Category Archives: Favourite Thinkers

Elections as inference machines

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bbElection results are wonderful things for generating piles of interpretation, since they are so informationally thin  (they only tell you how many people voted for each candidate in particular places, not why, or who they were, or anything else). Where would social science be without the secret ballot? But election results do provide just enough information to set-off all sorts of inferential flights of fancy, supported by waves of supplementary polling and survey evidence of different sorts. This might be one of the more important things that elections do for democratic politics – they generate deliberation after the fact, if not so much before! Getting your interpretation to stick is itself a political strategy, of course. The meaning of election results is nothing if not theoretically-overdetermined, one might say – give someone an election result, and they can use it to confirm their own favourite theory of what is going on in the world just now. It is even possible, for example, for some people to interpret Donald Trump’s election victory, secured quite legitimately by winning fewer votes than his opponent, but winning those votes in the right places, as “an unmistakeable rejection of a political establishment and an economic system that simply isn’t working for most people.” Never mind.

Anyway, on occasions like these, I tend to find myself thinking that I should either re-read, finish, or read for the first time certain things that I have kicking around the house, things like this:

Hannah Arendt, ‘Truth and Politics’, in Between Past and Future.

Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times.

Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote.

Jan-Werner Muller, ‘Real Citizens‘, Boston Review.

Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts.

Nick Clarke, Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, Gerry Stoker, ‘Anti-politics and the Left’, Renewal, 24, (2).

David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

David Slater

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I was sad to hear that David Slater has passed away. In a parallel universe, we would have been colleagues, if only the University I worked for way back when had had the intelligence to hire David when they had the chance. I have always found him to be one of the most compelling critical thinkers in and around geography. He is among the few people to have written thoughtfully about the geographical resonances of democratic theory. His argument about ‘learning from other regions‘ was both a crucial moment in the reception of postcolonial thought in human geography, and remains highly relevant in the context of current debates about southern theory and decoloniality. The very first thing I ever read by him, when I was an undergraduate, on economism in development theory, remains in my memory as one of the smartest things I have ever read, a model of critical analysis, unashamed of its theoretical sophistication, to which we perhaps should all aspire.

 

Bite Size Realism

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“So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.”

Niccolò Machiavelli, 1517, The Discourses.

What does Truth have to do with Politics?

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lbjhkwrHere’s a thought, from Hannah Arendt’s 1971 essay ‘Lying in Politics’, to orient one’s analysis and thinking about political excitement in the UK this past week or so (actually the whole essay helps, as does ‘Truth and Politics’ in Between Past and Future, 1968):

“We are free to change the world and to start something new in it. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – not just to statements or propositions in order to express agreement or disagreement, to our organs of perception and cognition – no action would be possible; and action is of course the very stuff politics are made of.

Hence, when we talk about lying, and especially about lying among men, let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness. Moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it disappear.”

 

Bite Size Theory

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“Thinkers tell stories to themselves and others about who they are as intellectuals. They are then strongly motivated to do intellectual work that will, inter alia, help to express and bring together the disparate elements of these stories. Everything else being equal, they will gravitate toward ideas that make this kind of synthesis possible.”

Neil Gross, 2008, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, University of Chicago Press.

Bite Size Theory

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“To conceive of intellectuals as professionals is to put critical thought in social context. To put thought in context is to accuse it of self-interest; that is what social context usually means. But self-interested thought, from the point of view of the ideal, is no longer thought at all. And by the same criterion, it is certainly not critical or radical or adversarial thought. This is the fatal logic of the intellectuals’ disappearance: the more intellectuals are seen as grounded in society, the less they are seen as truly critical or oppositional, hence the less they are themselves. The less they are themselves, the more they can only seem to be glimpsed, for the last time, in the act of vanishing.”

Bruce Robbins, 1993, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso).

Bite Size Theory

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“A genre is a loose affectively-invested zone of expectations about the narrative shape a situation will take. A situation becomes-genre, finds its genres of event.”

Lauren Berlant, 2011, ‘Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness’.

Bite Size Theory

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“[O]ne reason why the South African situation became so acute a marker of iniquity in the twentieth century was because it was an extreme example of the way people could be bounded beyond their own volition; into neighbourhoods, into families, into destinies, into lives, and into jails if they resisted. This strand of self-consciousness about borders and boundaries – a negotiation of frontiers and a fear of what lies beyond – is particularly (even if not uniquely) South African.”

Mark Gevisser, 2014, Lost and Found in Johannesburg.

Almost Famous

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jhbThe Sociological Review blog has a series of articles on what it calls Superstar Professors, including commentaries on thinkers such as Zizek, Giddens, and Bauman. There are some interesting thoughts raised in the posts published so far, including reflections on the relationship between MOOCs and academic celebrity, and on the relevance of recent debates in the sociology of ideas (the work of Cimic, Gross, and Baert for example) in accounting for the ‘success’ of certain strands of thought.

There is, though, a rather predictable tone to these pieces, in which the apparent ‘rise’ of ‘star authors’ is taken as a sign of standards of ‘scholarship and intellectual quality’ being undermined by the unfortunate pressures of commerce and the market. It’s actually a recurrent problem of trying to analyse seriously the relationship between ‘thought’ and its conditions, this temptation to fall back on a style of evaluation in which one identifies the instrumental and strategic calculations that shape academic life in an act of disapproving exposure.

I have an amateurish interest in these things, partly related to some current thinking about how to research the living histories of ideas, partly as a more general interest in understanding cultures of theory. Long ago, Murray Low and I wrote a paper in which we tried to conceptualise the relationship between what was then called French Theory and the changing dynamics of academic publishing (in the interim, one might be inclined to extend the analysis to investigating the formation over the last two decades of ‘Continental Philosophy’ as the name for a serious, canonical field of intellectual curiosity, as distinct from a term of abuse). Slightly less long ago, I also did some work on the complex relations between commercial dynamics, public institutions, and cultures of aesthetic evaluation that shaped the formation of a canon of post-colonial African literary writing.

I tend now to think of those projects as part of a wider, long standing interest in understanding the variable formation of public life. One thing I take for granted, on the basis of things learnt from these projects certainly, but it’s also a pretty basic feature of any decent account of the concept of the public sphere, is that the relationship between public life and markets, public life and commercial practices, public life and processes of exchange, is an internal, constitutive, and integral one. Contradictory, no doubt, often tragic in a Habermasian kind of way, but nevertheless, a type of relationship which requires a rather more careful style of analysis than the one provided by simple claims that the standards of intellectual life are menaced by such worldly matters. 

 

 

Bite Size Marxism

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“Ever since Luxemburg put into question the completion of real subsumption by suggesting it was nothing more than a heuristic device Marx employed to totalize capitalism, thinkers outside of Euro-America have, in one way or another, underscored a conception of the social that embodied an uneven mix of practices of prior modes of production alongside the newer innovations of capitalism”

Harry Harootunian, 2015, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism.