the student was asked how he could draw conclusions from four data-points or whether brokerage or autonomy was the more important causal factor. The student defended himself okay, but I wish he'd been better equipped.

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. In my work I am often quite aggressive trying to prevent readers from interpreting my work as participating in a methodological project that I find deeply problematic; I prefer to have those issues front and center, so that the status of empirical results I produce will be understood correctly. Perhaps this isn't always appropriate in all contexts, but it is the way I (aesthetically?) prefer my academic debates.

After the defense I went to an event I was hosting as coordinator of a speaker series here; we had a State Department guy in to talk about US-Russian relations. Obviously, questions about methodology would be out of place here -- we listened as the speaker discussed current tensions in the relationship, and then began asking him questions about whether the US government was worried about the dissolution of Russia, or what kinds of things might be done to advance non-proliferation, etc. Not looking for findings, so much, as trying to get a sense of how things appeared from the inside of the policymaking apparatus -- the whole thing was more like a piece of primary-source research.

One interesting finding, though: I pressed him on the reasons why the US held Russia to a higher standard when it came to democracy and human rights and the like, especially since his narrative about the tensions in the relationship was all about essential characteristics of the way things work in Russia (and sprinkled with references to Russian history -- they've been like this for centuries, never had an Enlightenment, etc.). And after a couple of rounds of that he admitted that the framework within which people at State thought about Russia was that Russia was a "Western" country and should look more or less like "the West," and that the weight of history was something that could be overcome through intelligent policy. Liberal empire in action, buttressed by a civilizational narrative: all "Westerners" (ignoring the whole slavophile/westerner controversy in Russia, and also the ongoing debate throughout 'the West' about whether Russia really was a "Western" country or not) are alike, deep down, even if they need a little help to realize that status.

So now if asked I have additional support for the enduring character of such enframing assumptions as exercising a shaping effect on policy writ large. One more story to help defend my way of worlding, as though ways of worlding could be empirically defended…

[Posted with ecto]

Disasters

2005-01-09T11:07:00.000-05:00

Let's take a quick look in the "Outlook" section of the Washington Post this morning (free subscription required). There we find this editorial on the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated communities all around the Indian Ocean this past week, in which the author -- who used to be a "manager of disaster education" (fascinating job title; I wonder how the position differs from, say, "press secretary" or "public relations coordinator") for the Red Cross -- opines:

But I'll wager that 5, 10, 15 years from now, the single word "tsunami" will trigger in any who hear it a near-total recall of the fearful events of Dec. 26, 2004. … That's because the scale of death in that catastrophe, occurring without warning and in a matter of minutes, and striking so many nations, has catapulted it into a class of its own. In my experience, the single factor that most underscores the significance of any disaster is the number of lives it takes. News reports of constantly changing, rapidly rising numbers in South Asia have made the deaths hit home, and our psyche is responding to the further suffering we know these lost lives will cause. … That's why we have such a deep-seated need to know how many people died in South Asia. That's why relatives of the victims search so desperately for information about what precisely happened to their loved ones.

The article then goes on to discuss, in illuminating detail, the technical obstacles to generating this kind of definitive count of casualties: the lack of a good baseline population count to begin with, the absence of bodies because of the sheer force of the water, different national accounting systems for reporting dead and missing, and so on.

The article makes a good point that obtaining such a count will likely be impossible, even concluding that "Every life counts. But sometimes, tragically, not every life lost can be counted." But what strikes me is the fetish for numbers that animates the piece, as though an "objective" count could tell us precisely how bad the tsunami had been and justify its place in our collective memory. [I am leaving aside for the moment the whole issue of the causal narrative that blames "the tsunami" for the mass death and destruction, and leaves aside the issues of poverty, overpopulation, shoddy construction, and the absence of a reliable early-warning system; there's a whole politics of disaster-construction implicated in the personating of natural events (like hurricanes, which are even more obvious examples since they get names, unlike this tsunami) which allows us to ignore the complicity of our social arrangements in making these disasters possible in the first place … but I digress.]

Two points.

First, I question the linkage between numbers and the presence of a disaster (or any event of mass death) in our collective memory. Does anyone remember a minor event about three years ago in which about 3000 people died as a result of some airplanes crashing into three buildings on the East Coast of the United States? Hmm. We remember the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, along with other "undesirable" categories of the population; we even have museums devoted to remembering it, and it is taught in classrooms throughout the world. Quick show of hands -- how many people remember, really remember, that Stalin killed more people in the gulags? Or that the Khmer Rouge emptied whole cities and buried their inhabitants in mass graves? 150,000 or so dead as a direct result of this tsunami is certainly a large number, but five million children a year die of malnutrition, and 852 million people world-wide suffer from chronic hunger. Something more than numbers must be going on here; temporal duration is probably implicated, but I doubt that suffices to explain why some events stick in our collective memory and others don't. [Arguably, the error here is thinking of "our collective memory" as a kind of large filing-cabinet or bulletin-board in which "events" are simply recorded; if we shift to thinking about "our collective memory" as a field of contestation, a site for ongoing efforts to produce and reproduce a way of worlding, we can get out of this problem.]

Second, the universalizing of the desire for hard numbers seems decidedly unfortunate. The "deep-seated need" that the author refers to applies to us, the inhabitants of a post-industrial world in which statistics popular equate to Truth and "coping" means constructing a detached, unshakeable picture that allows us to comprehend the event. And yes, I mean "comprehend" in both senses:

To take in the meaning, nature, or importance of; grasp. See Synonyms at apprehend.
To take in as a part; include. See Synonyms at include.

Comprehending an event thus means both understanding it and subsuming it, both grasping it and in a way disposing of it by distancing ourselves from it: mastering it, getting a grip on it, processing it. Numbers represent a good technique for doing this, since one no longer has to operate in the realm of immediate and personal details; numbers transmute the event into a "disaster," a big systematic happening that we can wring our hands about and make solemn promises about how it will never happen again -- at the cost of the immediacy of the personal stories of suffering and survival.

I'm not saying that such comprehension is a bad thing. There is probably an upper limit to personal stories that any one person can read before becoming very numb to the whole thing; my limit seems to be about one a day. But we need to be more self-conscious about what is involved in such a strategy, and what kinds of remembrance it yields -- and above all we have to remember that this is a strategy, and not something that flows self-evidently from the dispositional character of "the disaster" itself.

In other news, Ralph Nader (yes, that Ralph Nader) offers what seems to me to be an eminently sensible proposal for the ownership of the new D.C. baseball team: let the team be publicly owned.

The District could find the financing to buy the Nationals by selling 49 percent of shares publicly, as the Cleveland Indians baseball team and the Boston Celtics basketball team have done. The District also could float Class B stock or sell small-denomination -- of say, $100 -- bonds redeemable only for face value. The idea would be to tap into regional enthusiasm for baseball, and let the fans pay for -- and own a chunk of -- the team. … The Green Bay Packers -- one of the most venerated and successful teams in professional football -- is community-owned. The nonprofit Packers is financed through the issuance of stock, and more than 100,000 people own shares in the team.

Go Ralph. Public ownership might help to prevent the potential disaster of a taxpayer-funded giveaway to cover overage costs of stadium construction and the like, and there's more than enough local enthusiasm to sustain such a program; folks in the district have been waiting long enough for a baseball team that I suspect that many of them would rush out to buy a share or two. Where do I sign up?

[Posted with ecto]

Judging and grading

2004-12-29T17:31:00.000-05:00

Taking a quick break from grading -- but actually, not so much of a break…and, as it turned out, not so quick.

This article from the Washington Post (free subscription required) provides yet another example of perhaps my least-favorite misuse of a philosophical term in popular discourse (right up there with the conflation of "deconstruct" and "analyze"):

[Michelle] Kwan has yet to face the sport's new computer-oriented judging system in which a panel of judges grades each element of a skater's program as it unfolds. The system made its debut more than a year ago in the aftermath of a judging scandal at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics … It is aimed at bringing more objectivity to a sport once considered rife with corruption and cheating. … Kwan said final preparations for the Jan. 11-16 U.S. figure skating championships in Portland, Ore., her only tuneup before the world championships, have been anything but relaxed. The U.S. championships will be contested under the old scoring system, a far more subjective one in which judges rank skaters only in two broad categories on a 6.0 scale.

I have italicized the key terms. What bothers me here -- not a surprise, I'm sure -- is the somewhat bizarre notion that a judging system based on point ratings for individual performance components is somehow more "objective" than one based on two broad categories. This is a nonsensical claim, inasmuch as the judges are still evaluating the skater as she or he skates, and as such the element of personal discretion is in no way eliminated.

To make a system of evaluation "objective," all personal discretion would have to be removed, so that "the facts" alone would determine how a performance was to be scored. This follows quite simply from the very definition of "objectivity," which means -- if it means anything at all -- that the truth of a statement derives not from the personal whims and impressions of an observer (which would be "subjectivity"), but from some inherent characteristics of the object under observation. To be more precise, this is what we might call classical objectivity, where "classical" means a number of things (pre-quantum physics, pre-poststructuralism, pre-interpretivism). And it is ordinarily opposed to "subjectivity," i.e. an epistemological stance in which the truth of a statement derives from the knowing subject's personal and potentially idiosyncratic habits of thought.

So let's look this new judging system for figure-skating a bit, courtesy of the International Skating Union's official website:

2) Technical Score

When a skater/couple performs, each element of their program is assigned a base value. Base values of all recognised elements are published annually by the ISU. During the program, Judges will evaluate each element within a range of +3 to -3. This evaluation will either add to or deduct from the base value of the element. … When a skater executes an element, the Technical Specialist, monitored by the Technical Controller, will identify the element, and its respective point value will be listed on each Judge’s screen. … The Judge then grades the quality of the element within the range of +3 to -3. The sum of the base value added to the trimmed mean of the Grade of Execution (GOE) of each performed element will form the Total Element Score.

Pardon me for being obtuse, but where's the "objectivity" here? What I see is a set of criteria that individual judges can apply using their (presumably expert) discretion. And this means that a skater's performance rating depends on how she or he is judged by the experts to have executed particular elements.

Well, how about in the portion of the score that replaces the old "artistry" rating -- the place where Michelle Kwan traditionally cleaned up and thus defeated skaters whose technical competence was arguably superior?

3) Program Components

In addition to the technical score, the Judges will award points on a scale from 0 to 10 with increments of .25 for the five Program Components to grade the overall presentation of the performance. These Program Components are skating skills, transitions, performance/execution, choreography and interpretation. Several factors, as detailed below, are to be taken into account when the Judges consider each component.

Hmm. Still no "objectivity" in sight. And when we start looking at the specific criteria that judges are supposed to take into account when issuing a score for a program component, the issue becomes even clearer. Let me just take two Program Components to illustrate the point:

Skating Skills include:
- Overall skating quality
- Multi-directional skating
- Speed and power
- Cleanness and sureness of edges
- Glide and flow
- Balance in ability of partners (pair skating and ice dancing)
- Unison (pair skating)
- Depth and quality of edges and ice coverage (ice dancing)
- One foot skating (ice dancing)

Choreography includes:
- Harmonious composition of the program
- Creativity and originality
- Conformity of elements, steps and movements to the music
- Originality, difficulty and variety of program pattern
- Distribution of highlights
- Utilization of space and ice surface
- Unison (pair skating)

All it looks like the ISU has done is to spell out the elements that were previously wrapped up to form "artistry" as an omnibus rating. While this is undoubtedly an improvement, inasmuch as it gives a skater a better shot at seeing what is desired from the judges instead of remaining in the dark and simply receiving scores more or less at random, it has zippo implications for the "objectivity" of the score.

Precisely the same thing can be said of "grading rubrics," a craze presently sweeping its way through academia. I'm all for spelling out course requirements and for telling students that when I grade an essay I am looking for a clear thesis, argumentative support for that thesis, an effort to refute counter-arguments, a judicious use of examples when required, etc. But I am under no illusions that this makes my grading more "objective." More precise, yes. More defensible, in that I can point to specific components where the student's performance was lacking, yes. Hence, more transparent. But in the end I, like the figure-skating judges, am still doing the same old thing: making expert judgments about how well a particular performance was executed.

Is there a way to eliminate this? It'd sure make grading go faster … what about giving solely multiple-choice exams? That would be the equivalent of replacing all baseball umpires with the QuesTec automated system for evaluating balls and strikes, I think. In so doing, it would convert a "ball" and a "strike" into purely positional claims: a ball went wide of the plate or was too high or too low, a strike managed to cross the plate at the proper height. And it would make the pitching of balls and strikes into a very mechanical affair indeed, one from which virtually every element of human discretion and judgment had been removed (or, at any rate, formalized and institutionalized into a locally stable structure of rules that restricted agency much moreso than presently exists in baseball). Ditto for a multiple-choice test, which would basically eliminate the elements of individual discretion and judgment from an evaluation of a student's performance, and instead simply record a measurement of how many of the pencil-marks attributed to the movement of her or his hand ended up in the proper space on the page.

But would such a system be "objective"? Would it generate "objective" measurements of performance? I don't think so. While such a system would go well beyond the channelling of discretion exemplified in the ISU judging system or in the grading rubric on any of my syllabi, and would essentially eliminate the need for a human judge to make a determination, it would in no way eliminate discretion and judgment per se. Instead, it would hard-wire a certain set of standards into the apparatus of evaluation, and thus take the immediate need to interpret results out of the hands of the observers present at the time. But it would in no way eliminate the observer-dependence of the results thus obtained, even though the "observer" in question would now be a machine -- a machine that was implementing standards generated by ordinary process of social transaction.

To equate a procedure for taking evaluation out of the hands of particular individuals -- or even out of the hands of any particular individual -- with "objectivity" in the classical sense is a peculiar bit of philosophical sleight-of-hand that simply reinforces the popular notion that there are only two options for a knowledge-claim: either the claim is "objective," meaning true because it corresponds to some innate dispositional characteristic of the universe, or "subjective," meaning true because someone arbitrarily declared that it was true. The sleight of hand here involves the notion of a "dispositional essence," whether this involves a student's "intelligence" or a pitcher's "talent" or a skater's "skill"; if we grant that such occult essences are the targets of our evaluation techniques, then it follows that if we all agree on a standard and then step out of the way, the dispositional essence of the student/pitcher/skater will shine through. Voila, "objectivity" -- in the classical, dualist sense.

[This is how John Searle manages to sustain the argument that one can make epistemically objective statements about ontologically subjective -- i.e. socially constructed -- phenomena: as long as individual discretion is minimized or eliminated, the only other option is "objectivity."]

But do we need to make such an assumption -- and is it even helpful to do so? I am not convinced that it is. After all, figure skating and baseball, as well as final exams, are clearly social products, and in this sense to use a word like "objectivity" in its classical sense when referring to any component of them seems a bit misplaced. Social practices that have more or less firm sets of rules that constitute and govern them generate, not "objective" evaluations, but intersubjective ones; any consensuses that they generate are at least as much a product of interpretive activities between and among the participants as they are a product of anything happening "out there in the world" (wherever that might be). Any stability that we perceive in baseball or figure-skating or in a student's performance is a result of our ongoing interpretive activities, our transactions with the world, and cannot be definitively attributed to "the world" itself (whatever that might be).

This applies equally to evaluation situations involving a lot of individual discretion (old-style judging of figure skating, and most baseball umpiring situations), more structured and transparent forms of discretion (new-style judging, grading rubrics), and virtually no individual discretion (QuesTec, multiple-choice exams). None of these generate "objective" results. A student's grades, like a figure skater's scores or a baseball player's stats, provide a record of her or his performance in specific situations. No occult essences needed.

Of course, none of this means that Michelle Kwan isn't a terrific skater, or that my best students aren't fantastically intelligent and capable scholars. Of course they are -- that's how we define the terms. A .300 hitter hits .300 over the long-term, and we know this because they, well, hit .300 over the long term. This doesn't explain anything; "being a .300 hitter" is as little an occult essence as "being an A student" is. ("She got an A because she's an A student" is an empty tautology.) But it does provide information that we can use to classify the person and evaluate her or his performance, and perhaps spur them to try to do better in the future. And isn't this what grading and judging is for?

[Posted with ecto]

"Vacation"

2004-12-27T10:01:00.000-05:00

[slightly modified from dictionary.com ]

n.

A period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation, especially one with pay granted to an employee.
A holiday.
A fixed period of holidays, especially one during which a school, court, or business suspends activities.

Yeah, right.

Approximate schedule for this week, the first week of "vacation":

27 December
am: work on revisions of co-authored article for resubmission.
pm: grade at least six final exams from grad class, and finalize semester grades for those students.

28 December
am: grade at least eight final exams from grad class, and finalize semester grades for those students.
pm: work on reading through immense stack of material that needs to be discussed in opening and closing chapters of book manuscript.

29 December
am: grade remaining (at least eight) final exams from grad class, and finalize semester grades for those students. Submit final grades for that course.
pm: continue to work on reading through immense stack of material that needs to be discussed in opening and closing chapters of book manuscript.

30 December
am: grade at least six final exams from undergrad class, and finalize semester grades for those students.
pm: continue to work on reading through immense stack of material that needs to be discussed in opening and closing chapters of book manuscript.

31 December
am: grade at least six final exams from undergrad class, and finalize semester grades for those students.
pm: maybe read a bit; spend time with family for New Year's Eve.

1 January
clean office; work on throwing out excess crap in house, only some of which is directly due to Christmas gifts received; spend some family time with wife&kids.

2 January
am: church.
pm: grade remaining final exams from undergrad class, and finalize semester grades for those students. Submit final grades for that course. Also take care of any other lingering grading (independent studies, internship papers, etc.) and submit those grades. Finally be finished with semester two-plus weeks after it ends.

The next week before classes start up again needs to be spent working on the first and last chapters of my book, revising the rest of the ms. to make it conform to those chapters and their slight reframing of the argument to accord with what the press' board of directors wanted me to do, finalizing syllabi for Spring courses, and doing my bit of another co-authored piece that is also due mid-January -- the same time as the final book ms. is due.

I think that I would like to have "a period of time devoted to pleasure, rest, or relaxation." [Of course, in my case -- as for many academics, I'd venture -- such a period would involve thinking and reading in directions that I wanted to instead of in directions that I had to or was obligated to.] Maybe after I get tenure? Please?

[Posted with ecto]

Extremes

2004-12-23T12:06:00.000-05:00

Has anyone else noticed that the papers/essays that take the longest to grade, and the students whose semester performance it takes the longest to evaluate, are the weakest ones? Maybe this is only true for me. The worse a paper/essay is, or the more marginal a student's performance, the more comments I want to make and the more guidance I want to give them.

There's a slight inverse effect too, in that really good papers/essays seem to take me longer to grade as well. Those students generally present no problems for their overall semester performance, though, so that's a bit of balance: more time for individual assignments, less time for the overall evaluation.

If the whole class was doing decently but neither extremely well nor extremely poorly, maybe this would all go faster.

[Posted with ecto]

Insanity

2004-12-23T09:12:00.000-05:00

This may not come as a major revelation to anyone else, but it did come as a major revelation to me: the reason that I feel like I am drowning in grading is not because I am slow or inefficient or otherwise deficient, but because I have entirely too much grading to do in entirely too short a span of time. Consider the following observations:

this semester I have three classes; their enrollments are 24, 22, and 18, for a total number of 64 students. This does not include a number of independent studies, internships which I am supervising, theses which I am advising, etc.
my university does not permit TAs, so there's no one else to help out with the grading.
the kind of courses that I traditionally teach do not lend themselves to blue-book, in-class final exams, so all of these courses had final take-home essays or research papers.
in addition, discussion-intensive classes, which two of my courses this semester were, take considerably more time to grade come the end of the semester, since evaluating a student's performance in class discussion is rather more complicated than simply inserting numbers into a spreadsheet and seeing what pops out. [Not that that kind of end-of-semester grading is particularly easy or self-evident either; my point is only that it takes less time per student than the kind of thing that I am presently wading through.]
it takes me between half an hour and 45 minutes to wrap up a student's semester, which means grading their final exam/paper and determining their semester grade.
most of the exams came on on Monday the 20th.

Now, factor in also the leftover semester assignments that consumed my grading time on Monday, and the fact that on Tuesday morning I had a conversation with my editor (I love saying that -- "my editor" -- after about two years of shopping the book manuscript around to people who didn't get the argument, it's very gratifying to be able to proudly proclaim the book to be "forthcoming" and to have someone whom I can call "my editor"!) about the re-framing of the book that he had discussed with the press' board of directors, and this led to a couple of hours of work revising the second chapter and drawing up a revised table of contents, and that Tuesday afternoon I had a meeting with a student about finishing his thesis, as well as some correspondence and discussions relating to the two (!) conference/workshop thingies that I am involved in planning, and the grading of the finals didn't begin in earnest until Wednesday. Also remember that Christmas is Saturday, which makes Christmas Eve (dinner, preparations for my kids to be delighted on Christmas morning) pretty much a lost cause as far as grading goes.

Yesterday I worked pretty much all day at a steady clip, and got through 18 research papers. That's about nine hours of work, interspersed with a couple of brief "sanity breaks." Today I need to finish the last four papers for that course (about 2 hours; planning to get that done before lunch); then I have to run out to my campus office to correct a shipping error of Santa's (grumble grumble wife's present went to the wrong place grumble), and run a couple of errands on the way; then I'll stay in for a few hours and grade -- and I also have to triage my e-mail, which has gone basically unanswered for three days. So I'll get some grading done this afternoon, but not a lot. Say three hours, or six students from the 21-person class.

This leaves me with fifteen students from that class (say 8 hours), eighteen students from the other class (say 10-12 hours, since that's a more intensive class where I have to evaluate megabytes of simulation chat transcripts and blog entries in addition to final essays), and a few lingering proposals and independent study papers. Make it an even 24 hours from tonight -- but oh yeah, can't really do it on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, because of Christmas festivities. It's sad when Christmas starts looking like an obstacle, isn't it?

So I'll have to finish up over the semester break. Oh yeah, and I have to finalize my book ms. by the middle of January, as well as do my part on a co-authored book chapter, revise an article for resubmission, deal with administrative stuff that lingers from a study-abroad program I ran this summer, handle some stuff related to a professional association that I have a leadership position in…

Like I said, I am beginning to realize (slowly, slowly) that the problem may not be my inefficiency, but more my level of overcommitment. Got to take steps to deal with that somehow…when I find the time to think about how to accomplish that…

[Posted with ecto]

politics fractal

2004-12-20T18:26:00.000-05:00

politics fractal
Originally uploaded by 21stCWeber.

Thanks to the magic of flickr.com, and CMap tools, here's a graphical version of the dichotomy I was referring to in an earlier post concerning "orientations towards politics." This graphic makes the argument much easier to understand, I think, than the Punnett-square-esque table I had used previously.

Note that this diagram is also a static representation of an ongoing series of local debates and discussions; in theory, the same basic dichotomy (and calling this a binary dichotomy is of course an idealization; the whole diagram is ideal-typical) replicates again and again within each of the terminal nodes of the present diagram. What is fascinating to me (and to Andrew Abbott, whose analysis this is derived from) is how the same central controversy replicates over and over, and that's what I am trying to capture in this picture. One basic controversy, one commonplace on which we have all implicitly agreed to disagree; a myriad of positions to adopt with respect to it.

Of course, there are other fractals useful for making sense out of these debates too. more on those when I get this &#!*^%$ grading done and can blog about them, complete with better graphics…

[Posted with ecto]

A Modest Memo

2004-12-09T12:31:00.000-05:00

TO: unreflective, unreflexive neopositivists of the social-scientific world
FROM: 21stCWeber
RE: your insulting, dismissive, and coercive use of the word "empirical"

It has come to my attention that for some time now y'all have been using the word "empirical" in very unusual and baffling ways. You say things like "can you prove that empirically?" when critiquing anthropologists and historians, and things like "you don't do empirical work" when referring to scholars who do discourse analysis, textual interpretation, and the like. You even say things like "now there's an example of what empirical work can get you!" when someone presents a large-n quantitative study, but make no such comment when someone presents their detailed interpretation of a series of historical documents or their richly detailed discussion of the (causal) impact of public uses of language.

