Wendy Brown: “Just as nothing is more corrosive to serious intellectual work than being governed by a political programme (whether that of states, corporations, or a revolutionary movement), nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry.”

William Davies quotes Wendy Brown:

Just as nothing is more corrosive to serious intellectual work than being governed by a political programme (whether that of states, corporations, or a revolutionary movement), nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry.

Good point! I do the “unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction” thing, and I don’t think I’m good at politics. Politics requires bargaining and secrecy, neither of which is impossible for me but neither of which I’m particularly good at. I guess that most people don’t enjoy bargaining and secrecy, but it’s the work that you need to put in to do politics. For that matter, reflexivity, critique and self-correction can take some effort too, even though they come naturally.

The tricky thing is that scholarly inquiry requires some politics, and politics requires some scholarly inquiry.

I’ll go through each part.

1. Scholarly inquiry isn’t just about figuring things out. It’s also about communication, explaining to the world. Sometimes it’s pure naked politics, professors making ugly threats to each other to secure publication in a prestigious journal. Other times it’s a pitiful form of cynicism, or journal editors pulling strings, or the use of tame journalists.

But those are just some embarrassing, extreme cases. Small politics comes up all the time. One day in the summer of 1990 I came up with what I knew was the best idea I’d ever had. I wrote it up and sent it to my former Ph.D. adviser, who had some suggestions of his own . . . together we wrote a paper that became a legend in preprint form. We submitted it to a journal, and it took a couple years to come out. Years later, I heard that the journal editor had mistakenly sent it to a reviewer who didn’t know jack about the topic but had a personal grudge against my former adviser. The paper was good enough that the referee couldn’t quite take it down, but he did manage to drag things out. Politics.

And then of course there’s plain old academic politics. Or stuff like this. Or this. Or this. Etc etc.

Anyway, I’m not painting myself as any sort of victim here. Considering everything, academic politics has treated me just fine. I’m just sharing the stories that are familiar to me. Or, to put it another way, even for someone who’s had success, politics has arisen even when I’ve wanted to avoid it. We’re always promoting our ideas, trying to get them out there.

Ok, not always. I guess that dude who proved Fermat’s last theorem just had to prove it, and the rest just followed. But it doesn’t usually work that way.

How does that relate to the Wendy Brown quote? When we want to disseminate scholarly inquiry, we need to do politics—but that’s corrosive to serious intellectual work. And we’ve seen that, from “p less than 0.05” on down. It’s a problem.

2. Politics isn’t just about politics, it also involves serious intellectual work. To the extent that you’re good at pulling those levers, at some point you’ll have to decide where you want to drive that car. I’m a political scientist, but I have very little direct experience with that aspect of the world. It does seem plausible to me what Brown says, that “nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry.” A lack of intellectual integrity can be a superpower in politics just as in academia. So, again, we have this tension, bouncing back and forth between the political action that is necessary for, and tearing apart, scholarly inquiry; and the scholarly inquiry that is necessary for politics.

No further thoughts from me here on this one. I just was struck by that quote from Brown. I’ll have to read her book.