Abstract thinking and “irrelevant” research

Hey everybody. Thanks for all your comments about the session we hosted as part of International Week 2008 at the University of Alberta. We thought we should post the text of the talk we gave... Sorry it took so long, we just needed to translate it from talk to text. ...

How abstract thinking and “irrelevant” research makes the world better for everyone.
Heidi Bickis and Ondine Park
Presented on January 31, 2008. Sponsored by: The Sociology Graduate Students Association


Abstract: Is academic work engaged? Can we understand it in any way as activism? Or is it just irrelevant, esoteric and abstract to the point of meaninglessness? In this session, we make the case that there is value in what is often pejoratively labelled the "Ivory Tower" and that the supposed gap between the academic world and the "real" world is not as vast as it may seem.


This session is part of a number of ongoing conversations that we have been finding ourselves having or witnessing for the last few months about academia, activism and the Arts; about the notions of relevance, usefulness, and being able to explain or justify ourselves; and also about the difficulty of learning, reading, writing, and the crises of being a grad student or not. As they often do, we've found these conversations overlapping in many ways so we'll talk a little bit more about them in a moment to give you some background about how we came to this session. But, we feel that as this session is a particular moment in a series of conversations, and not a conclusion, we'd like to keep it at that level of a conversation--we are not aiming to say something definitive and we don't expect the outcome of the session will be a position that we'll all agree upon, maybe we'll each leave disagreeing with everybody else. But, the process itself is important, we think. If we have a goal for this session, it is to provoke and in a way make messy by opening up questions. And, we're open to counter-provocations.

Since it's a conversation, we invite and encourage each of you to participate: if you'd like to participate by actively engaging in the discussion towards the end of the session, we welcome that. But we also appreciate and acknowledge your participation in just being here with us. Sometimes we can impact a conversation just by our presence.

The way we'll proceed is by way of provocations. We're hoping this'll help to generate some interesting discussion. It is also a way to explicitly enact our own position of provoking and questioning. And, of course, this provocation begins with the title of the session itself, which we hope you found to be provoking!

First, we'll tell you a little bit more about a couple of those many conversations we have found ourselves either having or being influenced by. Next, we'll raise 4 provocations, which we’ll work through. After that, we'll summarise where we feel our own conversation is at the moment. Then we'll open it up for about an hour of discussion that'll take us to the end of our time today.

Background context

Arts Dialogue
One of the conversations we have been witnessing is The Critical Arts Dialogue currently underway as part of the University of Alberta's Centenary. The Dialogue features a series of lectures and forums that address the role of the Faculty of Arts within the University, one conversation within a wider Centenary conversation about the University of Alberta itself. The website explains that the purpose of the dialogue is: “to reflect upon the Faculty of Arts’ past, its current academic positioning, and to deliberate on intellectually vibrant headings that will guide our endeavours in years to come.” The dialogue is presented as an “opportunity to reflect critically on the academic foundations of what we do as members of this Arts Faculty, to assess our current scholarly predicament, and to think seriously about where we want to be in the next decades. "

For us, the Dialogue is both exciting and worrisome. On the one hand it offers us, as members of the Arts Faculty, the opportunity to come together as a kind of community (something that doesn't necessarily happen very often) and reflect collectively about the role and place of the Arts. The speakers and discussions have offered a range of positions on the subject, given us much to think about, which is in itself an important practice. We expect the same from the presentations that are still to come. On the other hand, this whole process reminds us of the precariousness of the Arts' position, the constant demand for usefulness and relevance, in short, an exercise in legitimation. Finally, one can't help but be forced to confront the limitations of a dialogue...there are more interests their our own at stake.


Cultural Studies & SSHRC
Another major event that also figured into our considerations was a concerned discussion that occurred within the Canadian cultural studies community sparked off by an article in the National Post written by Robert Fulford this past October. A number of different issues emerge from this article but, amongst them, Fulford claimed two things: (1) that the largest Canadian public-funding body for social sciences and humanities research (called SSHRC) is irresponsible with tax-payers' money, is insufficiently monitored, and supports ridiculous research. He de-legitimized the most important funding source for most Canadian social sciences and humanities scholars and all of the research it funds. And (2), Fulford derided the work of cultural studies scholar Jes Battis who studies popular and queer youth culture and media, arguing that his work is an example of the "current level of research in the humanities," i.e. that it’s marked by the "chronic irrelevance that afflicts much recent academic work," and that scholars of cultural studies and history "believe…that there’s nothing too trivial to study." He suggests that this kind of work should not be publicly funded. Fulford was particularly contemptuous of Battis's use of queer theory.

There were a number of responses to the article, including an excellent one by Battis himself. But we want to focus on two responses in particular. The public response by SSHRC and an internal debate within the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies.

SSHRC President Chad Gaffield wrote-in a response letter to the National Post explaining in what ways SSHRC is legitimate, focusing on (1) justifying the evaluation process of grant applications by expert panels and (2) defending the relevance of social science and humanities research, including cultural studies, suggesting, for example, that what may seem irrelevant can often turn out to be crucial. (He uses the example of Middle Eastern studies, which not too long ago was widely seen as an esoteric and basically irrelevant area of research (I think he was talking about within the North American context). Then, he points out, the use and relevance of such studies became readily apparent on Sept. 11, 2001.)

The Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, in which we are both somewhat involved, engaged in an internal conversation responding to the National Post article. In the end, a couple of decisions to take action were made, amongst which the most surprising for us two was that as an association, we ought to work harder to better communicate to the community the relevance and importance of cultural studies research.

Although both SSHRC & the cultural studies folks in particular did make gestures towards more complex, nuanced and significant responses, both of us ultimately found both the SSHRC and the cultural studies' responses to the Fulford article to be disappointing. We felt like "we" (if we can speak of a social sciences and humanities "we" of researchers and teachers) were justifying ourselves according to virulent, narrow-minded and inappropriate criteria to be "relevant", "useful" and "legitimate"--and that somehow, this legitimation comes straightforwardly from "the community" and the positive, explicit benefits to "the community" that should directly result from research. Fulford took the (not uncommon) position that there is an obvious measure of value, usefulness and legitimacy that anyone who’s not an academic, who are not, in his words, "gormless, in the sense of foolish, lacking sense and discernment" can readily and authoritatively see. SSHRC and the Canadian cultural studies’ response to better try to communicate our importance seemed to us to be missing the point: For us, in our initial conversations, it’s not about dutifully answering to such calls for self-justification, but to question the very foundations of his attack.

Our disappointment was made worse by the recognition of the external and material conditions in which academic labour occurs, and the necessity, within the constraints of the current context, to constantly have to justify our work if we are going to be able to meet the material conditions of survival whilst doing our work.

Provocations

Now, we'd like to launch into our provocations to try to think through (or maybe 'think otherwise') some of the issues that we feel compelled to address. Let's start with this one: The value of the following statement is not as obvious as it seems:

Academic work should contribute to and be engaged with the community.

We are throwing out a statement like that because we feel it summarises the thrust of some of the conversations that initially brought us to this session. For us, the phrase speaks to something of the value given to direct usefulness and the importance of being 'active'. This sort of discourse seems to be predominant and increasingly the measure of legitimacy for academic work and the academy itself. So, using this statement as a beginning provocation, we would like to raise the following questions:

What is academic work? What is community? What does it mean to contribute or be engaged? And, what does 'should' mean in such a phrase as "academic work should contribute to the community"?

1. What is 'academic work'?
The first question we would like to consider is: What is 'academic work'? For the purposes of this discussion, we want to follow along the lines of both the dictionary and common sense definition of "academic". That is to say by 'academic work' we mean abstract and impractical research that occurs specifically within an institutional framework (i.e. the university) rather than intellectual work in general (e.g. in think tanks, private organisations, NGOs.) We also recognize that academic work can potentially be divided by that which is obviously applicable (e.g. policy research, community development studies) and that which appears wholly irrelevant (perhaps literature, history, classics, social theory, pure maths). But, our position is that although this may be the case, the value of both is not premised on their 'usefulness.'

Part of this common characterization of academic work rests on three assumptions: That it is (1) isolated—disconnected from the “real world”, (2) esoteric—limited in scope to those who work within, and (3) irrelevant---it doesn't “do” anything. We would tend to agree and disagree with all of those to a certain extent.

What becomes of interest is how this characterization is taken up as both a defence and critique of academic work. Perhaps, two examples will illustrate what we mean:

1) In a recent column in the New York Times, Stanley Fish, a Humanities professor, argues that humanities are irrelevant and useless, but that is, in fact, the point: “The humanities are their own good”:

Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good (Fish 2008a, para 12).

What do you make of that thought? Is Fish going too far? What struck us was the resonance of that statement with a claim, (of which we were reminded in the Cultural Studies discussion,) that was made by Ted White, former Alliance MP (2004 for North Vancouver), that humanities are just personal "passtimes" (sic).