News flash: "empirical" does not mean either "statistical" or "quantitative." Empirical, according to my trusty OED, means "pertaining to, or derived from, experience," although it also carries connotations of medical quackery (e.g.: proceeding to do medical treatments without a firm scientific and theoretical foundation) and an emphasis on observation as a source of knowledge. Indeed, according to the OED the word first arose in the context of a debate about whether experiments were a valid source of knowledge -- whether one could start with observation and proceed to develop knowledge on that basis. From there the word mutates slightly so as to encompass a general orientation to the world, retaining an opposition to "theory" but also undergoing several modifications in the course of fractalized disciplinary debates about the status of knowledge.

The point is that "empirical" never meant "statistical" or "quantitative" unless you were a statistician or quantitative analyst, and even then I think it meant something else. Statisticians have empirical data, but this is far from sufficient to define their endeavor; what makes a project "statistical" is how one organizes that data and what one does with it. Instead of a descriptive term, "empirical" used by a statistician as a critique of non-statistical work is just an insult, and only makes sense in the context of an overarching consensus that statistical modes of reasoning are the best guarantor of Truth.

This might -- and I stress might -- have been a sustainable position in the social sciences in the 1950s, and even then only if one ignored the work in the philosophy of science that raised doubts about precisely what the mathematical manipulation of quantitative data could achieve. But that people continue to reproduce this myth today baffles me; did y'all simply miss the last twenty or thirty years of very public debate about this?

And come on. Seriously. Are you really prepared to say that someone who goes out into the field and lives with a group of people for an extended period of time, learns about their cultural set of meanings, and then reports back in the form of an ethnographic account has no empirics? What about a diplomatic historian who uses, say, the complete record of negotiations carried out between the great Powers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the basis on from which to develop their reconstruction of events and trends? Or the discourse analyst who sifts through years and years of Congressional testimony and parliamentary debates in order to precisely track the deployment of particular rhetorical commonplaces and themes?

Sheesh. "You don't really do empirical work" my ass. Let me tell you something: "I ran regressions on a data set" is probably less empirical than scholarship that is based on fieldwork and detailed documentary analysis. Coding data is empirical work, but in that sense it is no different than participant-observation or the disclosure of central rhetorical themes or network ties. everything that uses data is "empirical." Social science is "empirical" by definition, inasmuch as it is constitutively about making claims about the world that are sustainable with evidence of some kind. That means statistical analysis, sure, but it also means interpretive and relational modes of inquiry.

[Note that there can be better and worse empirical work in all of these camps. But that's a secondary issue; just because there's some really bad interpretive work out there it does not follow that interpretive work is somehow not "empirical."]

I suggest that all of you go back and read Weber's essay on "objectivity," and then get back to me about what is and is not "empirical."

[Posted with ecto]

Storm Clouds

2004-12-07T22:49:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you can simply sense when a storm is brewing. Something about how the air smells, or the way that the light comes through the clouds…something subtle, but tangible. A sign that a certain amount of chaos is about to erupt. And if it's a bad storm, the possibility emerges that things will be swept away in the violence.

This semester has been a rough one for the Ph.D. program, as tensions and divisions that had been suppressed and unacknowledged have begun to manifest themselves. Whether in dissertation proposal defenses, or in the seminar in which advanced students present their works in progress, or in general conversations in the hallways, people have begun to acknowledge that there are serious divisions between the faculty about what makes for good social science methodology. After witnessing several painful sessions where students were critiqued on neopositivist grounds and were unable to defend themselves, I sent off a carefully worded message to certain key parties, setting in motion a chain of events that, suffice to say, looks an awful lot like the rumbling of thunderheads. Maybe we're finally going to have a frank discussion about this.

I admit to some trepidation, on several grounds:

I don't have tenure yet. Big concern -- what if this goes horribly wrong?
I have seen departments ripped apart by fights over methodology, and know of others that fared even worse. Not quite sure how precisely to prevent that from happening here.
Combat takes time. And time is not something I have in abundance.

In general I maintain that having the fight is better than not having it, especially when issues like the direction of the Ph.D. program are at stake. I do not imagine that we will achieve a complete consensus about how the program should be arranged, but I do think that the possibility exists for a rough consensus about what we do and what we don't really do. I think that we need to prepare students to defend their methodological choices on valid philosophical grounds, and that we need to provide them with feasible options that both cover the range of available options in the discipline and are appropriate for their projects. But even doing that, it remains the case that our program leans in one direction rather than another, and we need to stop trying to force people into a mold where they and their projects don't so much fit…if we can achieve rough consensus about that, and take certain criticisms and attacks off the table as options for people to use in public fora, I'll feel that a victory has been won.

A storm seems to be coming. Hopefully it will bring changes…hopefully we'll all survive the experience, and even prosper from it.

[Posted with ecto]

Backstage

2004-11-21T22:11:00.000-05:00

In previous entries I have written about the sort of worlding that emerges from (s)wordplay and argument. But this is by no means the only type. I am aware of this, but recently I was reminded of another type: the kind of communal presence-ing that derives from communal endeavor, in which a (small) group alternates between performing and debriefing about their performance. That is what I always loved best about participation in choirs: working through rehearsals, discussing the performance beforehand, performing, and then reflexively reviewing and critiquing the performance afterwards. It's a very specific form of worlding, of a somewhat different flavor than the (s)wordplay kind; where the latter is borne on mutual exhaustion and a momentary stand-still, a kind of divine stalemate that abruptly produces stillness at the heart of the conflagration, the former involves communal effort towards a single goal, a shared endeavor within which everyone participating can become embedded -- at least for the duration. I know you and you know me through the work, rather than by taking one another's measure and working towards a mutual respect ushered in through noble combat.

[I think that these two can be combined, at least in principle: "we" work together to produce a response to "them," and vice versa. If it works properly, the moment of mutual respect dissolves both groups, at least temporarily. But I suspect that it rarely works like this, and that what happens in practice involves a continued clash until one side wins at least a temporary victory. But that's a different issue entirely.]

One of the odder things about academia is that most of what one does for a living does not involve this kind of worlding. Classroom teaching, except in rare circumstances, is a solo act; there are no collaborators and coconspirators to share the experience with. Publishing? The contours of the modern academic market work against co-authored work in most circumstances; I know several stories of such collaborations being actively discouraged by Rank&Tenure committees. Even the arrangement of panels for a conference is often just a series of solo performances: people meet, say their piece, and leave after a few pleasantries. Edited volumes? I have been in several where I have not even met many of the other authors. And the one edited volume I was involved in which grew out of a workshop didn't breed much of a sense of common endeavor. Search committees? Don't get me started on those. Ditto departmental decisions about designing programs and the like; a few committee meetings and a vote to approve doesn't quite cut it.

Indeed, I think it's problematic to regularly expect that kind of commonality among academics. Academia was, after all, designed for and by monks, and each of us is constitutively sealed in our little cells wrapped up in our own research and our own teaching. The exceptions to this are few and far between, and greatly to be prized:

1) co-authorship. Collaborating with someone to produce a piece of writing can produce that kind of connexion, although it need not -- I know of occasions where it has not. But when one can get away with it, and where one can take it seriously, there is a good deal of communal worlding to be explored there.

2) group projects. Throwing a workshop can produce the worlding of common endeavor between the coordinators, I think, as can the planning and execution of a conference or even a panel. but those dynamics can be odd: I once put together a roundtable (parenthetically, I think it may be easier to do this kind of thing with a roundtable than with a panel, given that panels demand papers whereas roundtables only call for memos or thoughts -- but this may also be a function of the kinds of papers involved) with six participants, and by the time it reached print we only had four left because of internal tensions and the like. Plus, the post-roundtable discussion was mostly about the substance of the arguments, and not so much about the communal endeavor itself.

Indeed, this is the problem: academics talk about their work. They don't talk much about the circumstances that produce it, or the formal and stylistic aspects of it -- it's not like musicians after a concert discussing their performance and that of others. It can be, but in my experience only is so rarely.

3) co-teaching, or, since that is not as common as I would like for it to be, the kind of co-teaching that involves one's TAs. TAs who are there in the classroom get to watch and assist; they occupy a unique position, in that they get to participate in something that is otherwise a very solitary performance. So one can debrief with them afterwards, and plan future activities, and engage in the kind of reflexive critique that results in better performances. Or at least results in that common endeavor sensibility.

At the conference this past weekend I (re-)discovered that conferences can be like performances, and can be like communal performances. I go say my piece at a panel, someone else says theirs, and later on we can compare notes, see what the effect was as observed by other people, talk about whether the resulting atmosphere was desirable…

Conferences can be performances in that way. I and my colleagues running around and working to interject points and shift the conversation(s), looking for people saying interesting things, even identifying morons who need to be publicly opposed: there's a pleasant commonality throughout that is missing in large portions of the academic life as I have experienced it to date. During the debrief sessions (generally in the bar, as usual) I did feel like I was, for a few moments, a part of some larger common enterprise. It's different than bitch sessions or gossip sessions, both of which are important parts of what goes on at conferences; where those involve huddling in the wings and comparing notes, this is more like playing. And the difference, I think, is two-fold:

1) this kind of worlding is produced by treating the conference as a game that we're all playing together, a game with rules and conventions and implicitly some way to keep score. I can envision -- and I have indeed played -- conference games with teams of (s)wordfighters, but this need not always be the case; there can also be more pedagogical games, or things like that game in the stands during sports events where you need to keep the beachball bounding between people and not let it touch the ground…

2) there is explicit and reflexive attention played to the context itself, to the conference and to the way it is organized and playing out. Talking about the field, or about the substance of the papers presented, or about politics, is good and helpful and fulfilling, but the special distinctiveness of this sort of worlding is that the subject-matter is the performative endeavor itself.

I wonder if the reason that this doesn't happen more often has to do with people not taking the conference seriously enough as performance. I often see people looking through it to the content of the arguments presented, or missing it entirely to focus on particular individuals (conferences as giant reunions) or on other, ancillary activities. And while at a conference I certainly do all of these from time to time. But there is also the rare distinctiveness of the activity itself, which is one of the very few moments of communal activity that this strange academic life seems to afford us. [Yes, teaching is communal between students and professor. But it's hard to debrief afterwards and run the class as a collaboration, given the authority relations involved. With my TAs some of that authority is displaced because of the common relation of each of us to the class members proper, and the same happens between senior and junior colleagues at a conference when both are playing together. The kind of worlding I'm after here involves relations between more or less equals, so that everyone is involved together in producing the outcome. Also, most students still think of classes as a technique for getting to matters of content, so they look through the class itself instead of focusing on the performance in the way that the professor and TAs do or can.]

We are often too concerned with tangible results in this business; we don't spend enough time on the process. And we don't spend anywhere near enough time reflexively monitoring that process in the way that generates that marvelous sense of being backstage with others, working together to generate a moving performance.

[Posted with ecto]

Tone

2004-11-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

Glad I got to run this morning for the first time in over a week -- this flu/cold thing really knocked me for a loop, and I was craving the peculiar opening that I seem to get most easily while doing some kind of repetitive physical task. Especially running. Hence I was able to think through a few things.

Another November, another conference -- the annual Northeast event, a conference I've been attending regularly since 1996. It was my first professional conference, back when I was in grad school. It was also my escape from the rather destructive environment of grad school, where almost no one had the slightest clue what I was doing and really didn't seem to care all that much -- an escape into an environment where I found like-minded scholars and kindred spirits and good conversations. And I've also just completed a year as President of the organization; I plan to stay involved with preserving and sustaining this fragile space in the hopes that it can play the same kind of vital role in the development of other young "critical IR broadly understood" scholars as it did for me.

Total conference cost for me: about $550, including plane fare, hotel, and food. Not too bad for three reasonably intense days of discussions and explorations -- plus a chance to hang out with comrades whom I don't see all that often, trade professional gossip, and practice being in (scholarly) form in a way that I sometimes find it difficult to do in my home institution.

I tried an experiment this time, an experiment stemming from my ongoing discussions with Magic and others about the purposes of conferences: I deliberately attempted to alter my tone during panels. I like and crave a good sparring match, of course, but I was trying to see whether I could accept the fact that other people do not seem to have the same inclinations and work with what they were expecting instead of trying to induce them into another mode of interaction by simply attacking and waiting for them to defend. Taking some advice from a number of people I tried to explicitly qualify what I was saying, signaling tentativeness and hesitation; I dropped a lot of hedge terms into what I was saying and explicitly invited people to critique me. Call it a more vulnerable kind of self-presentation, or a weaker style in the sense of Stephen White's notion of "weak ontology": -- less forceful, less self-assured, less final. Or, at any rate, signaling such a provisional status more explicitly.

See, I tend to think that these things are obvious and implied. It surprises me a lot when I am reminded -- as my friends and colleagues sometimes, thankfully, do -- that there are still people floating around our field who hold fast to notions like "objective truth" (in the non-perspectival, non-constructionist, non-Weberian sense -- a.k.a. Truth-with-a-capital-T) and "definitive conclusions" and "final readings" and that sort of thing. So whenever I offer any claim, it is to my mind only a provisional statement, serving largely as an invitation to critique and further conversation. The best thing one can do, the thing I am always interested in, is having someone come back at my claim and wrestle with it; then I can defend, we can tussle, and eventually produce the moment of connexion that can come from mutually proficient (s)wordplay. But apparently (and this is news to me, and yet another example of how tacit social rules remain mysterious to me -- unless I can spell them out and, in effect, write them down for future reference, I am rather oblivious to them. No social antenna, so to speak -- welcome to the wonderful world of Aspergia) when I simply advance a claim or a criticism or a comment, most people -- even in an academic environment where I'd think that people, having been exposed to the methodological issues generated by the collapse of the Enlightenment project, would realize and act on the realization that there is no self-evident connection between reason and Truth -- take offense, refuse to engage, and dismiss whatever I am saying. Apparently this has some connection to my failure a) to explicitly signal the tentative character of the claim and b) to say something supportive about the person's argument before offering the critique.

The second of these issues strikes me as deeply problematic in contexts in which I am facing off against professional colleagues, which is the case with many if not most panels at the larger conferences. It is problematic because a) I do not see much of anything of value in the arguments that many of my colleagues advance about things; b) when there is anything of value it requires such a drastic re-coding and re-writing of what they are saying that I might as well be making the argument myself; c) I do not understand why someone would be advancing an argument or a claim that they were not prepared to defend, even though I see many of my colleagues doing this all the time; and d) most people in my field do not seem to even understand their own arguments -- either the underpinnings of their arguments or the implications of their arguments -- and so almost anything I would say positive about them would require the kind of reconstruction of their points that I do not really feel is appropriate for the setting of a panel or similar public forum. In other words: saying something supportive simply for the sake of saying something supportive seems highly artificial to me to me in that kind of environment. My professional colleagues do not need my support; they are professionals and should -- should, but apparently often do not -- simply be capable of offering their arguments and then engaging in (s)wordplay over and around them.

Two exceptions to this rule: the sort of presentation where people explicitly say that they are just tossing something out that is half-formed and embryonic (often the case in a roundtable, but I have seen panels in which this takes place as well); and presentations by graduate students who are just entering the profession and who are almost by definition still finding their way. When I discuss graduate student papers, or ask questions of graduate students in public settings, I try to be more deliberately "constructive" (i.e. gentler, and a little more affirming) than I often am to professional colleagues who should know better. There, I said it: they ought to know better. Graduate students can't and shouldn't be expected to be operating at the same level of competence, but established professional academics? Especially those with "important" publications and a certain level of prestige in the field? Please. I do not feel it appropriate for me to be playing "educator" to them -- it's not a classroom, they aren't students, I'm not their teacher. I have students of my own; them I'll teach. And I'll extend that same courtesy to other people's students, and instead of blasting the incoherence of their position I'll invite them to think through that incoherence and give them an opportunity to flesh out how these things go together in their own minds…I'll try to create the same kind of space I try to create when advising one of my own students. But that takes a kind of authority that I do not feel empowered to claim when confronting a colleague's inconsistencies and incoherence -- unless they explicitly ask me for that, which sometimes some of them do.

I digress. I do that.

Anyway, what I did at this conference is try to modify my usual style of presentation and engagement during public session in three ways:

1) at a roundtable on a colleague's book -- a fantastic book that is about to be published, and a book that I can't wait to start assigning to my students left and right -- I began by pointing out that there was a dearth of books in our field that repay close and careful reading and re-reading, but that this book was a happy exception, and one of my favorite recent books period. Longish period of public praise before launching into my detailed critical engagement with the argument, an engagement that largely revolved around my usual hobby-horse about the conflict between a strong specification of subjective motivations and the preservation of agency. And scattering notes of praise throughout the criticism, plus ending on a high note about the kind of debate that I think this book invites us to have, a debate I think sorely needed in the field. Success? Well, the author appreciated it, and I got some feedback that I didn't come across as quite as obnoxious as I might have otherwise.

2) as a roundtable on "ethics and IR,"a subject about which I know little and which does not occupy the center (or much of anywhere near the center) or my work, I introduced the proper graphic representation of the fractal dichotomies I wrote about in previous entries, noted that this was just something I was playing with as a way of making sense of my frustrations teaching in a policy-oriented school, and then speculated on ways that this might help to make sense of our discussions about ethics (and what 'ethics' might mean to different groups of us). Success? Immense. People took the disgrams to heart and began to utilize them during the subsequent discussion, and several people told me later that the diagrams also helped them to make sense out of other experiences in their professional lives. So that worked pretty well, even as I used the conversation on and the participants in the panel to flesh out my points; people didn't mind being used as examples for some reason, and I think it went back to the way that I introduced the concepts.

3) when asking questions at a panel, I used a couple of formulaic signals suggested to me by others in the past: "help me think through this…"; "I think what you're saying is this, and I wonder about this implication…"; "Your reading of Nietzsche is interesting, since in my reading blah blah blah, and I'm curious about what you'd do with a passage like this one…"; and "I'm not sure what I think about this, but it's something I've been pondering and I'd be curious to hear what the panelists have to say about X." All of these, especially the last one, feel somewhat disingenuous; I do have a take on the issues I raised, even if it is by definition (see above) provisional and tentative, and the reading of Nietzsche I was skeptical about was, in my opinion, flat-out unsustainable, since the author was arguing that Nietzsche was making definitive knowledge claims rather than tactical interventions of dislocation. But I deliberately held back, used alternate formulas, and bided my time. [On another panel I held myself in check while a panelist went on and on in a wildly incoherent way; even though I was formulating a sharp rebuke that started with "but that makes no sense," I didn't voice it aloud. Instead I asked a question asking for a clarification of the difference between several of the terms that he had tossed out. Granted, this happened after one of my former students said precisely what I had been formulating, thus relieving me of the necessity of saying it myself, but still.] Success? Somewhat. The more "vulnerable" questioning style did promote a better discussion, I think, than might have been the case otherwise. And several people wanted to continue discussing the issue(s) with me afterwards, which was (I think) a good sign. Now, granted, the discussion was somewhat loose and woolly; what was "better" about it was that people were talking and responding, not necessarily that they were being particularly precise about what they were saying. But some conversation is better than no conversation.

So I altered my tone, and there was some improvement. But at what cost? I feel a little disappointed that there was only one really good argument in which I was involved at the conference. I am greedy; I always want more of those. Then again, one good argument (which was really the latest round of an ongoing argument) is certainly a positive thing, and I don't know how many really good arguments per conference should be realistically expected. And the other public conversations were nice, if not particularly earth-shattering. Plus, I know that I did a little bit to help alter the reputation that I apparently have in some quarters of being an obnoxious asshole; I know this from private conversations, which continue to constitute the real reason I go to conferences anyway. (More on those in a subsequent entry.) Also, Northeast is a smaller gathering, without so many prestige players in attendance; beating up on children and old people doesn't make for good sport. Northeast is a more nurturing environment, or at least it should be, and maybe my altered tone helped in some small way to make it so.

[Posted with ecto]

The status quo

2004-11-07T14:07:00.000-05:00

An issue that I continue to wrestle with in the general area of "science and politics" concerns the charge often leveled at me and some of my students that we are not "political" enough. At first I thought that they simply meant that we were not letting our politics drive our scholarly conclusions, and so I simply took it as a compliment -- even though this is almost certainly not how our accusers intended it. Then I though that it might be exhausted by the fractalization of the contemplating-enacting dichotomy; while I think that this gets us part of the way there, it does not suffice to get at all of the relevant complexities of the issue -- largely because there are divisions inside each of the four categories produced by that fractalization that do not seem to involve contemplating-enacting at all, but seem implicated whenever "science and politics" is discussed. And I have colleagues and students who have no doubts about their Cc scholar status, but who are still very concerned about the lack of "politics" displayed by other Cc scholars.

So here's where my thinking about this puzzle is at the moment: what is going on here involves the basic insight that the social and political status quo does not appear to be "political" by virtue of its being the status quo. So if my analytical assumptions about the world mirror more or less closely the arrangement of forces and factors in the world, and if I further proceed with this analytic without taking pains to distance myself from it or to criticize it, this apparently appears "unpolitical" to those who are much more opposed to the status quo than I am -- and perhaps to me, too, inasmuch as I appear to simply be reflecting the world as it is and not making a "political" claim about the world at all. Silence equals consent -- taking the world the way it appears to be and not overtly critiquing it slips easily over into a a signal of support for that world and its arrangements.

"Political," then, seems to mean opposing the status quo, while "unpolitical" means defending it, or at least not condemning it in toto. This is a curious usage, inasmuch as a good Nietzschean would be the first to admit that all knowledge was power-laden and in that sense "political." But I can see how a refusal to overtly condemn the status quo might be taken to be "unpolitical" if what one was interested in was a more or less explicit attempt to change that status quo, or at least to distance oneself from it.

Once again, the content of the terms seems to depend on one's position in a set of local debates. Fractalizing the dichotomy as before, we arrive at the following breakdown:

	Pro	Anti
pro	Pp: defenders	Ap: critics
anti	Pa: reformers	Aa: radicals

It is important to note that pro- and anti-status quo stances are potentially much more fluid and transient than the orientations towards politics that appear in my first chart. As the status quo, or one's conception of it, changes, a particular person may find themselves going from Pp to Aa without changing the substance of their claims one bit. If I think that world politics is divided up into sovereign territorial state units, and I am researching global social movements, I am most likely an Ap or an Aa: my work directly goes against what I think of as the status quo, by introducing other elements into consideration. But suppose I then alter my sense of the status quo, perhaps through doing more research, so that I now think of world politics as consisting of broader flows and networks; my concern with global social movements becomes Pa or even Pp. Similarly, if I am working to get human rights on the agenda when it is not, I am anti-status quo; if keep working on human rights after conventions are signed and standards are implemented, I am now pro-status quo, even though I may still be dissatisfied with precisely how human rights are being deployed (I'd be a Pa, whereas I might have been an Ap or an Aa before).

This fluidity is not characteristic of the orientations to politics arranged around a fractalization of the contemplating-enacting dichotomy. If my attitudes towards politics are such that I really want to pursue particular goals, I am not likely to be happy with contemplation; likewise, if I am after comprehension, the daily business of enacting will probably not suffice for me. While it is always possible that someone who begins on a contemplative path will end up forsaking the academy for a more consistently activist life, and vice versa, I'd wager that this is less likely than someone finding themselves at various times in their lives and careers occupying all four of the stances generated by the fractalization of the pro-status quo-anti-status quo division. And while I think that one might well simultaneously occupy multiple positions on this chart, depending on the status quo in question, I do not think that occupying more than one position on the first chart is sustainable for long. More likely is that (for example) someone with enacting inclinations but an overall contemplative disposition [and I am deliberately avoiding the question of whether such dispositions are innate or contingently constructed; my inclination is for the latter, but that's neither here nor there] will end up as an expert trying to speak truth to power in defense of her or his specific causes and issues. But trying to be both a scholar and a practitioner at the same time strikes me as quite difficult, perhaps even impossible, to pull off.

(Can there be people who are temperamentally anti-status quo? Sure. Ditto the opposite. I don't think this changes my analysis much, though, since the possibility of changing positions in the chart remains more open than it does, IMHO, in terms of the contemplating-enacting dichotomy.)

Thinking of the issues like this should, in the first place, put to rest the silly notion that there is any such thing as "non-political" thinking or behaving. Every action has a politics, inasmuch as it is always oriented towards or against the status quo, and is so oriented in more or less extreme ways. But now that we have that out of the way, notice that the change of being "unpolitical" is most likely to arise in one specific debate -- between Aa radical and Ap critics -- because of the usual habit in fractalized debates of conflating local opposition with a more global issue, and thus collapsing Ap critics into Pp defenders of the status quo. No such option is available to Pa reformers, although they are quite likely to be conflated with Aa radicals by their Pp defender opponents -- a dynamic that we see in political debate all the time, for instance in the patently absurd notion that any tampering with the operations of the free market is the same as state socialism, or that allowing moments of silent prayer in schools is the same as theocratic dominion. So being called "unpolitical" most likely means that you are debating with an Aa radical, and there's a good chance that what has offended their sensibilities is that you are an Ap critic instead of a proponent of their Cause -- whatever it is.

Notice also that this dichotomy also parallels the distinction, first brilliantly sketched by E. H. Carr, between "realist" and "utopian" views of social order. Realists are by definition pro-status quo, because they think that this is the way that the world is and that a failure to take this into account would be disastrous. And anti-status quo orientations have something of a utopian tenor to them, inasmuch as they rest on a vision of the world that is at variance with how the world appears at present. Pa reformers are utopian with respect to Pp defenders, and both are "realists" when compared to Ap critics and Aa radicals. The debate between critics and radicals that can easily lead to the deployment of a charge like "non-political" is, in this sense, a debate about realism vs. utopia, albeit one in a specific local context of people generally opposed to the status quo.

[Notice also that the way I have set this dichotomy up -- like the contemplating-enacting dichotomy -- deliberately abstracts from the specific content of particular positions. A debate about what the status quo is is, I think, a different matter from the issues I am trying to highlight here. By doing this, I have also left open the possibility that people of different orientations might nonetheless come to agree on what the status quo consists of -- optimistic, perhaps, and maybe even a little utopian. But I would still like to think that people's general moral-practical orientations do not completely determine the "facts" that they apprehend; I'd prefer to reserve that for the analytical apparatuses that they produce out of their substantive commitments. But I digress…]

Now, the real action starts when we combine the two dichotomies, generating sixteen ideal-typical combinations of positions that people might adopt. Combine this with the basic observation that the most intense fights are between those who share the most in common (the "family" rule, so to speak), and we have a rather dynamic way to account for and appreciate the struggles that we see inside and outside of the academy. A group of scholars who disagree on their orientation to the status quo will engage in vitriolic debates about one another's "politics," in part because they share the same basic orientation to politics. A group of radicals might almost come to blows over the question of whether "theory" was or was not an important component of the revolutionary struggle that they all agree is necessary, and what theory's precise role should be. And in all cases, the local meanings of the terms deployed would be specific to the situation at hand, while bearing enough of a Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" to the way that those terms are deployed in other local contexts to enable interlocutors to drag in other statements in support of their claims -- hence characterizing their opponents as occupying more extreme positions in the fractalized field than they actually do occupy…

Also, consider that in present circumstances (and for the moment I am deliberately leaving underspecified what those "present conditions" entail) opposing the status quo is somewhat intuitively easier to do from a position of actively intervening in politics, while the institutional and organizational constraints of the academic life make it quite tempting to simply engage in disinterested or detached analysis rather than explicitly opposing the social and political status quo under investigation; there is thus something of an "elective affinity" between contemplating and affirming the status quo, and between enacting and objecting to the status quo. This means that it is in many ways easier to be an "unpolitical academic" than it is to be an academic opposing the status quo, and that it is easier to be a "political activist" than it is to campaign and to mobilize around the notion of a defense of the status quo. [Here part of the genius of mobilizing fundamentalist Christians during the last election, since their narrative always places them in opposition to what they conceive of as a sinful, secularized status quo…even as they make concrete inroads and enact policies that increase the overtly Christian character of the public sphere in much of the United States.]

What this means, ultimately, is that the people who have the hardest time will be those who occupy the most "counter-intuitive" positions, such as (for example, since this is where I'd locate myself :-) scholars with a critique -- but not a radical one -- of the social and political status quo. Such CcAp folks are likely to get accused of being "too political" by their Pp and Pa scholarly brethren, and too "unpolitical" by CcAa radical scholars; they may also (shifting the kaleidoscope slightly) be accused of being hopelessly out of touch with practical reality by Ec and Ee critics, and dismissed as too impractically conceptual by ApCe "critical experts." CcPp scholarly defenders, like EeAa practitioning radicals, have the power of socially sustainable consistency to draw on in support of their stances. "Scholarly radicals" -- CcAa -- and "practicing defenders" -- EePp -- have the consistency of their positions (always more radical or more status quo oriented, or always more contemplative or more enacting oriented, than others in their local group) to draw on for support. [This is much clearer when fractal dichotomies are drawn in a different graphical format, such that a secondary division is below the first and is connected to the initial split with lines forming an inverted "v" -- I really need to find the html for doing that.]

But as for the rest of us, muddling through -- and differentiating ourselves from one another in myriad ways -- is perhaps the best we can do.

[Posted with ecto]

The Ee electorate

2004-11-06T13:42:00.000-05:00

Call me crazy, but I think that the analysis I presented a couple of days ago concerning tensions between orientations towards politics also can help to shed some light on the recently-completed U.S. presidential election. The sociology of knowledge: it's not just for academics anymore.

First, let's review:

	Contemplating	Enacting
contemplating	Cc: scholars	Ec: scholar-activists
enacting	Ce: experts	Ee: practitioners

These four orientations to politics, generated through a "fractalization" of the the basic choice between contemplating how politics works and enacting specific political programs, produce different sets of expectations with regard to such matters as knowledge, theory, "success," and the like. Scholars have their internal debates about epistemology and methodology, and in an ordinary academic context generally have some experts around with which to contend; experts seek "value-added" in the form of policy recommendations that are grounded in some sort of theoretical rigor but targeted at overcoming the "ivory tower" habits of their scholarly brethren -- even at the expense of a measure of intellectual coherence. Practitioners focus on geting things done, and have little use for more abstract conceptualizations; scholar-activists remain grounded in the world of practice, but step back to reflect on that practice according to standards that they share, more or less, with scholars -- even as they, like experts, aim to produce specific recommendations for policy practice.

Because of "positional solidarity," experts and practitioners find themselves weakly allied against scholars and scholar-activists when it comes to a choice between abstract theoretical rigor and more concrete plans of action. Scholar-activists are the contemplators of the enacting community even as experts are the enactors of the contemplating community. As a result, the issues open for debate between scholars and experts on the one hand, and scholar-activists and practitioners on the other, are effectively the same issues translated into different local contexts. Just as scholars criticize experts for oversimplifying, minimizing complexity, and glossing over methodological subtleties, scholar-activists critique practitioners who do not have a broader grasp of the meaning of their activities, or a solid intellectual defense of why certain actions are performed in preference to others. "Theory," or "rigor," or sometimes "methodological sophistication," serves as a specific move in a language-game of debate between the two ideal-typical poles within each community. And the reverse move is also possible, and prevalent: experts and practitioners throw the charge of "sophistication" back in the faces of their opponents, charging them with being completely out of touch with political reality.

[Parenthetically, such conflicts are also fueled by the striking fact that scholar-activists look like ivory-tower scholars to practitioners, even as experts look like a-theoretical practitioners to scholars…typical fractal distortion, in which a group occupying a similar position within the broader universe of positions is substituted for the group with which one is actually arguing. Experts are hopelessly "abstract" by comparison with either scholar-activists or practitioners, but from the content of the charges leveled during the debate, you wouldn't know it. Hang on to that point; it will be useful in a moment.]

A final thing to note is that Ee practitioners are not impressed with academic rigor or sophisticated logic; they are much more likely to respect results, even as they (from a scholarly perspective -- I can't completely detach myself from my own position in this typology, even while trying to envision how things appear from other positions) lack the critical argumentative habits of thought needed to evaluate claims about results. This accounts for the habit of expert-seeking I often see among my MA students, who shop around for an expert whose arguments support them and then deploy that expert as part of a debate with other Ee practitioners. This kind of move presumes a certain positive valence to contemplation, though, such that a practitioner with experts on her or his side is to be taken more seriously than a practitioner without them, or that policies founded in systematic contemplation about how the world is structured are superior to policies that are not so founded. Ec scholar-activists are better able to separate sound from unsound arguments by thinking critically about them, but are probably less likely to simply accept the pronouncement of one or another expert in their debates with Ee practitioners -- which is why we see Ec scholar-activists critiquing the methodology of the experts on which Ee practitioners draw, and drawing on Cc scholarly arguments in order to do so.

Now, assume for a moment that we are dealing with a situation in which contemplation has been devalued. [Set aside for a moment the intriguing question of precisely how this has happened.] In such a situation, one can effectively attack an opponent by deriding their intellectual proclivities and portraying them as an aloof thinker -- lumping reflective enactors in with the most ivory-tower of intellectuals. Given that Ec scholar-activists -- or, perhaps, "thoughtful politicians" -- tend to have more nuanced positions on issues, given their increased familiarity with the nuances of scholarly debate and the complexity of the issues under investigation, one could easily take such a candidate to task for "waffling" on the issues, while touting one's own "fortitude" and "resolution" -- and occasionally trotting out a expert or two to assuage the objections of those remaining few who give a little credence to the idea that thinking matters to political decisions. Behold, the Bush campaign strategy, with the Heritage Foundation and AEI playing the occasional (very occasional -- the Bush campaign, indeed the whole Bush administration, prides itself on not consulting experts for advice, and they rarely base their public claims on expert testimony) "expert" role, and the major substance of the charges against Kerry amounting to something like "he thinks too much, and he surrounds himself with thinkers."

Yes, the Bush campaign also deployed the "moral values" card -- which, as my friends over at The Republic of Heaven wisely point out, means "homophobia" -- and this got them quite a bit of (rural) turnout in swing states, and thus sealed the election. But the condition of possibility for such a deployment to work is that contemplation and thinking be devalued; if it weren't, then we'd be having a much more intricate debate about sexuality, instead of the naked fearmongering characteristic of current public rhetoric on the issue. [Note that I am not saying that the more intricate debate would necessarily be more rational or anything like that, just that it would be more intricate -- with experts weighing in on all sides, and discussion rather than categorical pronouncements that shut down further debate.] In the absence of any public discussion of values, and in the presence of a culture that devalues contemplation, we are left with bare assertions of what "value" entails -- and a lack of public rhetorical space in which to effectively challenge those pronouncements without being accused of, in effect, "thinking too much."

Not too surprising, coming from a group that prides themselves on not being a part of the"reality-based community":

---
The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
---

We are now living in a country run by people who not only don't value contemplation, but actively de-values it. And this resonates with their base of supporters.

The solution? We have to restore the value of contemplation, somehow, so that we can get the positive valence back for "thinking a problem through." FDR's brain trust followed the Great Depression; maybe we need another crisis of that magnitude to frighten people into esteeming something other than their "gut" sense of right and wrong?

[Posted with ecto]

"Healing"

2004-11-04T11:16:00.000-05:00

Oh, fuck this rhetoric too. The country doesn't need "healing," which is a none-too-subtle way of telling the blue states to knuckle under and shut up, having lost a closely contested election. Particularly an election where the major issues on voters' minds seems to have been "moral" issues, involving "gay marriage" and the like. (Yes, yes, materialist pundits are going to say that it's the economy, stupid. But it wasn't. The economy is not doing too well, particularly in many of the red states, so poof, there goes that hypothesis. People do not simply vote their pocketbooks, although they may vote their moral conception of what should happen to their pocketbooks…which is a different matter altogether.)

The War On Terrorism? What is that if not a "moral issue" too? It can't be some kind of "material reality," since on basically any defensible measure we are not "winning" that war, and the chances of a terrorist attack in Iowa or Ohio are so slim as to make winning the Powerball jackpot look like a sure thing. (The Gateway Arch in St. Louis -- now there's a media-worthy terrorist target. But Ohio? Iowa? What would they blow up?) "We have to get those bastards" sounds like a moral claim to me, one straight out of a bad, de-contextualized reading of the Christian Old Testament: an eye for an eye. Sound analysis? Virtually every professional IR scholar and analyst not directly in the pay of the emergent neoconservative establishment signed this open letter condemning how the Administration has elected to pursue the War On Terrorism. People apparently aren't thinking about these issues in anything like a defensible, logical fashion, they are -- as usual -- reacting to a compelling configuration of rhetorical commonplaces that is supported by a long-term effort by religious conservatives to re-engineer the social environment of the country. The War On Terrorism is nothing but the completion of Reagan's public recasting of the Cold War as a manichean struggle between Good and Evil.

Values, people, VALUES. It's what Republicans know about American politics that Democrats have forgotten. I like my values. I'm happy to debate them any time. So why is the Democratic party so afraid to do so?

The "healing" rhetoric -- which we now hear coming out of both camps -- is the biggest bunch of bullshit I can imagine. It's worse than the "mandate" crap I was ranting about earlier. Why? Because it reflects this fundamentally a-political, anti-agonistic approach to social life where consensus (almost any consensus) is good, dissent is traitorous, and conflict exists as a problem that needs to be solved. As though perfect utopia would exist if everyone agreed on everything -- as thought that wouldn't be precisely the Orwellian nightmare that all of us fear. Well, maybe not all of us. Apparently some people buy the sanctity of their values enough that they're fine imposing them on others by force. I wonder what it's like to have that much certainty about anything, so that you know that you're right, right, RIGHT -- and that anyone who disagrees with you is utterly, implacably, irredeemably evil, and deserving of whatever cruel fate befalls them at the hands of the righteous.

We don't need healing. We need ongoing contestation, because that's the only thing that stops us from falling into the gross conceit that we have figured it all out, that God Himself (only a male God does things like this, usually) is on our side and we can do no wrong as long as He is with us. And the U.S. constitution is designed for this: when one has an issue that is so contentious that the country as a whole cannot agree, and cannot agree in the supramajoritarian way that is (wisely!) required to make Constitutional modifications, then we let individual states make their own decisions and fight the constitutional issues out in court. It's the American (federalist, or "negarchic") way. [And yes, I am quite aware that sometimes the system breaks down, chokes on issues that cannot be handled that way -- issues like "slavery." But I do not think that we are dealing with anything quite that fundamental here. I could be wrong, of course; only time will tell. My point is that we have to try.]

I want states to enact "gay marriage" legislation, and then get into principled struggles with other states about whether it should be permitted -- and whether there are any Constitutional grounds for one state's refusal to recognize the legal enactments of another (which is a very tough argument to make and sustain). I want states to pass educational programs that try all kinds of crazy things to solve the problems with our public school systems all across the country, and not be beholden to the absurd timelines of the No Every Child Left Behind act. The Patriot Act scares the shit out of me; I want some state to mount a legal challenge on the basis that civil rights have been compromised, so that we can debate the issue instead of being presented with a fait accompli which is then unquestionably valid for the whole country.

Unlike what both parties are now saying, we most certainly do not need "healing," IMHO. We need a good honest and fair contestation on Constitutional principles -- something that can't be resolved with one rather close electoral victory by the champions of one conception. Conflict is good. I do not fear conflict; I fear imposed consensus, especially the kind backed up by force of various kinds.

A prayer: "God, please help us all to stop USING YOUR NAME IN VAIN to justify our particular conceptions of what is right and just. And please do not send us 'healing'; please send us much, much more conflict. Amen."

[No, this is not the entry I planned to write today either. Maybe that one will make its way into print after I grade some more and need a break.]

[Posted with ecto]

"Mandate," my ass

2004-11-04T08:52:00.000-05:00

This is not what I was originally going to blog about this morning -- I'll do that a bit later, got to get it out while the inspiration lasts -- but this article and its quotation from Dick "there's no way I can run for President in 2008 so I'd better do what I can now while I still have an elected position" Cheney:

Mr. Cheney, in introducing the president at the rally at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center less than a half-mile from the White House, left little doubt about how this White House saw the election, and what it intended to do with it. He said the president had run "forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate."

Please. For one thing, the Republican victory in the election was very close, coming down to a few votes in a few swing states. Had Kerry won, calling his victory a "mandate" would have been just as absurd. The country remains deeply divided, and to pretend otherwise is fanciful mythmaking. (Not that the Republicans are the only ones guilty of this. Arguably, the emergence of red states in the first place has something to do with the Democrats' tendency to assume that the rest of the country agreed with them and their values, and almost completely missing the demographic and ideological shifts of the last two decades. The Republicans retooled their base a lot during the 70s and 80s, setting the stage for their electoral victories in the 90s; the Democrats better do likewise if they don't want to miss the boat here. In particular, I think that the lesson is that you can't run as a thoughtful patrician intellectual and hope to succeed in the long run -- no more FDRs and JFKs. Who will emerge as the next great Democratic populist candidate?)

But more fundamentally -- pardon my ivory-tower, scholarly tendencies for just a moment -- the very notion of a "mandate" makes no sense in the American constitutional system. The U.S. Constitution is set up to minimize the dangers of the momentary will of the masses taking over and steering the country down a disastrous course; hence the Electoral College, the indirect election of Senators originally specified in the document, the life tenure of the judges in the Supreme Court, and so on. The central danger (and The Federalist Papers are so abundantly clear on this that it is impossible to miss unless you either don't read them or take great pains to pull words and phrases out of context) is governmental tyranny, which the authors of the document thought about in terms of any one branch of government -- or its natural constituency -- gaining the upper hand for a long period of time. Executive tyranny is minimized through the need for "advice and consent," the fact that President's veto can be overridden, and his inability to dissolve the Congress (among other things); a tyranny of the Court is prevented by the need for judges to go through an approval process; and legislative tyranny is prevented through bicameralism, federalism, and the need for country-wide supermajorities to override the Constitution.

The system is not designed to do anything efficiently. It is designed to present obstacles to effective action, in the hopes that only those courses of action that are obviously right [which, for a bunch of sober enlightenment intellectuals, meant "reasonable" in that reason-is-the-voice-of-God-whsipering-in-your-mind kind of way] would survive the process and be enacted. And in partuclar -- something that we like to forget in our more populist age -- the tyranny that the framers most feared was a tyranny of the majority. The "factions" that Madison rails against in Federalist #10 are not lobbying groups; they are political parties. And the danger is that such factions present their special and specific interest as though it were a more general interest. Think "Rousseau" here, not "Locke"; the argument is that a special interest represents the will of a part, not the (general?) will of the whole. The U.S. Constitution is a machine designed to prevent this, by making it so immensely difficult to win a decisive victory that the difference between the interest of a few (even the interest of the majority) and the interest of others (even a small minority) cannot be mistaken for the difference between the general will (which cannot err: who could oppose the Voice Of All The People, Of Which You Yourself Are A Part?) and a small holdout that has to be "forced to be free."

The notion of a mandate is antithetical to this whole setup. It commits the central error -- flagged both by Rousseau and by Kant -- of falling into democratic tyranny, conflating the "will of all" (in this case, not the "will of all," but the "will of a rather slim majority") and the general will, and removing the possibility of opposition from the rhetorical topography. Who among us can oppose the will of God as revealed through a "mandate" from God's Chosen Electorate? Rhetorically, discursively, politically, this is a much trickier proposition than simply opposing a specific policy or set of policies preferred by a set of elected officials. So it makes political sense that Cheney would invoke such a notion, regardless of how far it deviates from the design of our institutions and our very governmental structure and philosophy, as it affords possibilities that might not otherwise be available. It's always good to have the General Will (a.k.a. the Voice Of God/Reason) on your side as you try to push through controversial legislation like drilling for oil in Alaska and outlawing abortion and "gay marriage."

"Mandates" scare me. The language of a "mandate" scares me. How can one feasibly stand against such a thing?

[Posted with ecto]

Certification

2004-11-03T13:45:00.000-05:00

It may be a failure of understanding on my part, but I cannot for the life of me wrap my brain around the concept of a terminal MA degree in international relations. This despite the fact that I teach in a program where the MA program is the center of gravity, both in terms of population and in terms of our intellectual life; we hire faculty to teach MA students, get speakers who are largely practitioners and government officials rather than scholars, and generally devote more resources to the MA program than we devote to either the undergrad or the PhD program. In fact, both of those other programs are often folded into the MA program in various ways: many of our undergrads are basically doing pre-MA work, with a not insignificant proportion of them deciding after three years to enter the five-year BA/MA program and this end up with an MA anyway, while about half of our PhD students in any given year are actually doing MA work -- policy analysis, advocacy, etc. -- instead of PhD work (academic research, negotiating theoretical debates within the discipline, and so on). So I find myself in the rather odd and sometimes uncomfortable position of teaching in a program that I do not really understand, and teaching students who I understand even less.

This is a constant feature of my daily life and work, but sometimes it is sharper than others -- such as around registration time, when students are choosing classes for next semester and seek my advice. I seem to have had the following conversation three or four times in the last week with MA students:

Student: I don't feel like my classes are really teaching me anything useful for my career.
Me: In what way?
Student: We read IR theory, but that doesn't seem relevant to what I do at my job/internship.
Me: Theory doesn't really tell you what you should do in your job/internship; nor does it instruct you how to get ahead in your career. it's at a higher level of generality.
Student: And we do academic research. But at my job/internship, we do policy analysis according to a whole different set of standards. No one wants to hear about academic work.
Me: There are different standards for knowledge-construction in the two domains.
Student: Is knowing how to engage in debates about IR theory, or how to do academic research, going to help me in my job?
Me: No.
Student: So what am I doing here?

This is a classic case of something that has a meaning for one group and in one context having a very different meaning for a different group in a different context. It is exacerbated by the fact that the two groups have to keep interacting. The whole notion of a "professional MA degree in International Relations" is an odd fit with IR as an academic discipline, and as long as the differences are not made clear, this kind of conversation is probably going to keep happening. And I cannot shake the feeling that our MA students are being hoodwinked, inasmuch as they come in expecting to gain something that I am not at all convinced that we can provide to them.

Now, part of this has to do with particular subfields. We have programs in "international development" and "conflict resolution" which are basically practitioner programs through and through; students in those programs take courses which are oriented more directly towards their careers, as the content of the courses involves a set of skills and rules of thumb that they will need to master and command in order to make their way in the worlds of development and conflict resolution. In that way, those programs are more like JD or MBA programs: the boundaries between contemplation and execution are much more porous, and it is not unusual for faculty members to be practitioners at the same time as they are academics. Indeed, the best instructors in programs like that are practitioners, since they can give the students a sense of "how things work" in the professional world and make sure that they get both the skills and the network connections that will improve their career prospects.

Those MA programs I understand, sort of. I understand them in the sense that I can see how they might actually help someone who was aiming for a career in that respective subfield. What I don't understand is what such programs are doing in a university setting. I mean, I understand it historically; I understand how universities got into the business of professional certification, and why they stay there (the term "cash cow" comes to mind). I don't understand it intellectually. As an IR theorist I am not convinced that I have much of anything to offer professional practitioners; my work is devoted to trying to understanding what goes on in the world, not necessarily to doing anything in particular in the world, and I am baffled as to why a practitioner would benefit from being exposed to my particular construction of knowledge about the world -- given that it is largely influenced by disciplinary debates and practical-moral value-commitments in a way that undermines any claim to definitiveness.

If I thought that my work produced definitive results, I could offer those results to the MA students as parametric constraints within which they should be working in their careers; but I don't, so I can't. Some of my colleagues have no such hang-ups, and are perfectly happy to do precisely this. Indeed, they would be happy with the label "experts," since they consider speaking truth to power to be some if not most of their jobs. It surprises me not a bit that many of our MA students gravitate to those members of our faculty, as long as they agree with what those "experts" are saying, because this allows them to deploy the label of "more knowledgeable" within their particular debates with other practitioners. The "experts" give them ammunition to use when trying to get the upper hand in their local context. And this is their interest. Knowledge is a means to an end, rather than the ground from which their action proceeds. And having an MA degree serves the same function: it allows the practitioner to claim to be operating from a position that needs to be taken more seriously. [Now, granted, this has been routinized in the usual manner, so that I doubt that most MA students are aware that this is what they are doing by getting an MA; to them, it seems to appear to them simply as a card that they need to have punched in order to advance in their careers.]

