As part of our mandatory training on how to teach freshmen to write like Harper's critics, I attended a session today on writing in other disciplines. Three presenters, three papers, three disciplines: history, political science, and "real science." It's the second one that really got to me.
The speaker began by going through main schools of political theory -- Comp. Politics, American Politics, IR, Political Theory (bracketed as "really practicing philosophy" and "largely irrelevant to the rest of the field") Political science, we learned, begins by taking puzzles and trying to come up with answers to them. The puzzle, as presented, was "Why are pretty girls so stuck-up?"
"I realize that the gendered aspects might constitute something like bias," he goes on, "but it's my presentation." Why are pretty girls so stuck up? Before we get to the question, the literature review, the lens. They might be stuck up for psychological reasons: pretty women were, presumably, pretty babies, and by college they've accumulated decades worth of positive reinforcement, leading to an overinflated and presumably irreversible sense of self-importance. Alternatively, we might turn to critical theory: pretty girls are stuck-up because the terms "pretty" and "stuck-up" are cultural constructs. This option is quickly abandoned, as it would negate the premise of the question. Let's try economics: pretty girls are stuck up because, like anything else, desire operates within a market, and pretty girls have a surplus value. He underlines this twice. "I think there's something to this one," he says.
At this point, the room is beginning to smell blood. Eliding the gendered aspect elides the fact that introductory writing classes are by and large taught by women. More to the point, they're taught by English majors, to whom "discourse" and "critical theory" (and let's go out on a limb here and say "gender") are still pretty active terms. One person raises her hand. "What's the category if a pretty girl is stuck up because she's tired of people calling her out on the street?"
Gender trouble aside, there's little difference between the overarching structure and the framework for a humanities paper -- you begin with a thesis, move through the lit review. Where we got caught up, by contrast, is where our students get stuck -- in a definition of terms. The assumption that you could choose freely between your terms -- skipping critical theory, underlining economics -- glossing over the idea that some levels (gender parity, for instance) for instance, precede and create other levels (say, assuming priority of the market).
We moved on. The point, after all, is not to worry over the frame, but to answer the question. Anyway, skipping over gender mostly just reified the prevailing assumptions in the room -- that is, the *real* differences between the humanities and the social sciences (in a handbag: that quantitative information is both more transparent and more concrete, that culture is by definition relativistic, that you have to read for *something* in order to say anything meaningful about the world, and that we don't hypothesize in science; we stick to observable facts).
All this is absurd, of course, but it gets to why the term "critical theory" would have so little valence in a discussion of how to teach political science. The real point is why "economics" got underlined three times. It's evident in the overtly sexist tone of discussion -- this jump to economics, and the assumption that economics is the only plausible lens for understanding political science, as it's actually practiced in the real world. Of course women are participating in a market. The idea that they aren't is absurd -- because, in the absence of quantifiable information (about how frequently they call you back, how many looks they acquire, how frequently you, in turn, fantasize about tearing off their clothes), there's really nothing to debate. End of discussion.
This gets to what David Graeber talks about in his book on values -- the sense in which economics (and its specter, Saussurean linguistics) are both empty categories, things that you read for, rather than read through). The point being that economics, as a frame, tends to be a means to an end -- the end (a validation of the market) serving first and foremost as a demonstration that the means (the assumption of a market to begin with) is a valid frame of argument. Having just read this and found it to be pretty succinct, I was more than ready to bristle at how quickly "economics" became the key term of the debate.
I digress. What's interesting, mostly,is not just the type of argument (quantitative or not) or the subject of the debate (reading texts, reading graphs, developing algorithms, counting people), but the grounds for the argument that really distinguishes these debates. History papers tend to be more conservative than literature papers in that they take more modest grounds -- they are interested in covering lost territory, not reinventing terms.
Which begs the question -- what do literary papers do? If I were giving this talk, I'd probably talk vaguely about culture, what we do with it, how we're wary of the term, and how it's gotten picked up and dropped over the last thirty or so years. I'd probably talk about it badly. I don't have really solid terms, and am unsure of the territory of the debate.
But maybe, on the other hand, that's what we *do* do -- not map out territory, but set the terms. If history fills in gaps, literary scholarship deals with context and hypotheticals -- the circulation of reform texts, the representation (rather than the treatment) of women, races, political minorities, the way things are said, rather than the content. All these speak to implicit cultural codes, which are only visible when the stakes are quite low.
What literature might offer, in other words, is an insistence on prioritizing *why* a thing would be worth looking at, rather than whether it actually is. It does so, mostly, by choosing topics that have no immediate relevance in the world -- the parsing of codes in mid-century romance novels, the context of book circulation, the political views of authors who are long dead - as rich ground for theorizing ways of reading, categorizing terms, and recontextualizing the assumptions being made.
All this suggests that culture isn't quite as dead as people like to say it is -- and that far from being an empty category, Marxist determinism (through Foucault and Butler, our most articulate readers of power) may actually be *more* basic to what we do than anything else -- an empty category, taken for granted because we're already so ready to read for it. That, as a takeaway point, is both obvious and incredibly reassuring.