2) Another way to frame the question is around what Michael Gibbons in The New Production of Knowledge presents as two modes of knowledge production. Mode 1: no apparent goal; method: curiosity-driven; academic interests; codes of practice within a specific disciplinary process. In Mode 2: knowledge production is guided by its usefulness to someone and based on a calculable usefulness in clearly demarcated strategic contexts (see Ang para 9). Mode 2 is now the norm. In an essay arguing for the relevance of Cultural Studies, Ien Ang argues that we should accept the prevalence of Mode 2 and show how a discipline like Cultural Studies can function within this Mode. Her argument is that we need to reframe the idea of usefulness. For her, usefulness should

lie in opening up new questions rather than providing answers to existing ones. ... the definition of the useful or the relevant will have to be stretched beyond the level of immediacy. We will have to demonstrate that keeping questions open is actually useful, that thinking more complexly and reflexively about issues is actually practical, if not here and now then in the longer term, in light of social sustainability for example (Ang, para 15).

We ask, does this go far enough? Isn't it bending to the will of Mode 2?

2. What is 'the community'?
So, having messied up what ‘academic work’ might mean, we’d like to turn now to the idea of ‘the community’. Again we suggest that the meaning and purpose of identifying ‘the community’ or even ‘a community’ is not as obvious and straightforward as may at first appear--and especially not as obvious as it is often used. First of all, perhaps the most obvious question is: Who is the community? And, relatedly, who is ‘the public’ or ‘the general public’? Who determines who counts as a community? Today, community and community-partners can often mean businesses, corporations, stakeholders and consumers. Is this the community we should be responsible to, responding to and giving to? Is the community something related to government or is it anything-but-the-government? Is saying community the same as saying ‘citizens’? And if so, ‘citizens’ understood how? As ‘taxpayers’? which taxpayers? Community groups? which ones should be given precedence? Whose values should we be taking up if our responsibility is to ‘the community’? For us, it's clear that not all of these 'communities' hold the same status.

So, why are we challenging the notion of the community? If we believe in provoking rather than closing off, isn’t ‘the community’ something we can leave messy and indeterminate? It seems to us that a clear understanding of the difficulty of positing a ‘community’ matters because the particular community to which we understand ourselves to have to be responsible changes the nature of our relationship & role vis-à-vis that particular definition of community. There will be a difference between serving a vague community of consumers vs. a group defined, for example, according to exclusion or oppression. That is, ‘who’ is the community changes the nature of ‘what’ the community wants, sees as valuable, relevant and important.

At the end of the day, it seems to us that we need to problematise the 'groupness' and presuppositions that form the basis of any claim to community when we are being asked to contribute to the community. What kind of 'common senses' or assumptions, abilities, exclusions are presupposed? In what way does any grouping come to be constituted or recognized? In what way does that matter for us as academics? In what way should we matter for them?


3. What does it mean to 'contribute' or 'be engaged'?
If we do messy up the idea of ‘the community’, then in what specific ways are we to contribute to or be engaged with the community?

First, perhaps we need to re-think the Ivory Tower. Academics are not separate beings living and working outside the "real world". They (we) live in the community, make up part of the public, watch TV, read the newspaper, shop at the local grocery store. Moreover, let us remember that the university is a public institution; professors are civil servants. We're already working for the public. And, to borrow from movements in Cultural Studies, isn't it the case that anything we do is always already political?

Secondly, how actively does academic work have to engage with specific issues, groups, etc. before it counts as 'contributing'; can teaching be understood as contributing; can research that doesn't specifically address a community's concern be considered contributing?

Thirdly, and we think most significantly, in thinking about contribution and engagement, it seems important to ask “to what demands?” and “whose demands?”

French Philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard offers one way for thinking through these questions. For Lyotard, the process of thinking, reading, and learning is an encounter with the unknown. That is to say, you write what you don't know how to write, and think what you don't know how to think. To connect this idea to our discussion, we would argue that the demand to be engaged or for a contribution is a demand for an answer. And an answer asks for research to proceed towards what is already known.

Writing about Lyotard and pedagogy, Pateman argues

..the academy has an obligation to defend thought and this obligation is a 'pure fact' of duty. The patient politics ... that has been invoked does not pretend to be cannot pretend to be, a politics of social change. It is a utopian politics with no goal (paradox, of course). Its responsibility is to resist thought becoming a function of capitalism and bureaucratism (Pateman, 56).