So, let me clarify: I think that the clash of understanding between myself and many (not all -- there are MA students with whom I get along very well, but they are generally either those students who are of a more scholarly inclination, or those students who are willing to play the scholarly game for a time) of our MA students is both epistemic and practical-moral: epistemic in that it involves the status and purpose of knowledge, and practical-moral in that it involves rather fundamental life choices and orientations towards the world. Indeed, this second aspect is probably more important than the first, since the meaning of the terms of the epistemic debate -- terms like "theory" and "knowledge" and "practice" -- changes depending on where one stands with respect to the broader question of whether one is primarily interested in contemplating the world or enacting programs and agendas within it. But as Andrew Abbott has argued, a major distinction like this one has a tendency to "fractalize," which is to say, to repeat itself within subdivisions. Thus we get the contemplating-enacting debate repeating itself within the group of contemplators (who basically all go into academia) and the group of enactors (some of whom end up in academia as "scholar-activists," others of whom do not, but simply stay in the field of daily practice).

I can't yet figure out how to draw this and make it display properly in html :-( But here's a table that captures a little bit of what I mean:

	Contemplating	Enacting
contemplating	Cc: scholars	Ec: scholar-activists
enacting	Ce: experts	Ee: practitioners

MA students are Ee. They come into the academy seeking certification, and find themselves in the company of contemplators. Frustration ensues on both ends. But looking at that table also reveals alliances and points of overlap; Ee practitioners can learn from the expertise of the Ce faculty, and can learn from the practical experience of the Ec faculty. But the major conflicts of interpretation would be along the diagonals, especially between (say) Cc and Ee. (The Ec-Ce conflict is another matter, I think, because of certain kinds of positional similarity that show up better in different kinds of diagrams: both Ec and Ce represent a way that the initially opposite positions come closer together. I need to research how to draw this in html so my readers can see what I mean.) And that's the situation I find myself in with most of the MA students.

Of course, as a Cc, explaining the conflict is an important way that I process it. Not sure how helpful this exercise will be for Ee MA students, or for my Ce and Ec colleagues. But at least it helps me make sense of the dialogue of the deaf that often seems to take place when I talk to MA students -- and also to make sense of my unease with the certification function that the MA degree plays in an Enacting context (or at least with my own role in that function).

[Posted with ecto]

Anything but the void?

2004-10-31T12:44:00.000-05:00

In this day and age, what we seem to fear the most is randomness. The idle metaphysical speculations that I have been posting lately as I try to articulate the importance of contingency in realms as empirically different as that of organized baseball and social theory touch on something that I think bothers all of the societies suffering from Enlightenment hangovers -- and bothers them in ways that no other societies have been bothered. Donning my "anthropologist on [or, perhaps better, from] Mars" hat for a moment, I invite my readers to consider the following excerpt from an essay written by a superstitious Red Sox fan (is there any other kind?) before hell froze over and the Sox swept the Cards last week:

"Most of us, I suspect, would rather believe that the devil is running things than that no one is in charge, that our lives, our loves, World Series victories, hang on the whims of fate and chains of coincidences, on God throwing dice, as Einstein once referred to quantum randomness. I've had my moments of looking back with a kind of vertigo realizing how contingent on chance my life has been, how if I'd gotten to the art gallery earlier or later or if the friend I was supposed to have dinner with had showed up, I might not have met my wife that night, and our daughter would still in be an orphanage in Kazakhstan.

Anything but the void."

There's real pathos here, a genuine anxiety about the lingering possibility that "shit happens" really is the only valid account of events. And also the implication that if things are random, then they have no broader significance; the "vertigo" that the author speaks of seems to be induced by the sudden realization that nothing supports or upholds the way that things are except for the simple fact that things are that way, or at least seem to be. Maybe they aren't. Maybe we're even wrong about that, and we have no way of knowing it. Cue extreme existential angst.

But what is perhaps most fascinating and revealing in this article is that the author goes on to tell a story about how random chance rules the world. In so doing, he deploys a metaphor derived from quantum theory (or, at least, from stories about "quantum theory," since the distinguishing characteristic of the mathematics of quantum theory is precisely that they defy anything remotely like an ordinary narrative account. I don't think that anyone has yet improved on J.B.S. Haldane's observation -- albeit from a different context -- that the universe may be queerer than we can suppose, and quantum theory properly understood certainly provides yet another example of this) to justify his refusal to watch Red Sox games:

"But it's easy to imagine that in baseball, where a quarter of an inch or a hundredth of a second can be the difference between a home run and a grounder to first, the Heisenbergian touch can have a profound effect, and my words -- just the thought -- were enough to collapse the wave function and the Red Sox. The branch of the universe in which the Red Sox are winners split away into some other parallel space, as near as an irrevocable breath, as unreachable as a black hole."

The incident in question involves the the author's decision to turn on the TV during the tenth inning of game 6 of the 1986 World Series, and to allow himself to think that he was about the watch the Red Sox win the World Series…just a moment before the infamous incident where the ball went through Bill Buckner's legs and allowed the Mets to score the winning run, which was followed two evenings later by the Mets' victory in game 7. So the author draws on "quantum theory" (granted, in a tongue-in-cheek manner) to blame himself for the loss. Is this really any different than blaming the Red Sox's 86-year drought of World Series victories on the "Curse of the Bambino," supposedly derived from the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees shortly after the Red Sox's previous World Series victory in 1918? Or explaining dramatic Yankee comebacks in Yankee Stadium with reference to the "ghosts" hovering around the place?

Anything but the void, indeed. This appears to be so much a part of contemporary humanity, humanity the way we have constructed it for the moment, that we are incapable of living in a void; we spin stories like spiders spin webs. Even stories about random chance remain stories, accounts crafted in language that lend meaning and significance to the occurrences that they relate, even if they do so by virulently denying that there is any larger significance to those occurrences. Nietzsche's admonition in The Genealogy of Morals that "the human being would rather will nothing than not will" partakes of the same spirit: anything but the absence of meaning, even if the meaning is that there is no meaning.

Now, to be accurate, stories about curses and ghosts affecting the outcomes of baseball games aren't stories about meaninglessness; they are stories about The Universe Itself caring whether the Yankees or the Red Sox win and lose games. In this way they have more in common with salvation narratives and Enlightenment attempts at "universal" (or "philosophical") history, in which the author tries valiantly to grasp the inner course and direction of history as a whole. "The Universe hates me," like Machiavelli's stories of virtu-ous rulers being confounded by the evil bitch goddess Fortuna, work by displacing randomness in favor of its polar opposite: determinism. Ditto "the Universe loves me." In both of these cases, the outcome is foretold, and the course of occurrences is nothing but a little bit of local color. And as a result, nothing that any of the characters in the story can do will have much impact on the narrative flow; agency, as the capacity to have done otherwise, disappears. And in a final twist, determinist accounts often give rise to the suspicion that nothing holds them up other than the author's insistence on their validity, leading to cynical nihilism…but Nietzsche already said this so I'm not going to repeat his brilliant diagnosis of the sickness of the Enlightenment at this point.

There is a third option for telling stories, however: the embrace of contingency instead of either randomness or determinism. But in the social sciences, we seem to prefer accounts that incline to determinism, either the determinism of statistical correlations among variable attributes or the determinism of "progress" as the ultimate guarantor that our work is meaningful. Statistical correlations work reasonably well when we have a relatively closed system of social relations, which is why correlations are meaningful in the game of baseball -- but they don't yield determinism even there. As for "progress," well, I defy anyone to demonstrate that such a notion has any epistemic status other than that of ghosts and curses. (It might have normative status, but that's a different matter.)

Accounts based on either determinism or on randomness are problematic ones, if the teller of the tale has any desire to preserve agency. If we have social institutions that are erected to generate accounts on one or the other principle, such accounts might capture what is going on reasonably well, but they do so only by temporarily accepting the denial of agency that the institutions embody. ("The contemporary post-season generates random outcomes" is in this sense a story that reflects a set of social institutions, perhaps as a preparation for criticizing those institutions, but not necessarily -- some commentators love the randomness. "The academic job market / academic publishing market generates random outcomes for individuals" works the same way.) At the most extreme, anti-agentic accounts end up combining both misleading principles to generate strikingly silly arguments like this suggestion that Curt Schilling is the greatest post-season pitcher of all time

"That's the thing about discussions of greatness: They're not just straight analytics. They come with resonances of expectation and surprise. They're all bound up with the who, how, and when.… So even if Schilling never pitched another day in his life after Game 7 of the 2001 Series, he'd be in the discussion of great postseason performers because his stuff coincided with the stuff we carry around with us. Because it felt, as it was unfolding, pitch-by-pitch, inning-by-inning, historic. Momentous.… This [Schilling's ALCS game 6 performance, in which he pitched through extreme pain in his ankle] was mythic, woven into the incredible story of the Red Sox coming back from 0-3, carrying on its shoulders the birth of hope from where hope had died a sad, writhing death."

Please. Spare me. Here we have a celebration of the randomness of the post-season [parenthetically, it makes no sense to talk about "post-season greatness," because almost no one has enough innings played in the post-season (which used to be just the World Series itself) for their performances to mean much of anything] combined with the post-facto determinism of the innate near-divinity of Curt Schilling -- who is a very good pitcher, I'd argue, but not one of the game's all-time greats. What did Schilling do to deserve these accolades? He pitched well in a couple of key games. If he hadn't, the story would have been very different: the Red Sox made a mistake spending so much money on a has-been, the curse lives, etc. So the judgment that Schilling is "great" would have been very different if a few minor things had been different, illustrating the collapse of determinism into randomness.

Both judgments -- Schilling is great because of some clutch performances, Schilling is not great because of some clutch performances -- are in my opinion equally silly. Whether Schilling is a great pitcher or not depends not on his performance on any given day, but on his performance over the long term. Such a judgment would take contingency into account in a way that placing overmuch emphasis on singular events simply does not. And I will be deeply disturbed if the people who award the Cy Young award allow themselves to be influenced by arguments about "post-season greatness" and end up giving it to Schilling this year instead of to the far more worthy Johan Santana.

I run into this problem when designing syllabi all the time. Which works do I want to make students grapple with? I generally adopt something of a historical standpoint when teaching things like social theory or epistemology, and argue that it is important to read people like Weber and Popper and Searle and Wittgenstein at least in part because the conversation that came after them is all but incomprehensible without knowing what it is that they said. Plato is worth reading not because of some inherent greatness that The Republic possesses, and not because of some "timeless truths" that Plato communicates to contemporary readers out of the mists of history (in point of fact, one of the most striking things about Plato is just how different ancient Greek values were from ours, whether we're talking about epistemology or social mores), but because Machiavelli and Hobbes argued with him, and Kant argued with them, and Nietzsche and Habermas argued with him, right on up to the present moment. The story I tell to animate the syllabus is about contingency: things could have gone that way, but they didn't, they went this way, and if you want to understand what's going on now you need to know how things developed and why they did so. Nothing higher or deeper involved here, as far as I'm concerned; if you get vertigo in the absence of Absolute Certainty, don't look down.

Is there then no destiny that shapes our ends? Maybe from a God's-eye view, what we think of as random really isn't random. But we'd never know whether this were the case or not, given our apparent tendency to retrospectively reconstruct sequences of occurrences as though they had a coherent plot. But this is where faith enters the picture, stepping beyond the knowledge that we produce into something wholly different. In fact, I'd actually argue that embracing contingency is in no way incompatible with having faith in a divine plan, as long as that plan remains ineffable instead of rationally knowable: while a rationally knowable plan shades off into determinism, an ineffable divine plan (or meaning of history) gives us a narrative challenge: tell the story in such a way that a larger purpose emerges. And organize human social institutions in such a way that a larger purpose emerges, and doesn't get trampled under by sheer randomness or absolute determinism.

In this way, contingency -- the preservation of human agency -- emerges as the most defensible way to generate meaning and to preserve the human capacity for doing so. When we design our syllabi, when we write our accounts of occurrences, even when we enter into debates about baseball, we should keep that goal in mind. I would argue that connexion as a purpose, and certain kinds of competition as ways of enhancing and generating the worlding that emerges from and is implicated in such a way of being, advances this goal and preserves human agency. We should have the courage of our convictions, I think, and celebrate and defend contingency -- rather than continually trying to evade what may be our highest and truest calling as human beings.

[Posted with ecto]

Guarantees

2004-10-25T11:51:00.000-04:00

This kind of thing is what bothers me about mainstream baseball analysis. The author -- a Post staff writer -- suggests that the 4-for-23 record of the Cardinals' 3, 4, and 5 hitters (Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen, and Jim Edmonds) in the World Series thus far is some kind of a blight on their regular-season record of excellence. As though the performance of the three through two games meant anything meaningful. In particular, the author argues:

"Most puzzling is Rolen's slump. He has yet to get his first hit of the World Series. Prior to the series, Schilling had said Rolen was perhaps well on his way to becoming the best third baseman in the history of the game. That designation seems unfair at this point."

Okay, hold on a second. Ted Williams -- Ted Williams, the "Splendid Splinter," the last man to bat over .400 in a season -- hit .342 during the 1946 regular season, but only hit .200 with no home runs during the World Series that year (also Red Sox-Cardinals). Rogers Hornsby, Stan Musial, and numerous other Hall of Fame hitters have experienced similarly dismal World Series performances in the midst of stellar careers. But no one would say that these folks weren't among the best to ever play the game. Whether Rolen does well in this World Series or not is not only no reason to change a judgment of him as one of the best third basemen in the history of the game, but it is no reason to make the opposite judgment either. In fact, performance during any series of games, or during any set of games less than several hundred in size, isn't adequate grounds either. "He had a good year" or "he had a bad year" doesn't tell you much of anything about whether or not someone is a good ballplayer; look at Roger Clemens' last year with the Red Sox in 1996, when he went 10-13 with a 3.63 ERA, and then went to Toronto and went 41-13 for the next two years and won two consecutive Cy Young awards.

The point here is that a player's greatness (or their crappiness) doesn't emerge in a single game, or series, or finite set of games. (Statistically, the number of games in a long career in the major leagues is just about the same as an infinite number of games.) Because of the genius of regular-season baseball's design, random fluctuations even out over the long haul, and we are left with contingency rather than randomness: what happens to someone over the long term is largely due to their ability to perform on the field, and can't be just a fluke. There are clutch hits and clutch performances, in which people come through at precisely the right moment, but there aren't clutch players; even the best players have bad days, bad series, bad years.

What I am leaning towards here is a notion that contingency is a function of a system of rules and procedures that shapes and processes randomness in specific ways, so as to temporarily arrest entropy and produce a standing wave in an ocean of sheer chance. Randomness -- and I am about to utter a strictly metaphysical principle here, something that is completely outside of the realm of logical or rational evaluation, and is thus strictly nonsensical, even as it forms the boundaries of the world I am sketching -- is basic. Shit happens, and it has no inherent order or sense or meaning. Chaos, not order, is at the bottom of the turtle-pile. (Note that this statement is precisely the same, operationally speaking, as the claim that there is an underlying order of nature to which we have no privileged access. In either case, the point is that we never know whether our claims touch "reality" or whether they do in fact "carve nature at its joints." But the stronger metaphysical claim may make the point better, or at least more dramatically.)

Into that chaos come human beings, with their stubborn insistence on meaning and their attachment to order and stability. Spiders spin webs; birds build nests; foxes make dens; human beings produce knowledge, both the abstract kind embodied in philosophical and social-theoretical edifices and the concrete kind embodied in social institutions and organizations. And knowledge can either embrace randomness, strive to eliminate randomness, or seek to shape and channel it. Most professional sports embrace randomness because it makes individual games "more exciting," since everything rides on certain specific outcomes; electoral systems which feature the drawing of lots (as some ancient Greek cities had) do this too. Most pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment systems of morality strive to eliminate randomness in favor of some kind of claim that is categorically true and can provide an absolute basis on which to found everything else, whether that basis is God or Reason or whatever.

But baseball -- like a functioning constitutional system in which a successful amendment has to make it through a number of obstacles before being accepted, or a well-embedded marketplace in which there are adequate start-up resources to overcome barriers to entry along with a determined refusal to commodify basic necessities of living -- occupies a strange middle-ground. Specific interactions are random in their outcome, but over the long haul that randomness is weeded out in favor of a more or less accurate reflection of the strategic soundness of the strategies and abilities of the players. Here we have what I'd call fair competition: a system based on contingency, where randomness is arrested and channelled so as to produce something relatively enduring, something that brings out excellence and ingenuity and creativity and the like. [I am deliberately setting aside the speculative question of whether or not this is the only way to achieve such a condition of "being in form." There might indeed be other ways to get here, ways that do not involve inter-personal competition. But I find myself quite unable to imagine what they would look like.]

The problem, I think, is our "Enlightenment hangover." We have not yet come to grips with the fact that Kant failed to decisively link individual freedom with the principle of pure reason, and that Hegel's grand dialectical synthesis collapsed under its own weight (and the inability of his followers to resist the temptation to either glorify the present for its inherent rationality or to vilify that present in favor of a more rational future), decisively demolished by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and their descendants. No grand rational system has ever succeeded. No grand irrational system can survive the blows of rational criticism. So the solution to living in a post-Enlightenment world may be to stop looking for guarantees, to stop trying to found outcomes and courses of action on absolute certainties that turn out in retrospect not to be so absolute after all, and instead to embrace the randomness of specific outcomes -- so that we can get back to the business of designing systems that create space for meaningful contingency.

Note that because we are talking about knowledge here, academics have a role to play in developing their accounts of things. If we look for easy answers, such as reasoning from "intrinsic properties" directly to outcomes, or compiling data on systematic correlations and projecting them into the future, we are still operating with that Enlightenment hangover. If we toss up our hands and simply say that things happen for no apparent reason, we are abandoning the whole project of trying to explain anything. But if we instead operate with an analytical stance that embraces contingency, and then apply that stance in a disciplined manner to the empirical material tossed up by the (random?) universe, we can build worlds that preserve agency and creativity and the space for truly outstanding performances. Analyses like the one in the Post bother me in part because they miss the genius of baseball, and forward the absurd notion that perfect performances are possible -- and are even to be expected. I am not convinced that things work this way, or that it is a good idea for us to operate as though they did.

Rolen may be the greatest third baseman in the history of the game. But we don't know yet, and we won't, until we have a long-term set of statistics to compare to other third basemen. And even if he were the greatest third baseman in history, he could still very easily have a bad series. No guarantees -- that's the randomness part. Things work themselves out in the long run -- there's the contingency.

[Posted with ecto]

Teacheable moment

2004-10-22T14:18:00.000-04:00

When I am leading a discussion, I usually have something of a hands-off policy, in that I generally allow the students to go wherever they want to go. I intervene and press, but in a more or less inductive fashion -- I let the overall dynamic of the space flow where it wants to flow, and look for openings and spaces to leap into. Teaching in a technologically enabled classroom adds another dimension, in that I literally have the whole InterNet available to use for illustration -- and in my particular techno-classroom, the students all have wireless 'Net access via computers which I can very easily link to the room display system. So we will be chatting and arguing along, and someone will find an interesting website related (even if only tangentially) to the topic, which I can subsequently toss up on the screen for everyone to examine.

This makes for a very dynamic classroom environment, since I have no idea where things are going before they go there. As a result, almost anything can become an example, depending on how we as a group end up dealing with it. Today we used a comment one student made about another student being an "overachiever" -- and having been "born that way" -- as a wedge to get into issues about essentialism, identity, and whether truth was purely a matter of consensus or needed to be grounded on something beyond consensus. (Okay, this was one example among others, but it was a major part of the discussion.)

One of the potential drawbacks to doing it this way is that I don't have time to think out particular examples very far before I use them. Something comes up, and I react to it: teaching as hitting, as I have written elsewhere. See a pitch, go with the pitch -- don't try to do something complicated with it, but just go with it. Today an example raised its head and I swung at it instinctively: the students were discussing "popular consensus" about the use of military force, and someone raised the issue of scholarly consensus versus popular consensus. So I pulled up Scholars for A Sensible Foreign Policy, and we had an interesting discussion about a) the lack of press coverage for this in the US media versus the massive coverage in the rest of the world; and b) the difference between public reasoning and academic reasoning about issues like this, and whether the public should trust "experts" or not. Fascinating conversation.

Now, the problem -- or potential problem, I'm not sure yet -- is that I am a signatory of the letter. And if the students poke around on the site they'll find out that I am involved more heavily than just as another signatory. The issue that this raises is that I have both supporters and critics of the Iraq war in the class, and showing them the site puts me on record as taking a specific stand on the issue. After class I became a little worried about the appearance of having compromised my detachment, especially when one of my students asked me about it -- and then said that she'd googled me and discovered that I was all over the place. which I am -- well, not all over the place, but when you google me some stuff comes up, publications, etc.

It was easier to be a blank slate in the classroom when I had no publications. Then, people would ask me my opinion on something and I'd just defer. And I still do that, but they can sometimes find my stance on certain issues out there on the 'Net. I don't think that this compromises my detachment, but I am a little concerned about the appearance of having done so. It might make my job a little harder if students started saying and doing things because they thought that I'd agree with them, given my published stances on some things.

Fortunately, I'm a theorist, so most of what I publish isn't as directly relevant to contemporary political issues as it might be. And I can still defer such questions. In fact, if anyone asks, I can morph it into a discussion about scholarly detachment and classroom conduct, and ask the students why they think that my having opinions should matter. Yet another teachable moment. So it makes things a little more complicated, but hopefully doesn't present an insurmountable obstacle. I have to be able to teach while I am in print on certain subjects, after all…I just hope that students don't start freaking out if they think that I disagree with them on some political matter.

[Posted with ecto]

2004-10-22T13:31:00.000-04:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Wildcards

2004-10-21T12:03:00.000-04:00

Last night's Red Sox victory in the ALCS has gotten me thinking about, of all things, the academic job market. What, you ask, is the connection between the two? Not surprisingly, the answer for me has to do with how the two systems organize and process competition. As I try to think through the issue of what an agonistic approach to knowledge would actually look like in practice, it occurs to me that what bothers me about academia is similar to what bothers me about baseball. It's not the game/metagame thing I was talking about in the previous entry, or not precisely that. Instead, it's the fact that both the academic job (and publishing) market and the present major league baseball system are structured to allow too much randomness and not enough contingency. That's what bothers me about both domains of action.

The Red Sox made it into the playoffs this year as the "wildcard" team, which is the team with the best record that didn't win its division. This change was made in the early 1990s in order to promote a more "exciting" end to the baseball season, modeled on the successful "March Madness" playoff system in college basketball. ("Exciting" here means "larger television ratings and more ad revenue," not necessarily "better on-field play.") As a result, it is now quite possible for a team to make it to the World Series and win it without having amassed the best record in its league over the course of the year, and this now happens regularly. The last two World Series were won by wildcard teams (the Florida Marlins in 2003, and the Anaheim Angles in 2002), and this may be the second time in three years that the World Series is played between two wildcard teams if Houston defeats St. Louis tonight.

What's the problem here? The wildcard system -- the playoffs in general, but especially with the introduction of the wildcard -- introduces a great deal of randomness into a season of baseball. By "randomness" I mean that the outcome of the competitive interaction between teams is reduced to a roll of the dice; there is very little that one can do to affect that outcome in any meaningful sense. The genius of baseball as a sport is precisely that, although the outcome of any particular game is unpredictable due to random fluctuations, the regular season as a whole is designed (whether by accident or on purpose is something that I am still trying to determine) to eliminate those random fluctuations, by having teams play enough games over the six-month extent of the season that good teams rise to the top of the standings and weaker ones fall to the bottom. Baseball statistics are meaningful, precisely because there are enough measurable situations that one can draw conclusions that stand up. A shorter season, or a design that emphasizes particular games, magnifies the importance of random fluctuations, and the outcome of any such situation is effectively a crapshoot. Any team in baseball can beat any other team in any particular game, but over the long haul, not any team can amass an excellent overall record.

What this design does is to make winning and losing contingent on factors like team design and balance, and on the way that particular players are deployed during the whole campaign. By "contingent" I mean that the outcome of the competitive interaction between teams depends on things that those teams do rather than on factors completely beyond their or anyone's control. The regular season system differentiates between good and bad teams by making the outcome of the campaign contingent on what those teams do; this involves both on-field game and off-field metagame, and as I argued before I have no problem with this as long as the metagame is related to and in a sense subordinate to the on-field game itself. One bargains hard in the off-season free agent market in order to enhance one's on-field performance; one trades during the season for the same reason. And all of this activity comes to a head on the field over the long haul: teams streak and slump, but in the end the team with the better players and better strategy prevails.

The playoff system, especially with the wildcard, is random rather than contingent. Any team can prevail in any finite number of games; any team can win a five-game series, and any good team can win a best-of-seven series. Which one actually wins is not contingent on the fundamental soundness of the team or the ability of its players, but is instead basically random: even the best pitchers have bad starts, and even the greatest sluggers have poor-hitting slumps. So we get the absurd notion of "clutch players": people who supposedly perform better under pressure, when everything is on the line, which is basically is all the time in a short series that will decide whether or not one advances to the next round. Sabermetric studies have confirmed for years that there ain't no such thing as a clutch player; no one in the major leagues performs significantly better in the "post-season" than they do in the regular season, once one takes into account the difference between playing a handful of games and playing 162 games. Short spans of time distort a player's record and mis-state his ability; short series, or a set of series stacked so that each one is do or die, are nothing but an arena for pure random chance to take over and determine who goes to the next round. Fortuna -- Machiavelli's evil bitch goddess -- is given free reign.

The academic job and publishing market is like this too, in that whether one gets hired or published is basically a matter of random chance instead of being contingent on one's abilities and long-term ability to compete and perform. An article sent to three reviewers might have gotten a firm reject had it been sent to three other reviewers. A candidate might have made the short list for interviews for a position if her or his advocates on the committee had not been out-maneuvered by the supporters of another candidate, or if they hadn't cut a deal to bring in or hire a compromise candidate. My book is about to go to contract, after a multi-year struggle to get it reviewed; the reason for this is that a colleague with whom I was having a conversation at a conference that I do not normally attend happened to mention the book to an editor that he knew at a press that I had not previously approached; the editor liked the concept, read the manuscript, and arranged to have it reviewed by people not fundamentally hostile to the approach that I take in the work. Random. The book being published has zippo to do with its quality, or importance, or logical soundness; it has to do with a chance meeting and a chance conversation. Ditto my job here, which owes more to the presence on the hiring committee of someone I knew from before, who could vouch for me and keep my file near the center of the committee deliberations…

What bothers me here is that the outcomes in each case are a matter of chance instead of being the sort of thing that you can do something about. Yes, there's a networking game that you can play to try to get articles reviewed favorably or place students in jobs (or in graduate school: same basic principles apply here). But this is a much trickier game, without firm rules and lacking a clear strategy for success. Baseball -- regular-season baseball -- has a simple recipe for success: hitters with high on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and pitchers who induce outs by not walking people and by striking hitters out (and perhaps also by getting more groundouts than flyouts, although the debate rages on about the importance of this factor). Score runs; don't permit your opponent to score runs. Easy to articulate; hard to achieve, but at least feasible and knowable, as well as being within the sphere of a team's control (again, to the extent that the metagame is "fair," which at the present point in time in baseball probably requires a more aggressive luxury tax on team payrolls and a better distribution of advertising revenue).

The academic job and publishing market is even more random than baseball with the wildcard system. I write an article and send it off to a journal, and I might as well be making it into a paper airplane and launching it from my office window. There are some steps I can take to help maximize its chances of seeing the light of day in print, but in the end whether or not it happens is a matter of sheer random happenstance. It's like winning a particular game: whether you do well on a given day or not is largely unpredictable. A system based on contingency is also unpredictable, but in a different fashion: a contingency-system makes the outcome dependent on something within the actor's sphere of control, while a randomness-system makes the outcome dependent on things quite beyond the actor's control.

Then there's always a third option: the "rigged" system, in which someone always win and someone always loses because the outcome is determined in advance. No agency in this system. Note that bargaining situations in which people have fixed preferences are "rigged" in this sense, as no outcome other than the one pre-determined by people's objectively-given interests can possibly come to pass. Agency, however, is contingency, not randomness; a randomness-system is just as problematic for a meaningful conception of social action as a system in which the outcome is determined in advance.

Thank God that we still have the regular season. I wonder what a regular season equivalent in academia would look like.

[Posted with ecto]

Clarification

2004-10-17T15:22:00.000-04:00

I have not turned into a closet Habermasian. I do not think that the natural or inevitable tendency of argument is towards consensus, let alone rational consensus. But I do think that argument as a language-game has rules, and those rules can be specified and can provide grounds for judging whether some metagame surrounding argument is "fair" or "unfair." The rules have as much transcendental validity as the rules of baseball, which is to say, none whatsoever. But they are pragmatically useful in generating that kind of connexion that comes from (s)wordplay.

Argument language-games are still about winning and losing. All competition is. I am not entirely sure what social life would look like if it were conducted in a non-competitive manner, but I do know that I for one would miss the ebb and flow of agonistic argument.

Maybe I am so adamant about this because I am not a Habermasian. Since I do not trust that the rules of argumentative (s)wordplay are somehow transcendentally presupposed in the act of speaking, I feel like I should be somewhat aggressive in advancing and defending them. Someone has to, right?

[Posted with ecto]

Permanent contenders

2004-10-17T10:48:00.000-04:00

Last night the Yankees kicked the crap out of the Red Sox, 19-8, in a marathon game that broke all kinds of records: it "established LCS game records for the most runs (19) and extra-base hits (13), t[ied] the marks for most hits (22), doubles (8) and home runs (4). The game was also the longest nine-inning contest in postseason history, clocking in at 4:20," according to mlb.com's wrap-up. Kind of fun to watch as a Yankees fan, but a little boring after a while. I would have preferred a taught, tight game like the previous two; even though individual players like Matsui and Sheffield had great moments of triumph against what is actually a very good Red Sox pitching staff, the game as a whole wasn't played at the highest level of excellence. Give me a 1-0 pitching duel any day.

Almost immediately I can hear people grumbling about the evilness of the Yankees, how they don't "deserve" to win and advance to the World Series yet again (for the sixth time in seven years!). Fafblog nicely satirizes the habit of mind:

---
"But Giblets how can the Yankees suck if they have beaten the Red Sox so many times?" says me.
"That is not what sucking means!" says Giblets. "Sucking is a moral property Fafnir! It does not reflect what the Yankees have done but what the Yankees intrinsically are. And they are intrinsically evil and suck!"
"I am not sure about your theory of sucking Giblets," says me. "I always believed sucking was reducible to natural properties such as double-parkin your car or stiffin your roommate on rent or leavin in Pedro Martinez for too long."
"No!" says Giblets. "Sucking is an objective irreducible moral property an we can intuit when sucking is present! It is an objective moral truth that the Yankees suck!"
---

As though somehow "Yankeeness" were responsible for anything -- as though it were a cause rather than an effect. Yes, the Yankees seem to be permanent contenders for the World Series title, and have been so for years and years, but they have done this in different ways in different eras of the game. When having your own farm system was the way to generate the best players, the Yankees had a great one. When it became possible -- due to free agency and the income generated by regional sports networks -- to basically bypass the farm system and buy the best players from other teams, the Yankees started doing that. If anything is at fault here it is not the Yankee sand their "Yankeeness," but the system of rules and practices that permits a baseball team to win by playing something other than baseball.

But are they really playing something other than baseball? Let's think about this. There's the game of baseball proper, which is the thing played on the field between two teams; these games are officiated by umpires who are in turn policed by MLB, which also sets the schedule and decrees rule changes. So that's the game. Then there's the metagame: the things that baseball team organizations do off the field to improve their competitive chances. This includes playing the free agent market, maintaining a farm system, utilizing the draft effectively, making good trades, and even trying to keep other teams out of your region to increase your profits [as Peter Angelos has consistently done in the DC area; that seems to be changing, though, suggesting that either a) he lost that part of the metagame or b) they cut a deal to keep his profits up; or c) both].

Now, the metagame involves more than simply having a lot of money. You can have a large payroll and still field a crappy team (e.g. the New York Mets), or you can do very well on a smaller payroll (e.g. the Minnesota Twins or the Oakland A's). There are successful strategies on and off the field, and becoming a perpetual contender means doing well at both aspects. Doing well in the metagame means being able to field a team of talented players, and to fill up holes in that team by getting replacement players when you need them; this directly contributes to success in the game on the field, as you can play with more balanced teams that have a better chance of winning over the long term. The Houston Astros are a good example of team that is playing well on the field but not as well off the field (although their acquisition of Carlos Beltran during the season, and their courting of Roger Clemens to coax him out of "retirement," were brilliant moves), as evidence by the sorry state of their pitching rotation and bullpen. Because of their metagame failures, they can't field as good a team for the on-field competitions, and in the long run it will probably hurt them -- although they might get to the World Series this year anyway, due to random streakiness and the like.

Note that the aim here is not something unrealistic like "winning the world Series every year," because any given series involves so many random factors, like Curt Schilling developing a weird ankle thing or Mike Mussina suddenly pitching better than he has for a couple of years -- at least for six innings), that it really isn't a fair test or a realistic goal. Doing well over the long haul is the actual measure of success for a baseball team, the one that is meaningful; winning a particular game is largely a matter of luck. And that's what makes baseball such an exciting sport: anyone can win any particular game, but over time the system is set up to differentiate between good, sound teams and pure random happenstance. Anyone can play good or bad baseball for a short length of time; the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were doing quite well for a while this year, and the Yankees had some serious slumps over the course of the season. But in the end, the right teams made it to the playoffs ("right" defined in this case by their season win-loss records), and it is looking like the silliness of the contemporary playoff system will not succeed in producing an absurd match-up for the World Series. The "right" World Series would be a Yankees-Cardinals series, since those were the two best season records in baseball this year, and it is looking very likely that we will get that World Series -- much to the delight of those of us who are not enamored of the increased randomness introduced by such innovations as the wild card playoff spot.

Why am I writing about this? Not simply because I like pontificating about baseball, although I do so enjoy that :-) I want to forward a moral claim that emerges from the preceding analysis, and has direct relevance to the ongoing discussion between Magic and myself about competition and aggression, and the like: as long as the metagame associated with any particular game is connected to that game in a meaningful fashion, the hierarchal relations produced through competition are acceptable ones. And this also relates to a causal claim: in a situation like the one that I am envisioning, competition produces connexion of a sort that simply cannot be matched in a more cooperative setting.

Magic agreed with me that competition can in fact produce connexion through the "touché" moment -- when I acknowledge your skills, and salute you for a well-played round, and we suddenly and abruptly bond over the competitive activity -- but suggested that since competition's "true goal" was "the creation of winners and losers -- a goal that creates alienation" and hence impedes connexion. [He also suggested that I misplayed my argument by suggesting that the notion of "internal competition" was unstable; I disagree, and I think that the idea that we can keep competition purely internal is logically problematic for precisely the same reasons as Wittgenstein thought that a "private language" was problematic -- any activity that has rules implies a social practice of enforcing those rules, and whether or not we organize that practice formally or not seems a secondary issue. How we organize that practice: now there's a more interesting issue.] So the burden on me now is to demonstrate that competition doesn't inevitably lead to connexion-destroying alienation. And my argument is that as long as competition is organized like baseball is organized, alienation need not result and connexion can be generated through the recognition of excellence in the other player.

Think about it. What is problematic to people about, say, the campaign system in the United States? I'd venture that it is the complete and utter disconnect between the "game" -- the clash between visions of the country -- and the "metagame" -- the ability to generate large sums of privately donated cash, and to dominate the airwaves and the popular press with repetitions of slogans instead of carefully worked-out arguments. Case in point: Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy released an open letter signed by a veritable who's who of IR scholars that advanced arguments about how the invasion of Iraq was inconsistent with the war on terrorism. US news media coverage: minimal. (Foreign news coverage: high. Google "security scholars sensible foreign policy" to see who has picked up the story.) Does this have anything whatsoever to do with the "game" -- the argument advanced in the open letter? No. Instead, what gets into the public sphere for discussion is determined by factors having nothing to do with the game, but instead with a whole different set of factors. It's as if winning at baseball had nothing to do with your on-field performance at all. And that rankles, and hurts, and impedes connexion -- unless one shifts games entirely, starts to play "shape the public space" full-time, and ignores the argument's intellectual coherence altogether. I suppose that would work to produce connexion among spin-meisters -- James Carville and Mary Matlin may be cases in point here -- but at the cost of abandoning the original game entirely.

The same can be said of the academic profession, I suppose. There's clearly a "metagame" involving invisible colleges, citation circles, mutual back-patting and reinforcing, and cross-promotion of one another's students. At the same time, there's this game involving argument, evidence, debate, and so forth. But there is a disconnect between on-field performance and professional success, so that we have people who can't make or even appreciate good arguments officiating over the major journals and public spaces in the discipline, shaping that space according to some completely different set of criteria. Once again the divorce of the game and the metagame produces an imperfectly competitive situation, in which one can "win" via dirty tricks and nonsense as opposed to winning by fielding the better team.

In baseball, this can't happen because at the end of the day teams still have to compete with one another, and these competitions have rules and procedures for adjudication that are intersubjectively valid and thus produce locally non-arbitrary outcomes. (John Searle would probably say that the rules of baseball were ontologically subjective but epistemically objective, which strikes me as a bizarre conflation of two distinct claims that is only made possible by an unquestioned root individualism: just because something appears to be "objective" from the perspective of an individual involved in the activity, as the rules of baseball appear to a player or a manager, does not mean that these rules enjoy some kind of transcendental status! Calling them "epistemically objective" confuses the issue, IMHO, by obscuring the extent to which those rules are nothing but systematized social practices, and that the process of achieving consensus about those practices may adopt the form of honing in on a correspondence with something that pre-exists the consensus itself without actually having anything pre-existing to correspond to. You and I discuss the rules and then go to the rulebook to adjudicate our argument; then we generally have to argue about what the rule means, and hopefully end up achieving some kind of consensus. But there wasn't a "right answer" out there waiting for us to discover it in advance, which is what a phrase like "epistemically objective" seems to imply. Even consensus about the validity of a statement like "there is no money in my checking account" is intersubjectively achieved rather than simply adjudicated by an appeal to the Real True Facts In The World, as we need to set rough boundaries on words like "no" and "my" and "money" in order to evaluate the statement in the first place; those boundaries, and not "the world," produce the truth and falsity of the statement.)

What I mean is this: there can be no dispute about who won a baseball game (except for the All-Star game a couple of years ago, which was a fiasco from start to finish and ended in a tie -- big scandal for a sport that always produces a clear winner and a clear loser in each game). There is a rough intersubjective consensus about the rules, about what makes for a winning performance (outscoring your opponent, and keeping them from scoring) and what doesn't; there is also an appeals system involving umpires for ambiguous on-field situations, and even a process of appealing those decisions in certain cases. And because there is rough intersubjective consensus about these parameters, and because the metagame is derivative of the central game itself (since everyone, rich and poor alike, still has to field a team), the hierarchical relations of winner and loser that the system generates need not lead to alienation and a lack of connexion. In that sense the game is fair. And to the extent that it is not, it can be tweaked through luxury taxes and other forms of redistribution of financial resources, a proposal that I generally support in the name of keeping the whole enterprise going.

Back to academia: I'd submit that our problem is that we don't embrace the competitive character of argument sufficiently to produce this kind of a result. As a result, professional success has almost nothing to do with our on-the-field play, and it's hard to produce the kind of connexion only generated by tough competitive interaction. But academia is weird in that we claim that we are interested in arguments, which gives space -- like panels and journals -- in which arguments can be engaged as arguments, which is to say, competitively. Now, people aren't used to this, so they are sometimes taken aback when I and others like me suddenly start taking the arguments advanced by various scholars very very seriously as arguments, and picking apart their inconsistencies or demonstrating that they have implications that the authors might not have foreseen. It's like everyone is getting together for a "friendly" game of softball (not quite sure what that means, but I have heard the expression before) and I show up and start playing hard. Not at all sure why one would ever play lightly or partially or weakly, though, unless perhaps you were playing with younger players and trying to teach them the game…and that would be pedagogical. (Although I am a fan of a pedagogy that challenges, so I play hard in the classroom too -- but it is surrounded by a different metagame involving debriefing, support, and constructive criticism for future improvement.)

In a conference setting, I am not trying to teach my professional peers (!) how to play the game. I assume that they already know how to play the game, and I come for a good tussle with the potential to lead to connexion. And I judge that taking those competitive situations seriously, exploiting the ambiguity of the game/metagame relationship that academic still affords, may help to improve the discourse of the profession in various ways. That may be a tactical error. But ultimately what I am interested in is connexion and not the profession, which is just a means (more often an impediment) to an end.

[Side-note: the notion of "being collegial" also impedes the competition in which I am interested. This is a particularly vicious metagame move used to shut down a good argument, especially within a departmental setting; it's especially nasty when a senior colleague pulls it out instead of responding to the arguments of a junior colleague about, say, hypothetically, the appropriate standards to use in evaluating a proposal for an honors thesis that the junior colleague has to approve on behalf of the honors program after the senior colleague has agreed to serve as the advisor for the project. And the senior colleague advances the ridiculous argument that a descriptive exploration of the issues involved in some conflict, drawing on secondary sources and a few interviews with activists, qualifies as a senior honors thesis, and the senior colleague then refuses to engage the junior colleague's entirely reasonable point that a senior honors thesis should at the very least have a research question and a literature review, plus something like a methodologically sound proposal for answering the initial question…no, no, don't raise objections, be "collegial" -- which means, back off and let me have my way, you insolent young punk. All hypothetically, of course. Such a thing would be deeply alienating, were it ever to occur, and it would be alienating precisely because the senior colleague would have refused to play the game and would instead have turned to a metagame with resources completely unconnected to performance on the field. And that would be inconsistent, and problematic, and wrong. Hypothetically.]

If there is alienation generated by competition, it is generated by competition in which advantages accrue to one side because of reasons that have nothing to do with the play of the game. So the solution is not to eliminate competition -- something I think largely impossible to accomplish, and not very desirable either: homogeneity is boring -- but to make it more explicit, more formal, more intersubjectively acknowledged. More like baseball.

[Posted with ecto]

Sensible Foreign Policy

2004-10-12T11:40:00.000-04:00

I have been absent from this blog for a while because I've been working on a piece of political activism: a website to publicize the overwhelming consensus among IR scholars that the current direction of US foreign policy, especially in Iraq, is not a good one. The website is now up, and can be viewed at www.sensibleforeignpolicy.net.

Please publicize it far and wide!

How do I square this political involvement with my strong Weberian stance? For one thing, this campaign is not about my teaching or research practices. Those remain "scientific" in the logical sense, inasmuch as they are not efforts to justify a pre-determined political position on some temporal matter. Now, they are a form of long-term philosophical politics, if you want to put it that way, since I am clearly advocating in my research a particular way of viewing and apprehending and worlding the world. But as far as local, "timely" issues are concerned, my research itself stays neutral.

Also, remember that the Weberian stance does not mean that one has no politics. it means that one does not choose to further one's political agenda through one's work with students either inside or outside of the classroom, and that one does not subordinate one's research to a particular partisan agenda. This website -- this whole campaign -- is not a piece of research. And I would never claim it as such. It is a political intervention which deploys the rhetorical resource "IR expert" so as to perhaps change the contours of the present debate about US foreign policy. The fact that many of the signers base their support on things derived from their research is incidental, especially since the scholars on the list disagree severely about issues of methodology and the like. This is why it is so striking that so many diverse scholars have chosen to sign on to the open letter.

It would be logically wrong to conclude that our research has demonstrated that US foreign policy is bad, and this is not the goal; instead, the goal is to point out that if one wants to fight terrorism, invading Iraq is a very bad way to go about doing so. So in that sense we are engaged in the sort of value-clarification that Weber advocated, and my stance should be under no stress at all. (There was talk of becoming a 527 group and really acting in a more partisan fashion, but that made some of us -- myself included -- uncomfortable so we didn't pursue that option.)

Hence: the politics of a non-political scholar. Such is what is given to me by my decision to treat academia as a vocation, and not merely as a means to an end.

[Posted with ecto]

"Everyone made good points"

2004-10-03T09:30:00.000-04:00

The other day a television crew contacted the student who runs our campus debate society, for which I serve as the advisor. (Shocking, huh? Me advising debate?) They wanted to do a piece in preparation for the presidential debates that evening, in which they would interview some "real" debaters and try to gain some sense of what a "real" debate was like. So they came onto campus with a camera, and I advised my debaters to stage a mock debate on the topic of -- cue "post-y meta" alert tone -- whether or not presidential debates were helpful to the political process. So they did the mock debate was filmed, in addition to a few brief interviews with each of us (which were of course subsequently chopped into small soundbites for use in the piece). And just at the end, as I was about to offer something approximating a summary judgment about who won (the anti-presidential debate side, I thought, did a nice job of demonstrating the contradictions in her opponent's position), the interviewer started clapping and said: "Wow. I thought everyone made good points. Thanks." And then they packed up to leave.

I have to admit that I was a bit floored. "Everyone made good points"? What is this, kindergarten? Of course everyone made good points; these are college debaters, and so by definition they are able to make good points. That's like saying "they played well" after a major league baseball game; duh, they wouldn't be in the major leagues for long if they didn't. [And when we say "they didn't play well" after a game, we mean "they didn't play up to the expected level of performance," i.e. something unusual happened and they didn't do as well as expected. Anyone on a major league baseball team can most probably out-play anyone who isn't, just by virtue of the operation of the system of professional baseball.]

It occurred to me later that evening while watching said presidential debates that the interviewer's comments were probably more representative of the attitude of most viewers than mine was. People don't know how to play this game called "argument," and they don't seem to feel that they have any obligation to learn the rules before wading in and making judgments about who won -- or, even worse, before becoming complicit in reducing the whole exchange to a meaningless exchange of soundbites and one-line zingers. Yes, the presidential debates -- given their position in the news cycle, and given the way that televisual media usually processes spoken words -- have increasingly become structured as that kind of performance. But participating in an evaluation of debates in that way furthers the process, sustains the (re)framing, and destroys any potential that the competitive clash of (s)words(s) has to produce connexion.

Actually, I am not particularly bothered by the application of soundbite standards to the presidential debate, where they seem appropriate and insightful. And they also preserve the fundamental character of the situation, which is its competitiveness: even if the exchange between the candidates is no longer an "argument" per se and has become a set of "dueling soundbites," it is still a competitive exchange that could, in principle, be scored and evaluated to determine a victor. One could imagine a scorecard: candidate one, six hits against the opponent, four times being touched by attacks, only two successful rebuttals…overall score of four. Compare to the other candidate and determine who gets to advance to the next round.

By contrast "everybody made good points" eliminates the competitive character of the activity in favor of a superficial and insubstantial sea of smiles and insincere good wishes. Blech. There's no connexion here, and no possibility of producing such, because no one is risking anything any more; everyone is comfy and smiley and set in their ways. Liberal heaven, perhaps: meet, greet, exchange meaningless pleasantries, go home and consume your goods in private. And then shoot me in the head, since that would be a quicker way of killing me.

Magic suggests that competition is always about establishing hierarchy, and that if I want to preserve human excellence I need to move to "internal competition" instead of looking for situations of interpersonal contest. "Internal competition, while it also produces a winner and loser, produces both in the same person. an internal hierarchy of better and lesser forms of self is established but no harm is done to outside others. Ergo: the production of excellence without the creation of hierarchy." Two reactions to this:

1) internal competition runs into the "private language" or solitaire problem, in that if I am simply playing by my own set of rules I can change them at whim, and thus not be playing by a set of rules in the strict sense at all. Rules mean that there is the possibility of making a mistake, as Wittgenstein argued, and that in turn requires a social practice through which the rules are (re)established -- because if I remain the sole judge of my own case I can award myself whatever I want to on a completely arbitrary basis. And if I end up engaging in such "internal competition" according to a set of social rules, there is at least in principle the possibility of judging between performances and performers (e.g. gymnastics, competitive diving, etc.). What this means to me is that "internal competition" is an unstable halfway house between competition and something else -- contemplation? navel-gazing? pure enjoyment of being alive? -- and as such doesn't produce a workable solution.