We want to ask about this demand for contribution. Who or what is it for? The present, the future, the government, a corporation, private donor, the discipline...?

Our concern is, that the notion of a contribution or engagement risks subordinating “research” and “learning” to a particular end, which contradicts the nature of research in the first place.


4. How should we understand 'should'?
Finally, how should we understand 'should'?

Is the sharing of academic work, in terms of teaching and research, an 'obligation'? If so, what is the nature of this obligation -- is it as civil servants? as a social/moral/other duty? Are we obligated to make people learn or simply to help learning occur? Are there inflections of elitism in this 'should' (a kind of noblesse oblige), or conversely, a business-model-like accountability?

To whom is this 'should' performed? Lyotard argues that the obligation is to think i.e. it is not to a someone, but to thought itself.

In what direction does this 'should' operate? -- is it the responsibility of academic work to make itself available and relevant to Others? And how relevant, and how explicitly relevant? Or, should “the community” have a responsibility to understand what we’re doing? Shouldn’t the community recognize that what we do is towards an unknown, or for some sense of a future?


Our concluding argument

Now, having provoked the heck out of the notions of ‘academic work’, ‘community’, ‘contribute/engage’ and ‘should’, (and hopefully to some extent humourously,) we’d like to return to our abstract for final remarks before we open it up for discussion.

We’re making two, apparently contradictory claims today. On the one hand, we're making the case that academic work is always-already engaged. For one thing, we as individual academics live within communities and within the larger society: the myth of the Ivory Tower is really only a myth. We are not isolated but rather we live everyday, embodied lives. While our work may sometimes be abstract, we never are (and never can be) entirely abstracted. And, moreover many of us are actively engaged in various capacities culturally, politically and otherwise. Secondly, the question of whether it’s possible to abstract ‘the outside world’ from academic work seems to us to be rather open-ended, although we tend to think that that too is a myth. So, then, we have to re-frame 'engaged' on a number of dimensions.

So, that's our first claim: that academic work is engaged. Seemingly contradictorily, we're also saying that academic work is (often) irrelevant, and that this irrelevance is valuable. If we recall Lyotard’s suggestion to ‘think towards the unknown’, then relevance is clearly not the relevant issue. We argue that academic work SHOULD be abstract and esoteric (maybe not always but sometimes) if it's going to address something more than immediate and interested issues. Therefore, we need to rethink what we mean by relevance and think academic work's usefulness lies in opening up new questions, not just giving answers -- questioning presuppositions rather than answering based on existing presuppositions.

Thus, there SHOULD be a gap but it's a specific gap: our fundamental work must be able to question everything. That requires a gap, an orientation to the unknown and potentially unknowable.

We'd like to end with two final provocations:

1. If we really are irrelevant, why are academics amongst the ones who are subjected to surveillance and political violence in situations of, for example, a totalitarian, destabilised or changing political regimes?

2. Is it not the case that academia fundamentally both legitimates and undermines the State?--to the actual glory or potential peril of the State? That it is not our position of weakness that we must explain and justify but rather our position of (actual or potential) vast power and strength that must be contained?

References

• Ien Ang. 2005. 'Who needs cultural research?' Retrieved from Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes website http://www.chcinetwork.org/angfv.html.
  
• Judith Butler. 1997. 'Merely cultural.' Social Text, Fall/Winter, 52-53: 265-177.
  
• Canadian Association of Cultural Studies: internal correspondence amongst members.
  
• Stanley Fish. 2008a. 'Will the humanities save us?' The New York Times, Jan 6. Retrieved from http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/will-the-humanities-save-us/
  
• Stanley Fish. 2008. 'The uses of the humanities, part two.' The New York Times, Jan 13. Retrieved from http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/the-uses-of-the-humanities-part-two/.
  
• Robert Fulford. 2007. 'Lex Luthor hearts Superman: Your tax dollars at work.' National Post, Oct 13. 
  
• Chad Gaffield. 2007. 'Building understanding: Our best investment for the future.' National Post, Oct. 16 [on-line response].
  
• Jean-François Lyotard. 1997. 'The general line: for Gilles Deleuze' in Postmodern fables, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  
• Matthew Pateman. 2000. 'Lyotard's patient pedagogy.' Parallax 6(4): 49-57.
  
• Max Weber. 2004. 'Science as a vocation,' translated by Hans H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills in Sociological writings, edited by Wolf Heydebrand. New York: Continuum. (Original work from 1918-1919.)
  

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