2) social relations are competitive, and they are about playing with hierarchical patterns. And I do mean all social relations here, whether we're talking about marriages or friendships or pedagogical interactions or whatever. [I have a colleague who serves on an admissions committee with me, and the other day at a meeting this colleague said the most extraordinary thing: that last year several students were admitted because this colleague was tired and not willing to fight as hard as some (pointed glance at me) about the issue. As though I was somehow to blame for having defended my preferred candidates during the admissions process. Of course an admissions process is a competitive situation, and often a zero-sum one: I have a vision of the program, and so does my colleague, and in order to realize that vision we each need students who fit that articulation of program identity. So we grapple for a limited number of slots. "Sore loser" is how my wife described this colleague when I told her the story, and I agree with one amendation: sore loser who is not willing to accept that the situation is and will remain a competitive one. Denying that a game was being played is a very convenient way of dealing with one's loss in a particular round of the game.]

But this does not mean that all social relations have to be about establishing "hierarchy." I am as uncomfortable with that formulation as I am with references to "structure" as an independent noun; structure is IMHO a way of seeing some-thing, a way of highlighting certain aspects of it and singling them out for analysis. "Hierarchy" is even worse, I think; I think that word should only be used as an adjective, as in "hierarchical pattern of social relations." Does competition -- and by extension, all social interaction, which I have suggested is somehow competitive by definition -- establish a hierarchical arrangement? Yes, it does. But need that hierarchical pattern persist outside of the local context? I think not. Someone wins one round of argument; everybody shakes hands and hugs, and then goes out for a beer. And because the players respect one another's abilities, they can shift modes from "playing this particular competitive game" to "playing a different game" -- a no less competitive one, but a game in which different skills matter and different people can emerge as (local, temporary) victors.

I am not interested in eliminating competition, or in getting rid of winners and losers. I am interested in using the competitive dynamic -- which does produce local winners and losers -- to promote that rare and precious kind of connexion that comes from a good (s)wordfight. And "everybody made good points" is the sworn enemy of such a project, which is why I despise it so much.

[Posted with ecto]

Running in form

2004-09-30T13:53:00.000-04:00

Jeff Galloway, a well-known running expert whom my local running guru recommended, has a section in his classic Book on Running devoted to "form." Form is about muscle efficiency, posture, and the like, and (so he says) "will make anyone's running smoother and more enjoyable." And he's right, as I have discovered over the past few days while out running in the morning; if I pay a little attention to the angle of my arms and the straightness of my back, the whole experience works better, and I have fewer odd aches afterwards. (My knee is another story, but that's less a "form" issue and more about the perversity of my arches -- and a place where technical supplements like inserts and braces have come in really handy.)

Form isn't the right way to run. You can run any way you want to. But the experience of numerous runners over the years, supplemented -- or maybe just legitimated -- by medical research, indicates that a little form work (Galloway recommends doing "form work," i.e. deliberately focusing on form, every three days or so, so that you can make corrections and help good form become more of an automatic procedure) can make a big difference. Think of this as a type of pragmatics: certain practices work in certain contexts, and by experimenting a bit, and by incorporating phronetic wisdom from other runners, you can enhance your experience.

What this means, I think, is that form is principally a way of enhancing efficiency: making sure that the workout that one's muscles get is as effective as it can be, so that benefits are maximized and undue pain and soreness is minimized. But this also means that form is defensive: it protects you from harmful exertion and lasting damage. And form is thereby productive of the wonderfully freeing openness that gets people like me addicted to their morning runs -- the body goes on autopilot, so the spirit can swirl and melt [I'm thinking of Isaac Asimov's description in The Gods Themselves of how the para-men come together in a kind of unification that results in a complete loss of individuality for the sake of and for the actual constitution of something transcendent] and the soul can be exposed. The body is exercised; the spirit flows; and the soul is dissolved into the world as a whole (which, as Wittgenstein reminds us, is a strictly meaningless concept -- although an important one).

Readers of my previous postings will have grasped where am going with this, because I often start with running and the body and move into social interaction, especially as it relates to pedagogy. And this time is no exception. I think that "form" in social interaction, and in particular, "form" in argument and discussion -- a particular kind of aggressive form -- can serve the same three functions. As a teacher and as an interlocutor more generally, whether inside or outside of the classroom, I am meticulous about form precisely because it seems to me the best way of achieving connexion -- but only if it's done right. It's not the only way, of course, but it works for me and I offer my reflections as a bit of phronetic wisdom for people to take or leave as they please.

What I mean by "form" here is well-captured by Oswald Spengler in his discussion of "nobility":

"There are streams of being which are "in form" in the same sense in which the term is used in sports. A field of steeplechasers is "in form" when the legs swing surely over the fences, and the hooves beat firmly and rhythmically on the flat. When wrestlers, fencers, and ball-players are "in form," the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and naturally. An art-period is in form when its tradition is second nature…Practically everything that has been achieved in world-history, in war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means that we call politics; in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found themselves "in form."" (Decline of the West, volume II, pp. 330-331 in the standard Knopf edition of the Atkinson translation)

Lots to chew on here, especially Spengler's use of competitive and combative examples to make his point. A well-turned double play in baseball illustrates a team "in form" just as a well-handled volley in tennis does, and argumentative dynamics are no different; one can seize on the weak spot in a chain of reasoning and press it masterfully, perhaps causing the whole edifice to fall apart -- or perhaps provoking an equally well-formed response, in which the cycle continues. And I'd submit that this is inherently competitive, even if one is not directly engaging an opponent; running "in form" is implicitly a competition with one's own past practices and with such forces as gravity and the terrain. [A well-defined competitive situation is one in which being "in form" gets you closer to victory; too much bloody randomness, as in American football -- a situation brought on by a) the insignificantly small number of games that constitute the "season" and b) the fact that no one knows all of the rules, so how a call is adjudicated is largely arbitrary from situation to situation -- makes a mockery of actual competition. But I digress; the merits of American football versus American baseball, an elegant game in which player performance statistics are actually meaningful, is fodder for another post entirely.]

The point I want to extract here is that being "in form" is inextricably linked with a dynamic of competition, and also has its own special kind of nobility. Performing at a high level of competence, whatever the activity, means nailing something squarely on the head, executing a move with grace and dignity and command, better than others have done…even if the move is something that appears wholly spasmodic to the uninitiated. There is a nobility -- a being "in form" -- to the writhing, elemental kind of dancing popular with the kids at the clubs these days, and practitioners can and do distinguish between competent and virtuoso performances. The absurdity comes when one tries to formalize the criteria on which one makes such a determination; then we get the judging of gymnastics and figure skating, which devolves into pure silliness almost immediately. Practical judgments are more than sufficient.

Argument is part of a subclass of activities that can be "in form" in that it is interpersonally competitive in addition to being merely intrinsically competitive the way that all of these practices are. A well-played argument is a dynamic contest. But the thing to keep in mind here is that there is a difference between being "in form" and "winning"; one can win an argument through sloppy reasoning and misdirection, which is what usually happens in (say) public political debates. (And the commentators know this, since they "score" the debate largely on moves that have zippo to do with the form or content of the argument.) The same happens in professional sports; there can be sloppy games won by one's team that are denigrated by connoisseurs, while a well-played contest that one's team loses (say, most of the games of the 2001 World Series) can be appreciated for its (so to speak) technical qualities.

So: competition is, as it were, an excuse to practice being "in form" about the activity in question. And in argument, the activity in question is interpersonal social interaction itself. Which means that argument must be connected to connexion somehow…and I think that it is.

Let me be more specific. Logical (s)wordplay serves three functions:

1) exercise. Just like running "in form," arguing "in form" keeps the (mental) muscles tuned up and sharp, and prevents mishaps. To avoid straining something, I can stick with logical derivations, and not exceed the conclusions that are warranted by the material that I am able to muster. In particular, this would mean not speaking in the kind of metaphysical nonsense-talk that characterizes so much of everyday speech, and not as it were exceeding the authority of language by making categorical claims about the essences of things. That doesn't mean that I don't have such claims in mind, but they are part of my (illogical, ultimately non-sensical: ethics and aesthetics are one) value-presupposition instead of part of my argument narrowly construed.

In engaging in an argument, you have to point out when people make these kinds of mistakes, when they fall completely off of the bus and find themselves in the land of I Can Say Whatever I Want To Because It Makes Me Feel Better (Probably Because It Conforms To My Strongly-Held Political Positions). If you don't, you're complicit in their mistake -- and you have given up an opportunity to help them improve their form, and/or to help you improve yours by coming back at you with a defense or rebuttal. This is aggressive, sure. But it's also the way that the game is played. Jamie Lee Curtis' character telling Kevin Kline's character that "Aristotle is not Belgian" in A Fish Called Wanda is just par for the course; calling someone on a claim is mainly an opportunity for and an invitation to further sparring. I don't know what the opposite would be…yes, one could go into an argument hoping to simply smile a lot. But then it wouldn't be an argument. A baseball game in which one team came to play and the other was more interested in posing for the cameras would not make for a very exciting game of baseball, IMHO. And it wouldn't tune up anyone's capabilities, or exercise anyone's (mental) muscles.

2) exercise is not the only benefit of a good argument, though. A good argument also provides defense for the parties involved. Adhering to logical conventions (and they are conventions, mind you, not transcendental absolutes) provides some measure of protection for the players, as there are rules about what kinds of moves are legal and permissible and what is out of bounds. This protects everyone involved in two ways:

a) sensitive issues can be discussed without necessarily inflaming irrational passions, because some kinds of displays are simply ruled out from the beginning. "I think that's racist!" Okay, sure; now demonstrate that, articulate some criteria, explain why it ought to matter, etc. Everything is up for grabs inasmuch as everything has to be submitted to the same procedures of examination, but the parties involved know that the examination will not proceed haphazardly.

b) adhering to rules and such provides some measure of distance and insulation from the issues involved. I am making an argument about something, which means that I am translating the inchoate mess in my head into something approximating rational language (and language is either rational or poetic; guess which one is appropriate to an argument?). Hence I always have an out: at the end of the day this is just an argument, just a part of the intersubjective social world -- certainly something produced by me, and something that I am committed to during the specific exchange in question (and perhaps afterwards, if the argumentative sequence seemed to be a useful tool to get me where I wanted to go). In other words: something I can step away from.

I think that the defensive aspects of argument are in this way akin to the defensive aspect of formal dancing (or dancing with any rules at all, as opposed to people just kind of moving in the same general space). To prevent things from getting way out of control, we have rules. So someone can enter what would otherwise be a very threatening situation -- lots of physical contact, invasions of personal space, etc. -- and feel safer than they would in the absence of those rules. But at the same time, they are in fact in that situation of exposure and potential connexion, buoyed (as it were) by the presence of conventional rules that enable them to focus on their performance instead of on how unsettled they feel.

[Magic commented to me at one point that he didn't think that arguments persuaded via logic. I agree. I don't think that arguments persuade at all, and I am not interested in using logical argumentation to persuade -- which seems quite absurd to me in any event. But there is something important about the argumentative dance itself, and that's what I am trying to get at here.]

3) the third benefit of argument is, not surprisingly, connexion. But not because logic produces a connexion, or because you can somehow logically maneuver someone into a relationship. Instead, argument sustains people getting into risky situations, situations wherein they risk their soul without really knowing it…situations in which they suddenly find themselves completely out and exposed and vulnerable. And it happens by accident: engage, engage, engage, bang. But everyone has to be "in form" for it to work; otherwise, the mind takes over and shuts the connexion down because it isn't making sense. A particularly important moment for such a connexion comes when you score a point, or someone scores a point against you: touché. Which is when that of God in me embraces that of God in you across the divide over which we have been sparring, and my soul acknowledges your soul as somehow kindred. And then we spin off again, continuing the dance -- but our souls, perhaps, remain tied together.

"Oddly enough, our arguments and battles unify us because they reinforce the fundamental moral symbols with which we all function." -- Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, p. 202.

Convinced? :-)

[Posted with ecto]

Social surplus

2004-09-27T10:22:00.000-04:00

As often happens, after posting some thoughts I figured out a more concise way to say what I was trying to say. This often happens to me while running; go figure. But in any event, here's another crack at what I was trying to get at yesterday:

I am quite taken with George Bataille's notion of a "general economy," which is to say an arrangement of social relations that is and should be evaluated not in terms of the distribution of scarce resources that it encourages, but instead in terms of the surplus that it produces. [Obviously, this is an analytic; anything can be evaluated as a general economy, which simply means that we focus in the specific instance on the production of surplus instead of focusing on the distribution of scarce resources.] According to this conception, the most important social decision involves the use of the leftover product and the spending of excess in a way that necessarily escapes the bounds of the rational system that produced the surplus in the first place.

By definition, the use of a surplus is an irrational act, even if the decision is made to try to rationalize the decision and re-appropriate the surplus into the system; such a re-appropriation is inherently unstable, since there is no logical reason why we should continue to use our surplus in this manner. Think of the reinvestment of profit in the expansion of a capitalist enterprise, or the use of time away from work to get trained in ways that will make you a more effective worker. One need not do this in any sort of classically objective or transcendental sense, which partially explains why we keep admonishing ourselves to do it -- as though we would be betraying some kind of universal principle by being unproductive.

[Classical political economists grasped this point very well; Smith had to introduce a moral duty to spend wisely in order to keep the market system functioning, and Weber noted that the "Protestant ethic" fulfilled this function in many settings. Polanyi understood well the role played by the quasi-naturalistic narratives of Townsend's "goats and dogs" and Mandaville's "fable of the bees" in aiding this effective closure of the system. And Marx understood that ideological consciousness could do something very similar, and keep the system on track by continually pressing the surplus back into rational circulation. From the perspective of the restricted economy of a closed system, the greatest sin is waste and excess; surpluses have to be re-incorporated, lest they undermine the whole process by exposing it for a giant tautology.]

Here's the rub: agency is surplus. Action is never exhausted by the rational rules of a situation; even a decision to reinvest stems from surplus, from a capacity to act that is never fully captured by any set of rules and procedures. [Wittgenstein knew this well, which is why he distinguished between a language-game and the form of life within which it was embedded; social relations are never fully logical, since inference is a social activity rather than a purely logical one.] So in this sense there can be no rules for action that have anything like a transcendental status, as the moment of action itself always escapes the system and stands outside of it. Agency is contingency. And the exercise of agency means embracing this contingency and this surplus, irrational character.

Why does this relate to what I was on about yesterday? Because the academy, as I understand it, is a surplus institution. Think about the immense social wealth and privilege associated with the creation of organizations devoted to thinking about things: this is only possible if one's society is already rich enough to handle basic necessities for most people, or if the organizations in question are supported by resource infusions from outside of the immediate social environment. Otherwise, how would such a thing be supported? Everyone would be too busy with the daily business of living to step back and reflect on things (or if they did, they would do so in an exclusively religious context; Nietzsche's observation that the ascetic priest was the cocoon in which the scholar developed seems entirely appropriate here). So the university, the academy, is social surplus. And I would argue that it -- and the academics who are called to live and work within it -- should embrace this status, and not continually strive to shed it or submerge it in other functional imperatives.

My opposition to "politically engaged scholarship," by which I mean scholarship that strives to push a particular partisan agenda in a present political context, is in this sense eminently similar to my opposition to and genuine fear of the creeping "culture of assessment" that seems to be colonizing higher education the way that has pretty effectively colonized primary and secondary education in the United States. Both imperatives reduce the academy, the university, to a functional tool for keeping the system running. Assessment forces people to evaluate their time at the university in terms of the practical skills that they have acquired; politicized scholarship forces people to evaluate thinking and pedagogy in terms of its contribution to some reform agenda. Both keep the Empire running, since the Empire in this sense is the general reduction of everything to means-ends rationality and calculations of efficiency -- the deliberate forgetting of the surplus character of surplus and the denial of agency-as-contingency. The result: the completion of the Enlightenment project of getting oneself out of the way in favor of one or another Absolute Truth that justifies one's actions.

[And, parenthetically - this is of course the necessary surplus that makes my argument issue from me, even though it is not reducible to anything within the logical structure of the argument itself -- this also eliminates the notion of faith from action. If I know, I need not have faith, I need not go beyond the comfortable bounds of reason. I need not risk anything, and if I am not risking anything I cannot participate in connexion.]

So what is one to do with the Empire, which in my usage at the moment largely represents the habit of action ( = behavior + meaningful interpretation thereof) that mandates that everything be subordinated to the logic of efficiency? I am not convinced that it makes much sense to either ignore it and go on one's merry way, or to simply stand there being inefficient and wait for it to run you down (which is what usually happens: people are martyred for such things all the time, and our present system is mercilessly good at doing so in any number of ways). Evil -- and I do think that this stuff is evil in the precise and technical sense (both because of its humanistic hubris that forgets or tries to eliminate the divine, and because the world that it envisions is one in which the most logical course of action is to stab one's intimate friends in the back at the moment of greatest personal advantage) -- needs to be resisted. And resisting evil means, ironically, using the very means of strategic calculation that the Empire pushes, but using them to do something very different: using them to create spaces in which the logic of efficiency is (efficiently) denied entry.

It's the paradox of the "intentional community," wherein a group of people undertake to deliberately create a space for openness, even though the effort to do so is very calculated and efficient. Like the Amish, who put a lot of forethought into their communal decisions about the use of technology and the like. Only this kind of deliberate exercise of power can hope to stand a chance against the Empire.

I think about it very much like the conclusion of Return of the Jedi -- no, not the bit with the Ewoks. Luke is fighting Vader in the Emperor's throne room on the Death Star; he manages to fight him to a standstill by using the same techniques of (s)wordplay that Vader is using. But he is hesitant, because he doesn't want to succumb to the Dark Side, so he stays content with a stalemate. Until Vader threatens the people whom he loves…and then bang, Luke comes out swinging and actually defeats Vader in combat (standing there with one's (s)word(s) and the neck of the opponent looks like victory in combat to me). And then the Emperor invites Luke to use that surplus and complete the system of the Empire, to kill Vader and take Vader's place, thus completely crushing the rebellion and ensuring that the Dark Side will be forever triumphant -- and Luke does something completely irrational, throws away his (s)word(s) and makes an identity-claim: "I am a Jedi, like my father before me." And then the miracle happens: the universe (or the scriptwriter :-) conspires to bring about a better end, as Vader destroys the Emperor, and the Empire falls.

The point? Luke at that moment acts in faith, not reason. He has escaped the system, escaped the parallel agendas (Ben and Yoda want him to defeat the Emperor, presumably by killing Vader; the Emperor wants him to join the Empire and complete it), and moved into a irrational realm where he ends up doing something very much like the farmer in one of my favorite, and often overlooked, biblical passages: "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seen on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come" (Mark 4: 26-29). This is the great ambiguity here: we do what we can, we use our skills and (s)word(s), and then we stop and wait. Vader would simply have killed Luke had he stood there defenseless earlier on; he needed to defeat Vader with his (s)wordplay first. But Luke stopped there, which is the other important point: having created space, he did not rush to fill it. He simply let it be: fallow, irrational, unproductive.

I am tired of being useful all the time. I am tired of being told that I should be useful as an academic. I want to be useless; I want to have and protect space for being useless. Undergrads need to spend more time being useless and want to help to create space for that. Graduate students need to be trained in the art of efficiently producing inefficiency and usefully generating space for uselessness; there's the great and glorious performative contradiction in which I strive to live as a mentor to graduate students (the Obi-Wan Kenobi role). And colleagues need to be beaten about the head if they persist in subordinating the academy to the agendas of the Empire, whether those are technical-efficient or partisan-political. This is, I believe, how one creates space for openness -- which remains my central project and agenda as an academic.

[Posted with ecto]

Anger, aggression, and the DAG

2004-09-26T16:06:00.000-04:00

Pretty much every self-respecting sci-fi geek (such as myself; say it loud, say it proud) has committed Master Yoda's admonition to memory: "anger, fear, aggression, the Dark Side are they." Of course, there is some ambiguity in the advice, inasmuch as sometimes these emotions are the Dark Side all on their own, and sometimes they merely lead to the Dark Side, but the point is that there is supposed to be something negative about them. In a slightly (!) clearer formulation, Yoda comments once in The Empire Strikes Back that "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack." Aggression, then, seems to be a definite no-no, and anger seems to go along with it in most instances. [Fear -- well, let me leave that to one side for the moment.]

Magic sent me some comments on my pro-connexion pedagogical position and the way that I have chosen to treat formal panel situations at conferences, and these seem to me to overlap nicely with a series of other ongoing discussions I have been having with people about aggressive questioning, whether of students or of colleagues (or of "ordinary people" outside of the academy, but that raises special issues involving the fact that the demand for rigor is usually understood by non-academics as a vicious dismissal instead of an invitation to a fencing match…but I am getting ahead of myself).

I) Magic suggests that my commitment to connexion represents what Marx would have called reaction to "alienation": the division of the world from itself, and the division of each of us from ourselves and from each other. He further suggests that I am thereby a little less concerned with the other part of Marx's project, which involves "exploitation."

Guilty.

"Exploitation" seems to me to be a somewhat epiphenomenal manifestation of the more fundamental problem, which is the absence of connexion generated in the present context largely by the all-pervading notion of liberal individualism: I am a world unto myself, and can only have narrowly instrumental interactions with others, but this situation is more than merely okay since God Himself speaks through my exercise of Reason. I recoil at calling this self-narrative mere "false consciousness" or delusion, since that downplays its constitutive character, and I am not (yet?) convinced of the value of trying to root this narrative -- which is the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves -- in "material" or "structural" factors (or even, and perhaps especially, in the "relations of production," which seems to me to be just as dangerous in its own way as the Enlightenment-era poppycock that it is trying to replace).

Is there a political project that arises from this commitment? In Marx, the diagnosis of alienation leads quite seamlessly into a project designed to address it. It is this seamless character that bothers me, as though "getting it right" were both a necessary and a sufficient condition of political action. The equation, as many marxists (perhaps not Marx himself -- the great thinkers generally don't say what they are supposed to have said, or at least don't say it as clearly and concisely as their disciples think, and I will be the first to admit that I have not spent sufficient time with Marx to really weigh in on this issue as it pertains to his writings; but I have spent a fair amount of time with marxists, and I think I have a pretty good grasp on how they operate while deploying Marx's name) seem to have it, is: see the world aright; use this right seeing to critique actually existing arrangements; get closer to paradise. It's a world-redeeming project rooted in the very same commitment to Certainty and Truth that is characteristic of the liberal individualism that I think is the more significant manifestation of the Dark Side of the Force these days.

I think that there is a personal quest that arises from my commitment to connexion: pursue it wherever possible, try to increase it and enhance it when I can. And when this personal quest (which may be entirely hedonistic; my former minister defined a "calling" as the place where your deep need meets the world's deep need, and I am prepared to let the jury remain out on precisely whether this is a "deep need" of the world's -- next time you talk to "the world," ask her for me, and tell me what she says) runs into obstacles, I am more than prepared to engage in a political campaign to defuse those obstacles.

II) Magic characterizes the reliance on logic and the demand for consistency when engaged in the production and evaluation of research to be a use of the Dark Arts of Germany, or DAG. And he takes me to task (gently, of course -- this remains a very civil exchange :-) for relying on the DAG in my work and in my conference practices. To quote: "You know full well, for example, that theoretics and empirics overlap as categories even as you know that their momentary separation is useful and necessary. The trick however is to temper the usefulness of the separating moment with the knowledge of their overlap. This I don’t see you doing as often as might be possible. Instead you use linear logic as a weapon, or as a surgical tool."

Again, guilty.

But this time, even happier to accept the charge, since he has hit the nail on the head here. I am indeed wielding linear logic as a weapon or tool (and as Ani DiFranco reminds us, "every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"), and am not particularly interested in promoting a situation in which people temper their use of binary categories with an awareness of the overlap that remains between them. The result of doing that, I think, is likely to be a somewhat flabby and hesitant writing and speaking, a kind of public angsting that I cannot for the life of me see the point of. I'd much, much rather have crisp arguments with which one could engage, instead of slippery statements that catch themselves up in knots and slink away before you can get a grip on them. Why? Two reasons: I think that there is a value to rigor all on its own, and I also enjoy a good fencing match. Sparring can enhance consistency; indeed, I spar precisely in order to enhance both the consistency of my own position and that of others. There is almost a meditative quality to such sparring, I think; when participants take it seriously it can be both rewarding and fulfilling.

If we do not have a commitment to consistency and rigor, we may be engaging in political activism or perhaps in artistic expression, but we sure aren't doing social science. Why am I insisting on this distinction -- and in particular why am I insisting on it when it has often been used to marginalize my kind of work in the past? I think it's because of the disciplinary-political project that seems to arise from my commitment to connexion, which proceeds as follows.

1) The dominant self-understanding of the social sciences involves the (to me completely absurd) claim that the right "method" can get us to Truth, a secure place from which we can legislate without fear that we are somehow exercising arbitrary power or choice.

2) This claim is part and parcel of the Enlightenment project of liberal individualism, or what Habermas calls "subject-centered reason," inasmuch as I-am-a-world-unto-myself is intimately interconnected with there-is-a-real-and-knowable-world-outside-of-myself and there-is-one-best-way-to-know-that-world.

3) The heart of this position needs to be defeated in order to open space for the connexion that is brought about by spiritually engaged conversation that risks souls; you can't have those conversations in the presence or even in the shadow of something like a One True Way That The World Is. Once you abandon that foolish pretension, the demand for consistency becomes a move in a connexion-enhancing transaction, an invitation or a call to one's interlocutor to pour more and more of themselves into their argument, to risk more and more and more until the spirit starts spinning wildly out of control and everybody starts worlding together. Or, as one might express it more concisely: BANG.

Not all transactions after the demise of Truth have to take the form of a lightsaber duel, though. I suspect -- and I have some experience with this -- that many of them won't. Although because I enjoy that kind of conversation, more of mine probably will than might otherwise be the case. There is also another problem: namely, that I am pretty effective with my (s)word(s) and can generally decimate interlocutors without quite realizing it. It is not necessary to do this in all contexts and situations. Arguments are (s)word(s) that can be wielded to destroy pretensions and deflate ambitions, but in order to do so one must evaluate the likely consequences of doing so. In pedagogical or transactive contexts, I try to temper my inclinations a bit, so as to better encourage a flow of spirit. On panels? Well, that's a different story.

4) Defeating the Enlightenment position (and this is a tactical judgment; feel free to question me on it) can best be accomplished by separating science and politics -- logic and the form of life that surrounds it -- in order to demonstrate in a concrete way how little logic can accomplish. So I engage in a two-step procedure: first, question so as to isolate the application of the value-commitment from the value-commitment itself, and get people to at least try to make those line up logically; second, ask what insight is generated by the systematic application of their value-commitment.

This opens up space for a third line of attack as well, namely the question "isn't your value-commitment inherently evil?" At this point they can't fall back on the "insights" that their perspective generates (yes, I am thinking of rational choice theory here, but I'd also include a lot of other anti-agentic determinisms in this charge), since those have been separated from the moral issue. So now they have to actually confront the moral status of their assumptions.

In panels, and when evaluating the arguments of other scholars -- I exempt graduate students from this for the most part, because they're still learning and can't be expected to be as adept yet -- I feel justified in being somewhat merciless. If you're going to toss out a position, then for the love of God be prepared to defend it -- even if you are not completely committed to it. Panels are experimental situations in which you can get people to attack your claims, which helps you to sharpen them up and work on your form. Other conversations can come later, perhaps after the panel in which you are able to link up with people who made interesting comments during the exchange. But now we're no longer on stage, and the rules are different.

5) my Weberian resolution of the science/values problem opens up, I think, room for a number of conversations that wouldn't go on otherwise. Conversations about the technical application or enactment of a position are common; what I am trying to get more space for are conversations about the value of empirical insights and the value of the values embedded in the perspective itself. Nether of these conversations are likely to follow the same kinds of logical conventions as the technical application conversations: given that a minimal consensus on parameters and fundamentals (some kind of weakly shared common horizon) seems to be an inescapable component of having a conversation in the first place, and given that conversations about values are generally conversations across such horizons, they are likely to be somewhat different. "Ethics and aesthetics are one," Wittgenstein once declared; among other things, this admonition cautions us against trying to resolve issues involving the parameters of the world by applying techniques that are only effective within a world -- namely, logic and rationality.

Contrast my approach with that of, say, Frodo, who proposes a new common horizon for everyone to fit within. I am far more agonistic than that about knowledge.

According to the novelization of Return of the Jedi (which Lucas says is canonical, even though he also says that Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which contradicts many things that happen in other parts of the Star Wars timeline, is canonical, so maybe he's not the best judge of this), there is an old Jedi rule of thumb: "when outnumbered, attack. This drives the force of the enemy in toward himself." I am certainly outnumbered here, and my inclination in such a situation is to attack. Why? Someone has to do it; I'm pretty good with (s)word(s); I do derive some pleasure from doing so; and I think that if I succeed even a little bit, I can help to make the discipline safe(r) for others.

The irony here is that if I do succeed more conversations will be about values, and fewer will be about technical application. At some point I will have to lay aside my (s)word(s) and engage in something very different. I have absolutely no problem putting myself out of a job in this manner. First we clear the field of political rants masquerading as scholarship, and then we defeat those who are packaging their particular perspective as Truth; then at long last we can have other kinds of conversations in the public spaces of the discipline.

Never gonna happen, though. I do foresee a time when I will get tired of (s)wordplay, and move into the Obi-Wan Kenobi role of training Jedi Knights instead of being out there on the front lines all the time. But I am not optimistic about winning this battle ever. Along the way, though, thinking space will hopefully be created and connexion will be enhanced. and that's enough for the time being.

III) Magic also raised a further point: "Yes, it is true, we are in the business of evaluating the worth of arguments. But if we leave it there then we become analytic philosophers, and Marx’s thesis on Feurbach comes to haunt us. As you know from your commitment to connexion, the point is to change the world, or at least to act as if that is what is important to us." I don't accept Marx's thesis on Feuerbach; I think that the academic vocation is about interpreting the world rather than changing it in any direct and partisan sense. Now, interpretation of the world can alter the world in a global sense, by changing the very conditions under which the world worlds, but this is not the same as opposing something specific within the world. My opposition to the Enlightenment project, and the liberal individualism that is its chief product, is just such a cause. Call it "political" if you want, but the fact remains that it is engaged with the world in a very different way than, say, an opposition to global poverty or to the absence of adequate protection for human rights.

My project informs my pedagogical and theoretical practice, naturally. But it does so by emphasizing that we are in fact in the business of evaluating arguments and producing defensible knowledge about the world (defensible from disparate value-commitments, of course, but defensible all the same). Magic comments that "if we are in the business of evaluating arguments, we are also in the business of being moved by “arguments.”" I disagree. We are not in the business of being moved by "arguments"; we are in the business of trying to harness the value-commitments expressed in such "arguments" so as to generate knowledge, and we are in the business of debating and discussing those value-commitments in their own right. But "being moved" is not, in my opinion, our business, and we certainly shouldn't be getting tenure and promotion and other such job perks because of it.

This applies in particular to pedagogical situations, I think; I have to evaluate what is there on the page or in the comment, not what I think I can hear lurking behind it. Now, in the discrepancy between how I heard/read something and what the student thinks that she or he was trying to express there comes an opportunity for the student to clarify, to try again to express whatever inexpressible thing it is that is driving them -- to pour more of their soul out into the transaction, and risk more and more and more.

Could a panel be like that? Maybe. But it would either have to be a stacked audience or something akin to a pedagogical situation. Me in the audience, people talking in loose and vague terms about things at the front of the room? That's not an opportunity for pedagogy, but an opportunity to strike some blows. People who are possessed by the Dark Side of the Force first need to be softened up and beaten to a standstill; that way, even if they don't listen, the audience might have some doubts about the rectitude of their claims in the future. Albeit ambiguously, that looks like "progress" to me.

[Posted with ecto]

Organizational identity

2004-09-23T19:11:00.000-04:00

I need to reply to Magic's latest round of responses to my thoughts on conferences, but that takes more time than I have right at the moment. Instead, here is a brief summary of two discussions I had today, both of which illustrate the centrality of organizational identity to our work as academics.

1) my department is engaging in a job search this year; it's actually a continuation of a search that didn't conclude successfully last year (don't get me started on that issue). In any event, there was some controversy about how many people could or should be on the search committee. Initially I was not asked to be on it, but I made the argument that this was not just another service obligation, but something much more important: an opportunity to help to shape the character of the department in a relatively profound way. Who one has in a department is much, much more important than formal organizational attributes of the department, and probably more important than things like degree requirements and the like. A search raises the question of what kind of department we want to be, and the very future tense of it means that there is an opportunity to exercise the kind of agency that doesn't come up all that often. And who one has around affects the kind of education that the students are getting -- and who one can use as second readers for theses, and who else one can send students to for additional instruction, and the general atmosphere of the place.

So of course I want to be on the committee, regardless of the fact that it will take quite a bit of time.

2) I attended a meeting today in which the university was contracting with an outside firm to audit the admissions website and see whether it needed to be redesigned. (I think it does; it's clunky, somewhat dated, and hard to navigate. But that's not my decision.) We hadn't gone more than five minutes before we got into a wide-ranging discussion of the identity of the university, what kinds of achievements we wanted to stress, and how different offices on campus understood that identity (the president's office, for instance, apparently has a set of five major goal points that they have not bothered to share with any of the faculty; since one of them is "practical education" (!) one would think that the faculty might want/need to have some input here at some point…also, significantly, none of these five goal points have any mention of academic or scholarly excellence, and the faculty as a body are almost completely absent from the list). Again, this becomes especially important because the admissions website attracts students, and thus plays a major role in shaping the character of the university in the future.

All organizational discussions are probably about identity. I get really annoyed when someone says during a committee meeting "let's just make a policy decision without getting into a big discussion about the overall identity of the program." News flash: policy decisions constitute "the identity of the program." So by not discussing it, one simply enacts a bounding of the organization's identity without being aware of what one is doing and why. This does not strike me as a good plan under any circumstances.

[Posted with ecto]

Cleaning out the roll-y bag

2004-09-20T09:40:00.000-04:00

This morning I am finishing the process of taking all of the accumulated stuff out of the wheeled laptop case I have been using for the past couple of years. Some of my students refer to it as my dog, because I usually walk around campus between classes wheeling it behind me. But I have made a decision to switch bags, so I am emptying the old one (which will probably just be thrown out, since it is rather worn by now) of all of the little things that have gotten lodged in it over the past couple of years: a lot of loose change, receipts for God-knows-what, several pairs of headphones, miscellaneous electrical adapters, business cards, a radio attachment for my iPod [I was wondering where that had gotten to!], etc. And then transferring everything into my new blue-and-silver Timbuk2 bag, which fits my laptop like a glove and still allows space for a book or two to squeeze into the main compartment.

Why am I switching? I have discovered that I carry around as much stuff as my bag can hold. So I was lugging around a lot of crap that I never really used in my old bag, simply because it fit. Once placed in the bag, it never seemed to make its way back out. So the alternative is to get a smaller bag, but not one that is so small that it can only fit the laptop (although that is certainly the most important thing that I carry around with me on a daily basis). I do need some other things, including books and cables for attaching the laptop to various things (external monitors, for example). And my reading glasses have to go someplace. So the search for a bag that was a little bigger than just a laptop sleeve but not as big as my existing wheeled bag went on. I think I've found something good now.

Actually, I already found one: an Ogio laptop backpack that I bought and used all summer in Europe, and still take in on days when I'm not teaching. It's big enough for everything I need to put in it, and I really like having my hands free when walking, so a backpack is a good choice. But I can't use it on teaching days, because it would rumple my suit even more. Plus, walking around with a backpack makes one look somewhat more like a student, which is problematic when one is actually the professor. Wearing a suit to teach is part of that same concern for me: visual differentiation seems to me to be very important to my position. Regardless of whether it makes the students feel that there is some distance between myself and them, it makes me feel that way -- and thus makes it easier for me to exercise some measure of authority inside and outside of the classroom. At least at first. Later in the semester, after the pattern has been set, it feels less important to maintain so rigorously.

Appearance is a crutch. A tool. A means to an end, where the end in this case is some measure of internal differentiation even as I am engaged with my students in producing intimate, soul-baring conversations. It's something of a way to avoid being completely consumed in the ensuing conflagration, which is an ever-present danger associated with my pedagogy. And that was also a consideration with the new bag purchase: does it look too student-y? Does it collapse the distinction that I am trying in other ways to maintain?

Of course, I do not maintain the appearance of an Adult Authority perfectly in any case. I frequently wear ties that, well, wouldn't pass muster in a law office (Star Wars , Winnie the Pooh, New York Yankees), and I tend to sit on tables and then leap up while facilitating a discussion. I have been known to stand on desks and the like, too, and my language veers between precisely formal and affected informal (which is an ironic doubleness that I quite like: here's the professor using some youthful slang term, but doing it awkwardly as though to emphasize the artificiality of his usage -- but then again, he's using the slang, so he apparently knows it). And some days I walk into the the room listening to my iPod, finish the song, and then start class. [And I am not a still listener; I have a tendency to conduct while listening, and I'd dance if I didn't look like such a completely uncoordinated white boy while doing so.]

So I suppose that the effect I'm going for here is some kind of alloy: authority figure yet not perfectly, in charge but also not, adult but not completely out of touch with the kids, etc. It takes some deliberate forethought to keep that particular balance going. Hence, choosing a bag is a rather complicated endeavor. Hopefully this one will work out -- and hopefully it will solve the other problem too, and prevent me from lugging around too much useless junk.

[Posted with ecto]

Further ruminations

2004-09-19T11:10:00.000-04:00

Apparently my knee wasn't as healthy as I had thought that it was; a couple of days ago it started hurting again while walking, so I skipped my morning run on Friday and tried to be more diligent about my strengthening exercises in the intervening period. Went out this morning in the 55-degree weather, and things felt okay; still doing a lot more walking and slow jogging than I'd really like to. I am beginning to realize that "healing" is a bit of an impossible dream, and that I will never be fully over this -- because that would require me not to have my knee anymore. The teleology of "healing" bothers me a bit in general, since it assumes an end state of perfect rest and health. I am much more processual, I suppose: I am not going to wait around for my knee to "heal" as much as I am going to try my damnedest to incorporate the odd way that it reacts to use and stress into my daily routines. It's that Augustinian memory thing again: by treating the present as the future of the past, one can generate a narrative that reshapes the past into a vector pointing through the present towards a still-open-ended future which is, nonetheless, a little more precisely delimited than it was before. Repeat ad infinitum.

[Is this what some folks get excited about "dialectics" for? Certainly any specific narrative generated in this manner fails to exhaust either past or future, a situation that manifests itself in the slippery character of a present that can always continue to be the subject of debate and discussion. But calling this a "dialectical" process strikes me as too mechanical, as though the bits left out of a given narrative were somehow a thing or a clearly defined position that could subsequently engage with the narrative that left them out in the first place. I'm much more comfortable thinking in processual or dialogical terms about this: the "outside" is part of the "inside," the necessary surplus produced by any attempt to narrate or to "lock down" a present situation. But if that surplus is subsequently utilized to critique or extend the initial narrative, we're not necessarily still having the same conversation; instead, we're in another round of trying to lock things down via narrative and conversation. "The surplus generated by a narrative" is an analytical construct, not a "real thing" (whatever that might mean), and as such depends on an additional narrative process. And so it goes. "Dialectic" seems to me to oversimplify this overmuch.]

Two things that occurred [I like the German word for this: "einfallen," which literally means that the thought fell into my head -- displacing authorship in this way seems to me to capture the experience of inspiration much better than alternative formulations] to me this morning, as a sort of combination of some of the reactions to my Amsterdam conference ruminations and to several other conversations that I've been having lately. The backdrop here involves the Weberian claim that there are two valid ways to evaluate a (social-)scientific argument: one can morally evaluate the value-commitment on which the argument rests, and one can technically evaluate the application of that value-commitment to some specific set of empirical data. Both are forms of engaged criticism, and both serve the same end: to evaluate the worth of a particular argument. But by doing so in a committed way, both also end up serving a different purpose (and here I think that I am departing from Weber to some extent, although maybe not -- I'd need to know more about how he treated conversations in general), which is to promote the most important thing in the world, which is connexion: that kind of spiritual flow that generates the intermingling of souls and collective intersubjective worlding. To quote Ben Kenobi, it's that energy field that "surrounds us, and penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together," and we get to be apertures -- clearings -- through which it can come to consciousness and do its work.

[Not completely happy with that formulation, since it sounds a bit too pantheistic still. I feel rather like Valentine Michael Smith in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, who comes up with a formulation -- "thou art God" -- that seems to capture some of his (Martian) intuition about things, and then ends up spending the rest of the book trying to figure out how to put that intuition across in terms that people won't be completely horrified by. The language of connexion and the intermingling of souls, plus the notion of "contingency" (see below), seem to get me part of the way there. but it's not a done deal yet by any circumstances.]

1) the first thing that fell into my head this morning concerned an ongoing debate between myself and Boromir (who is probably more a combination of Boromir and Faramir, truth be told) about the purpose of panels at conferences, and how one should deal with them. He argues that the central issue ought to be learning, and the promotion of learning in every aspect of life; hence even panels should be approached as moments from which I/we can learn something. He goes further: "Neither of these are so different from my claim that it does us good to treat every moment of life as a learning opportunity – even if it is not."

Hmm. Part of me wishes that I was that patient and that generous. I can and do enact this attitude in the classroom -- teaching as letting learn, and the one with the most to learn being the teacher, as Heidegger would and did put it -- but panel presentations at major professional conferences seem to me to be something quite different. I see panels and professional conferences, at least the "on-stage" parts of them (the less public gatherings in the wings of the conference, in the bar, at restaurants, and so forth are different issues entirely: those are opportunities to build and strengthen connexions), as realms of largely disembedded instrumentality. Like other such realms in liberal societies -- the putatively self-regulating market and the putatively "free marketplace of ideas" leap readily to mind -- the logic of the exercise is to engage in mere interaction (not transaction, and certainly not connexion) for the sake of gaining something. Interaction in such realms is a means to an end. The end in the case of panels and conferences involves disciplinary prestige, being noticed by various power-brokers in the disciplinary hierarchy, making a name for oneself. This end gets one certain things, such as gainful employment, invitations to participate in other panels and roundtables, publication opportunities, and perhaps the opportunity to have people engage with your work because they have some clue who you are. You can get on their radar screen, so to speak. And this does not just mean getting on the radar screen of disciplinary gatekeepers and powerhouses, but also on the radar screen of graduate students and younger scholars.

Hence: participation in the ritual of panels and conference roundtables is, for me, largely a means to an end. That end is both the sort of conversations that can go on outside of the panel and the "on-stage" part of the conference, and the set of institutional resources that enable one to keep doing what one is doing -- i.e. a job, tenure, publications, etc. The game is not valuable in itself, but only instrumentally.

There's a second level to this, though: the public "on-stage" conversations at conferences also embody and (re)produce a certain kind of disciplinary common sense. Intervening in those conversations can be an effort to disrupt that common sense to as to open up "thinking space" for other conversations to make their way into print and onto the stage. And this, in turn, increases the possibility that people will see them and choose to participate, thus widening the circle and enhancing the opportunity to forge more connexions around a weakly shared commitment to various novel commonplaces that were not on the agenda before. In so doing, I think that it is perfectly acceptable to run smash-and-grab operations on great thinkers from other fields or from one's own; the point is not to get it right, but to open space for conversation. if a skewed reading of Anthony Giddens, or Max Weber, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or whomever, accomplishes this task, I am inclined to treat it more charitably.

But only as a disciplinary intervention, and only in certain contexts. There's a difference between "let's have a serious discussion of Nietzsche's approach to knowledge" and "let's use Nietzsche as a way to deflate certain pretensions and open space to have that conversation later on." The problem is that academic discourse blends these two modes together and wraps them up in an Enlightenment package, so that we can easily slip into thinking that subtle, nuanced readings will create thinking space and that arguments creating thinking space need to be subtle and nuanced. "That's not what Nietzsche said/meant" has two possible valences, depending on the context. In a serious discussion arising from and strengthening connexions, it means "I'm going to offer a different reading for you/us to chew on." In an on-stage disciplinary context, it means "I'm going to contest your reading by invoking the authority of the text and myself as a reader/interpreter of it, so that I can try to undercut the conclusions that you are drawing from your reading." Which is why if I understand something to be a disciplinary intervention I try not to go on record as critiquing its intellectual content, because doing so in that context might undermine the potential thinking space that it can create.

Panels are performances. Engaging with a panel is a performance. Neither are opportunities for forging or strengthening connexions, unless you are cooperating with others to subvert the performance…which can be loads of fun if done artfully :-)

2) the second thing that fell into my head this morning involves an issue that I have been struggling with for a while now: the role of "political commitment" in scholarship. I and some of my graduate students sometimes get criticized for not being "politically engaged" -- sometimes this criticism comes out as a charge of "positivism" -- because we persist in regarding the application or enactment of an analytical framework as something logically divorced from the moral acceptability of that framework in the first place. The value-commitments that we have are encoded into ideal-typical analytical stances, and those stances are then applied to a mass of data (or "stuff") to generate insights. As a result, my work doesn't tend to engage in a lot of "unmasking" of claims on the basis that they don't accord with my initial value-commitments, since that would be tautological. And I don't tend to engage in a lot of explicit efforts to change the world based on the putative "results" (in a lot of "politically committed" scholarship I think that these so-called "results" are nothing but value-expectorations and a lot of banging one's fist on the table about human rights or sweatshop labor or global racism -- worthy causes all, but causes rather than rigorously derived conclusions about the world) of my intellectual labors.

As Wittgenstein (whom such critics also think of as a "positivist") put it: philosophy leaves the world just as it is. One can't solve the problems of living in the world simply by engaging in scholarly research, and to the extent that people try they end up being both bad activists (suffering from bad conscience about their lack of positive contribution to The Struggle, which often comes out in a seriously misguided effort to convert their students to The Cause) and bad scholars (whose conclusions are tautological restatements of their premises, generating no novel insight into anything). I am deeply impressed by those scholar-activists who can move in both worlds, but they do so IMHO by keeping the worlds separate; blending bad.

Boromir (he doesn't like this label for himself, so maybe I'll have to look for another; given his basketball past and Sufi-like demeanor, I could perhaps call him "Magic" :-) always asks people where their anger is, and why they are doing what they are doing in their scholarly work. This question comes up a lot in "politically committed" scholarship: what pisses you off enough that you feel compelled to write? Where is the project underpinning your scholarship? And the implication, it seems to me, is that lacking a project makes one a "positivist," since the work produced then becomes something of a detached intellectual exercise instead of a concrete intervention into the world. This strikes me as a problematic stance, though, inasmuch as positivism is itself a project: an effort to get away from unquestionable transcendental claims and focus on things that we can actually talk about without getting inextricably mired in contradictions and inconsistencies. "The world is all that is the case," Wittgenstein declared; hence, stop trying to talk about things that lie outside of the world as though you could talk about those things in the same way that you talk about things in the world. The sense of the world lies outside of the world, so you can only talk about it in oblique and poetic ways; this is not the case for things that lie within the world (pun intended).

Maybe this will help to clarify. Scholarship, I think, has two subdivisions. The first is the articulation of a value-commitment and its transformation into an ideal-typical analytic. The second is the application of that analytic to some stuff to generate insight: this is called empirical research. These are obviously related activities, but they are not collapsable into one another. Value-commitments disclose the world in specific ways, and hence can never be validated or proven by the empirical research that they generate. By the same token, empirical research shouldn't be evaluated solely in terms of the acceptability of the value-premises on which it rests. This is the politics/science distinction on which Weber insisted so forcefully: agreeing with someone politically (or, more generally, morally-practically) does not mean that you agree with the way that they enact that commitment or with the conclusions that they draw from it, and agreeing with someone's scientific/empirical conclusions or insights does not commit you to agreeing with the value-premises that generated those conclusions.

Two things follow from this for me. First, I understand a little better my frustration with "constructivist" scholarship in my field. And second, I understand a bit better why dwelling on a scholar's "anger" or "project" bothers me to some extent.

"Constructivism" in my field bothers me for two reasons: many if not most constructivists are not very clear about their value-commitments and how those translate into ideal-typical analytics, and to make matters worse they are wildly inconsistent in their application/enactment of those commitments. A commitment to "social construction," to me, follows what Ian Hacking articulated in The Social Construction of What?: constructionism is the claim that whatever is in the social world did not need to be the way that it is, that the social world is not a realm of transcendent or parametric necessity. It follows from this commitment that apparent stabilities need to be explained, since they cannot be presumptively stable in the analysis without running into major inconsistencies. (This is why I think of social constructionism as a post-structuralism: structuralism is an effort to import something like natural necessity and parametric constraint back into the social world, and post-structuralism is the position -- the moral position -- that there ain't no such animal.) But in my field, people try to define "constructivism" as a commitment to researching the role of ideas and norms and other intersubjective factors, which strikes me as a rather absurd way to define an approach -- especially since one can research such empirical phenomena in wildly divergent ways. So I get annoyed that they don't spell out their value-commitments explicitly, in such a way that would make clear the world-creating character of their methodology.

As if that weren't enough, I get further annoyed that "constructivists" then conflate politics and scholarship in ways that I find unacceptable, grabbing all kinds of wildly inconsistent approaches and techniques in an effort to reach their pre-determined conclusion: norms and ideas matter. To which I reply: of course they do, to you, since you already assumed that in your analytic. Big shock that you reach that conclusion. What novel insight are you generating by doing so? Talk to me more about that, especially since we already agree on the basic value-commitment issue (even if I don't think that they are articulating it clearly enough). So when I start taking constructivists to task, there are two discrete elements that bother me. And in a way I am more bothered by constructivists because I share the overall value-orientation; intra-family disputes are always the worst, after all.

Second, the "project" issue. Knowing where a scholar is coming from helps me to understand them better, but it doesn't really affect my judgment about their work. I find it fascinating to engage in the "what are you angry about" conversation with people, because their anger is usually important to them and by talking about it they can generate a motion of the spirit that may not happen when discussing things that they don't care as deeply about. But simply being angry, or even simply being angry about the same things that I am angry about, does not suffice to make a piece of scholarship "good" in my estimation. I am not inclined to evaluate someone's work on the purity of their conviction or on the strength of the fire that burns within their breast about some issue. Will I try to get to know them on that basis? Of course. That's the really good stuff -- the connexion -- that comes about in intimate conversations and the like. But "I know where you're coming from" and "your analysis makes me see things differently" are two different claims, and the latter is the one proper to an evaluation of someone's scholarship. The former? Well, that's just politics, plain and simple.

Coda: there can be two kinds of scholarship, I think, or two modes of scholarship that are sometimes combined into one work. The first articulates a value-commitment and transforms it into an ideal-typical analytic; this is what we usually (in the social sciences, at least) call "theoretical" or "conceptual" work. The second takes an ideal-typical analytic and enacts it; that's empirical research. Both are scholarship, but they need to be evaluated and engaged with in different ways. The latter needs to be critiqued on both technical and moral grounds, but the former can and should only be engaged with morally. Both end up working on the same basic issue -- the world as a whole, the world as it worlds -- but they do so differently: the former intervenes directly in the conceptual apparatus that we use to world, while the latter does so but also provides something like a concrete demonstration of what it would be like to world that way. But in neither case is the purity or strength of the scholar's commitment at issue. "I like your project" probably means "I agree with your value-commitment," and critiquing a scholar for not being "political" probably means either "I don't see your value-commitment" or "you don't have an explicit value-commitment, which means by default that you are supporting the status quo, with which I vehemently disagree."

I am very much in favor of clear articulations of value-commitments, but largely so that we can have better conversations about them. Maybe that's a-political too. But my commitment is to connexion, not to any particular cause.

[Posted with ecto]

The Sociology of the Discipline

2004-09-13T09:09:00.000-04:00

I was at a conference in Amsterdam most of last week, staying in a house at the beach with five other members of the Fellowship (a loose grouping of "critical" scholars interested in social theory and pedagogy -- big round of applause for Elven Archer #37 for organizing this). Busy week for me: two paper presentations (one co-authored piece that I took the lead in presenting, the other a single-authored and unfortunately incomplete paper on Weber and the methodology of the social sciences), one discussant gig on the absolute last panel session of the conference, and in between several "working" dinners and lunches featuring intense discussion of a number of weighty issues. (And yes, we did have some fun too; the trip to Utrecht on the last day was largely recreational, although the discussion on the drive back to Amsterdam was most illuminating.)

If I had to pick one issue that dominated all of our reflections and discussions and arguments, I would have to say that it was the sociology of the discipline. "Critical" scholars in any scientific discipline, I'd wager, are always more interested in this topic than those more centrally located in the social apparatus of knowledge production; the overarching narrative of "science" is that the succession of findings and positions represents some measure of progress, and hence those on top of the prestige hierarchy require no special analysis of how they got their positions: their work has made progress on older work, and this justifies their centrality to the discipline as a whole. But to more critical scholars, the hierarchy of the discipline (and let's not kid ourselves here: every discipline, even those that do not constitute themselves as "scientific" in the same way as mine does, has a hierarchy of journals, presses, universities, and individual scholars, even if that hierarchy is more or less malleable over time) is anything but the result of some kind of classically objective process of neutrally sifting through arguments to eliminate the weaker ones and permit the strongest to survive. Instead, disciplinary hierarchies are constructed in inescapably power-laden ways, ranging from the "gatekeeping" function performed by journal editors and peer reviewers to the outright coercive tactics of unsolicited letters trying to torpedo someone's tenure review process or to prevent them from getting a particular job.

Yes, this stuff happens. We all know it, but we don't usually talk much about it -- at least not in public and while sober. But it was almost the entirety of the hallway and mealtime conversation that was generated by the conference; indeed, it is almost the entirety of the hallway and mealtime conversation generated by virtually every conference I have ever been to. (I suspect that even those in the center of the discipline engage in such discussions from time to time -- not about themselves, of course, but about insurgent movements and how best to contain them. But I am not now, nor are particularly likely to be in the foreseeable future, privy to any of those discussions, so I can only speculate.) In this sense, a conference is largely an opportunity for disciplinary self-reflection, with the manifest content of papers presented standing in a very unclear relationship to the business of the conference (except, of course, for papers and panels directly on the sociology of the discipline.)

So what did I learn from these discussions at this particular conference?

1) "the discipline" is a very ambiguous notion, and how you understand it depends a great deal on local context. I knew this before, but having it presented rather dramatically in the form of wildly divergent evaluations of particular authors and works and occurrences drives the point home in a more profound way. Two specific stories. One night at dinner we were discussing a particular scholar (let's call him Frodo, because much of the Fellowship is convinced that he is on a mission to destroy the One Ring -- which in this instance represents classical objectivity and absolute certainty -- but may or may not have succumbed to the seduction of the power represented by the One Ring as he goes about his dangerous quest) and his impact on the discipline. The Americans involved in the conversation were by and large grateful to Frodo for his efforts to open discursive space for our arguments, and for directly or indirectly helping to support our careers. The Europeans, by contrast, were by and large more interested in criticizing the intellectual coherence of Frodo's work, and were not impressed by the American argument that Frodo's work needs to be understood as a disciplinary intervention rather than as a piece of decontextualized theory. And this divergence, I think, stems ultimately from the fact that Frodo's intervention was not as important to European scholars' careers as it has arguably been for American scholars. So "the discipline" is more localized than we might think at first.

Second story. The co-authored paper that I presented is a remapping exercise, an effort to reorganize axes of debate so as to open space for different kinds of conversations than those that are currently going on. Our sense of what kinds of conversations are going on, of course, is American-centric, having to do with American journals and the issues that make their way into the American academy understood more broadly. Surprise, surprise: non-American scholars, or those based outside of the United States and hence not as directly dependent on the American disciplinary structure for their professional success, see other conversations as the important ones and thus tend to perceive more space for different kinds of work. They thus understand our intervention as unnecessary, by and large, since the relevant movement to the conversations that we would like to see has already happened -- it is just happening in journals and other locations that are far removed from the American scene.

Hence: the intervention might indeed be necessary in one context, but not in another. This gets complicated by the fact that the American context tends to dominate the others, so I'd suggest that even the Europeans would benefit from our intervention in particular ways. But I can see how it might not be seen as anything like an urgent priority.

2) this differential sense of "the discipline" also extends to individuals, even those based within the same national context. Again, not a new revelation, but one made much more concrete by agonizing conversations about Frodo, and about job searches, and horror stories about "blind" peer review processes, etc. A senior figure who acts as a patron for one of us (for Boromir, in this case -- yes, we pretty much all have LotR names too, because we're all big fantasy/SF geeks, and proud of it too) is regarded by others of us as incoherent and unproductive. When one entered the discipline also plays a role; Frodo's intervention was important for scholars who tried to get jobs in the late 1990s, but maybe not so important for those who were established earlier. And how one evaluates Frodo has a lot to do with one's view of the discipline, and one's view of what would have happened in the discipline absent that intervention.

Simply referring to "the discipline," as we all do, does not mean that we are referring to the same thing. There are some family resemblances between my view of the discipline and, say, Boromir's (who somewhat disingenuously claims not be concerned with the discipline, but when you engage him in conversation you discover that he has obviously spent a lot of time thinking deeply about these issues). I would submit that it takes real effort not to operate with a view of the discipline, and not to spend time thinking about the sociology of knowledge in one's discipline; I know people who try to go on pretending that knowledge is produced in a decontextual manner, and that they can simply think their own thoughts in the privacy of their own office or their own classroom or in their own little circle of intimates, and ignore the way that the discipline shapes even the most private of reflections. Not in a totalizing way, of course, but in a rather profound way all the same.

Let me be a little more specific here. By "the discipline" I mean a particular configuration of social relations and network connections between scholars, journals, and universities/institutes/think tanks (there are a few that are important to my discipline). Such a configuration is composed, as all such configurations are according to my relational analytic, of the ongoing practices by which cultural resources are deployed, (re)imagined, and utilized. The content of those resources is the intellectual content of the papers and articles and books that we produce, together with the standards for evaluating scholarship which sometimes don't show up in our work explicitly. So to speak of "the discipline" at any one point in time is to take a snapshot of those social arrangements, emphasizing certain connections rather than others, in standard ideal-typical fashion; when we do this as practitioners we are arresting social processes in order to achieve some goal, and when we do it as analysts we are tracing that arrestation in a grounded empirical manner.

What follows? Well, for one thing, it makes no sense to say that "the discipline" causes anything or generates any outcomes. One could make the "structural selectivity" argument, and claim that the structure of the discipline at any one point in time affects the knowledge that can be legitimately produced (i.e. find its way into print in one of the major journals, and start to shape the general debate), but this reification of the patterns of social relations in question ignores the ongoing (re)production of those social relations in practice, and thus eliminates the possibility that the discipline might be reconfigured by any particular intervention into it. (This is the same argument as the claim that capitalism generates capitalist policies, or that the anarchic structure of the international system generates policies that sustain anarchy, and it's just as tautological if pressed to extremes.) "Structures" don't do anything, but practices do.

Case in point: at this conference a colleague offered her discussant comments on two sociology-of-the-discipline papers, and commented that the narrowing of theoretical discourse in the field had a lot to do with the narrow-minded people running a particular, top-ranked journal that often sets the standard for "good" work. A member of that journal's editorial advisory board, who was sitting in the audience, berated my colleague, calling her professionally unethical and generally presenting a more decontextualized view of knowledge production -- i.e. the dominant self-legitimating narrative of those in the discipline's center at this point in time. This policing -- or what a senior colleague who has been a great inspiration for the Fellowship (is he Elrond? Gandalf? I forget) calls "the disciplining of the discipline" -- is the thing that has effects, and does so in particular situations rather than in general.

The point here is that to speak of "the discipline" is to engage in an active process of construction, by which particular aspects of the mass of stuff that we all experience in our daily lives as academics gets separated out and held up as important. And the sort of work that one produces depends, I think, in large measure on how one's own conception of "the discipline" and one's role within it interacts with the conceptions held and promulgated by others. This is not an "ideational" claim; I am not saying that simply thinking about the discipline in a certain way can change the fate of one's article at a major "gatekeeping" journal. Social relations are intersubjective rather than subjective or classically objective, so they can be discovered by individuals as though they were simply part of the environment, even though we remain internal to those relations and may in fact be contributing to their (re)production without being aware of this. And there is no possible final account of "the discipline" or even of particular parts of it; there is only local consensus formed either through conversation about the issue or through more or less authoritative deployments (for instance, in intro field survey courses in graduate school -- even though these typically leave the sociology of the discipline by the wayside).

But even in the absence of consensus, discussions about the discipline help us to locate ourselves, and also help us to target our interventions at some part of the overall patterns of social relations that surrounds us -- and out of which knowledge is produced. This is important, IMHO, because the dominant discussions in the discipline -- the ones that show up in the pages of major journals, and dominate the intellectual/substantive component of major conferences -- are, whether we like it or not, the primary orientation for our thinking. We are in our particular disciplines for a reason, and that discipline has a specific history and a set of contexts into and out of which one can legitimately speak. In order to publish, or to appear on conference programs, one needs to work through some of those spaces. And if the dominant conversations shift too far away from your work, you run the risk of no longer having any way to reach an audience -- and also the risk that space for your work will be all but eliminated, leaving you a forgotten relic unable to have conversations with anyone else in the discipline, because they no longer have the conceptual and analytical tools to understand what you are saying. There's the fate worse than death: complete isolation.

This is why talk about the discipline, and the sociology of the discipline, strikes me as an important product of conferences. Perhaps the most important part. If one ignores the discipline, one gets passed by, or maybe directly policed.

3) at this conference I also discovered that not everyone thinks about panel presentations as part of a status game, or as something that could in principle be scored competitively. I have always understood panels as opportunities to score points, make a name for oneself, cut a figure in the room and maybe leave a lasting impression, and I have always thought that one did this largely by engaging and arguing with the arguments offered by others on the panel or in the audience. At no time have I really considered a panel an opportunity to have a conversation with anyone -- it's configured in a way that makes this very problematic as long as "the panel" is ongoing. (One can also use a panel as an opportunity to locate people with whom one would like to have a longer, more leisurely conversation afterwards, but this seems to me a strangely inefficient way of connecting people. Why not skip the panel and go straight to the discussion?) Panels as instruments for producing prestige makes sense to me; I grasp those rules and can generally play that game. Panels as point-scoring? Same logic. And the distance between point-scoring and offering arguments that engage the other's work is very little, I think; engagement does involve scoring points, finding salient agreements and disagreements, and so forth. Such an engagement might be started in a panel setting, but in my experience that happens rarely.

[Perhaps relevant aside: part of our discussion about this issue involved the fact that Strider and I, in particular, are very demanding in our rules of engagement. Neither of us tends to suffer fools gladly, so to speak, and we tend not to be very charitable when offering a question or comment to an established figure in the discipline -- if they're established, they ought to a) be able to defend their arguments and b) want to do so in a relatively sophisticated way. If they are so little invested in their arguments that they don't care to defend them, why did they articulate them in the first place? Not that I am suggesting that authors have some kind of privileged relationship to their arguments, or that they ought to feel personally attacked when someone criticizes the argument; rather, it's the opposite: one offers arguments so that one can be critiqued and engaged. Substance -- whether empirical or theoretical -- is a vehicle for the really important stuff, which is the kind of spiritual connexion that engenders intersubjective worlding and the contingent blending of souls. The prerequisite is that the substance has to be of high enough quality that the interlocutors don't get hung up on the technical details of the argument, since that stops the flow and terminates the connexion. That's how it works for me, at any rate: interlocutors have to be coherent enough that the process can flow on unimpeded. I can't get past that, and I see no reason to try, unless one is talking to one's students. More on that below.]

But some members of the Fellowship made the argument last night (and well into the morning) that panels were instead opportunities to connect to what a speaker is trying to say, and then to help her or him to clarify that and make the argument tighter. Panel as pedagogy, essentially: treat one's interlocutors in the panel setting as generously as one would treat one's students. I am somewhat sympathetic to this point of view, especially if one is addressing the work of younger scholars while occupying the discussant role. But as an audience-member confronted with an utterly incoherent combination of claims, this demands an extraordinary amount of patience and charity. (Boromir argued that it was actually self-serving too, inasmuch as there is always something worth hearing -- something that you need to hear -- in every argument. I am not convinced of this, having sat through many panels where the approximate level of interesting content was quite near absolute zero, either because of total incoherence or because of the conflation of science and politics to the point where a rant becomes a piece of scholarship. Call me crazy, but I do not see the value in either incoherent mishmashes or political screeds. I see neither scholarly value nor moral value there, and hence I see little or nothing to engage with productively.)

I am not that patient in a panel setting unless I'm discussing a younger scholar's work, and virtually never as an audience member asking a question, although I can be and usually am that patient in the classroom. But that has to do, IMHO, with a certain pattern of authority relations that are implicated in the classroom setting; I can dismantle aspects of my professorial authority only inasmuch as I can never escape that subject-position fully because I keep re-occupying it at the conclusion of every class session. I think that there are significant differences between the classroom and a panel, or between a mentor-mentee relationship and the reader-author relationship that is mediated by a piece of writing. Panels, I think, aren't for pedagogy. Neither are articles. Books, maybe -- some books. But written work is largely about research, which I understand as the systematic application of value-premises, and panels are about status, performance, and argument between putative equals. So why do I need to be patient and charitable? You made your claim; here's my criticism; now respond in kind, or go home.

For me, at any rate, a conference should be organized around the intellectual content of the papers presented. Engaging with that content, and having meaningful exchanges about it, is the point of the conference. But this rarely, if ever, happens during a panel session, because of the posturing and status-generation. A second aspect of a conference is to throw people together in close proximity to the center of the discipline, thus more or less engendering or encouraging conversations about the sociology of the discipline. (Not that any of this is deliberate, I think, except in the case of a really well-organized conference in which research communities have threads of panels to follow through the program, and ample opportunity to eat and drink and snack together between sessions.) And a third function is to, in effect, find students and interlocutors in places other than one's home institution: grad students in other programs, colleagues going down the same pathway, and so forth.

So this all comes back to engagement with one another, and to the formation and strengthening and modification of the social contexts out of which knowledge is produced. The sociology of the discipline is a useful tool for advancing this goal, I think, but it's a means rather than an end. Done well, it can remove obstacles to connexion, and promote the kind of self-reflection that loosens things up and gets spirit flowing again. But ultimately, we social scientists generate connexions by engaging in conversations about stuff, whether that stuff be empirical or conceptual/theoretical. Privileging the sociology of the discipline, or at least giving it increased prominence, might further these kinds of conversations, but I'd hate for it to become all that we ever talked about. That strikes me as its own kind of trap, and its own kind of dead end. Without conceptual and empirical work, what would we have to be self-reflexive about?

Also, we had a decent talk about what "postcolonial anger" was. I still don't think it's important to an evaluation of po-co work, but that's a different entry altogether.

[Posted with ecto]

Life After Theory

2004-09-06T11:45:00.000-04:00

A colleague forwarded me the link to this article, which describes the decline of "theory" in the American academy. I must admit mixed feelings about the author's diagnosis, which berates left-leaning academics for adopting a theoretical language wildly divorced from the language of everyday people, and argues that this created "a power vacuum in the kind of holistic intellect that unites political commitments and practical goals with a whole vision of the good life."

On the one hand, he's correct about a lot of the garbage that goes on under the name of "Theory" (the capitalization is important, methinks), which largely involves re-coding things under the rubric of one or another set of putatively objective categories of analysis. The turn in the social sciences and humanities that regarded a redescription of a text using the categories of race or class or gender to masquerade as a reputable analysis of that same text was deeply problematic, I think. And in some quarters, notably in "post-colonial theory" and in some parts of the study of globalization [I am limiting myself to things I know better, which are in the social sciences], not to mention the upsurge in "rational choice theory" and other formal modeling exercises, we get this conflation and confusion still: as though recoding were scholarship. It isn't, especially when the recoding is called "political" to the extent that the author has a clear agenda that she or he is pursing against the work or situation being analyzed. There is a name for this exercise: knowledge politics, i.e. political struggle by other means. What it is not is scholarship.

[Clarification: not all academics operating with categories like race, class, gender, rationality, etc. are engaged in this sort of thing. Teasing out the gendered practices embedded in some social policy can be very revealing and insightful, and an analysis of the rational calculations at play in some delimited social setting can also generate some helpful insight. However, there is a thin but vital line between using one's assumptions to generate insights, and using one's analysis to convince the audience that one's initial assumptions were somehow transcendentally correct. There are gendered gestures and deployments in Huckleberry Finn and contemporary welfare policy, to be sure. And calling attention to them can help to improve our understanding of the phenomenon by generating novel insights. But I fail to see how the continual demonstration of the gendered, or racist, or post-colonial nature of things counts as a finding. It's an assumption of the analysis, and pretending that it's a conclusion makes your "scholarship" into a giant tautology. Lots of work in "Theory" did this and still does this, largely because it conflates theory-as-analytical-tool with Theory -As-The-Truth-Of-Things-Revealed-To-The-Elect.]

On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with the idea that academics should be trying to remain too close to everyday discourse, or that left-leaning academics should be producing scholarship that somehow advances a leftist political agenda. I know that the right does this, and it's just as bad when they do it; I for one am not willing to adopt that particular tactic in order to resist them. "Left-wing scholarship," like "right-wing scholarship," strikes me as a contradiction in terms, and I am not interested in producing scholarship that serves merely to advance a narrow political agenda. When operating as a public intellectual -- or what the author of the piece calls a "linking intellectual" -- it might be okay to draw on one's scholarship in order to support a position. But that drawing-on is not itself "scholarship"; it is politics. Noble, perhaps, and praiseworthy, but not scholarship, and not what academics should (IMHO) be primarily concerned with.

The author of the piece seems to agree, and I can give hesitant approval to his conclusion: "The problem of theory was never the philosophy it drew on but the absence of a public forum to criticize it, expand it for intelligent adults, and correct it. The return of the linking intellectuals -- adept in philosophical thought but not beholden to the academy -- could restore a heritage of speaking to the public about the professors, and, more importantly, could get the professors speaking honestly and intelligibly to us." Two caveats. First, linking intellectuals have to be based outside of the academy (political journalists, perhaps) and shouldn't be given (for instance) named chairs in the study of particular regions or religions, and shouldn't be teaching classes! Second, I am skeptical that this kind of activity can "get the professors speaking honestly and intelligibly to us." Thinking follows its own course, and those of us with academia as a vocation simply have to follow the path of thinking wherever it leads us. There's nothing dishonest about theory (although there is something disquieting about its transformation into Theory and its subsequent use as a gospel to preach from in the classroom), and "intelligibly" is over-rated as a virtue when and if the audience is, well, uneducated. Just because someone outside of my field or outside of the academy can understand something that I write does not, in my opinion, mean that the piece is any more or less valuable as scholarship. Different criteria apply.

A third caveat: linking intellectuals, or the activity of linking theoretical thinking and scholarship with ordinary everyday discourse, is a form of pedagogy. That kind of writing is, or should be, more akin to what goes on in the classroom than it is to "scholarship" narrowly construed. Pedagogy-at-a-distance, perhaps, because it is mediated by textual presentation and the like, but it is or should be pedagogy nonetheless, inasmuch as it aims to challenge assumptions and provoke thinking instead of simply reporting findings.

Best line in the piece: "Gilles Deleuze loved surfing." Loved that.

[Posted with ecto]