Informal memo I wrote after some discussion with friends and mentors.
Nicos Poulantzas offers this pretty scathing critique of his contemporaries in State, Power, Socialism:
For it is precisely one of the merits of Marxism that, in this and other cases, it thrust aside the grand metaphysical flights called political philosophy - the vague and nebulous theorizations of an extreme generality and abstractness that claim to lay bare the great secrets of History, the Political, the State, and Power. More than ever should this be noted today, when, in the face of the pressing situation in Europe and especially France, we are once again witnessing the typically escapist phenomenon of large-scale systematizations — First and Final Philosophies of Power that, more often than not, regurgitate the stale terminology of the most traditional metaphysics. They do this by cheerfully flooding the concept market with the grandiose terroristic and mystifying Notions of the Despot, the Master, and a few more of the same stamp: from Deleuze to the ‘new’ philosophers, an exhaustive list would be long indeed. The philoosphical fraternity may be enjoying itself in France, but in the end none of this is really very funny. For the genuine problems are too serious and complex to be resolved by pompous and ultra-simplistic generalizations that have never succeeded in explaining anything whatsoever.
If the concept market was “flooded” in 1978, I wonder what Poulantzas would think now. Academia (here, by the way, I’ll refer to social science and humanities scholarship in particular) is in quite a sorry state, with both a massive abundance of theorizing and constant new juxtapositions of terms flowing in every day, lack of any unitary basis on which to view the world here each of these theories might relate to each other, and a poorly-articulated and disorganized response to the Trumpist attacks on universities that can neither articulate what is valuable about scholarship nor how we can stop it and create a more just future for all.
In this blog post, I’ll articulate just one response to this state, trying to define what “good” or “useful” scholarship that works against that deluge of theorization might be. If Poulantzas makes an offhand remark against the unnecessary intellectualism of philosophers — what intellectualism is necessary, if any?
To go about this, let’s pretend for a moment that there’s two kinds of (social) “theory” or “scholarship” — a descriptive kind (can also be called interpretivist variety I guess) and a prescriptive kind. The descriptive kind would encompass pretty much all of what the humanities and social sciences view as scholarship. It tries to make sense of the world and process or metabolize ongoing developments. It also describes a fair amount of scholarship outside of the academy, just general commentary on what’s happening. Joshua Clover [describes] his work this way: “my job is not to tell people what to do, it’s just to try and name things correctly, to try and describe what’s already happening.”
He goes on there to note: “The great theorists are the people who are blockading the pipelines and taking care of the camps. They’re the theorists and they’re figuring out how you do it and what you do to get free and I’m just lucky to have the opportunity to try and think about it and put sentences around it.” So we can call that the prescriptive kind of theory or scholarship, which develops an intervention into some kind of practice, some kind of politics. Clover names theorists of this prescriptive kind in pretty heroic terms, but in the most general sense this would also be political party strategists and congressional staff, the nonprofit “analysts,” the Wall Street bankers that determine that a certain investment should be made given certain market trends.
The prescriptive tends towards the specific and concrete, while the descriptive operates at the level of synthesis, sometimes abstraction, sometimes reduction.
Are these actually distinct, with the university only creating space for the descriptive but not the prescriptive? I think (as Clover suggests) the answer is generally yes. I see two kinds of counter-arguments saying academic scholarship encompasses both. First, many scholars do view their scholarship as prescriptive, as an intervention. Each piece of scholarship is making an intervention that is telling people to do things. Do scholarship a certain way, data scientists should recognize the politics of their work, everyone should recognize the ways rocks have agency, etc. But, for the most part, that prescriptive kind of thought loses any real validity or weight to me because no matter what kind of new politics or relationality or whatever that scholars claim they are excavating — mostly, it is class struggle purely at the level of thought. A professor for instance commented on my precand that she didn’t know if the students I was studying were actually doing endowment “research” given it’s not generalizable for knowledge in the sense that the IRB generally defines research; the highly specific form of info gathering intended to shape activist strategy is rightfully not recognized as intervening in “knowledge” in the abstracted sense the university uses.
There’s of course many cases in which academic scholarship is prescriptive in a concrete and material sense, not only at the level of thought — for instance, corresponding directly with unions, offering an intervention into their existing practice. In these cases, as far as I have observed, the interventions these researchers present to their partners (the prescriptive aspect) is not actually why their work is important to a scholarly community, which would be more on the ramifications of this project for design (the descriptive kind). They are conjoined almost by accident, by the force of circumstance and strategic innovation of researchers; prescriptive theory in this sense happens as a byproduct of research.
Both avenues of integration seem to be trying to bring prescriptive and descriptive theory together in a way that seems to intervene at the wrong level, by changing academic scholarship. Clover says that [here]: “I’ve grown more skeptical about poetry’s role in it or art’s contribution to it, and I’ve grown more skeptical about the university. [...] the alienation of theory and practice, intellectual and manual labor, is a real issue, but it’s the outcome of social domination; it’s sort of a mistake to blame it on the subjects of that domination.” It may be noble and changing an academic discipline or field may be rewarding in its own right, but probably the real task of socialist scholars is to somehow use research to empower work happening outside of that narrow sense of what we call “scholarship.” For that reason (though again, I’m not totally opposed to it and it may be valuable for reasons other than making socialism happen or whatever), I don’t really find the utility of work in translating activist knowledge into the academy — these are mostly attempting to execute class struggle through papers against liberal and right wing scholarship.
All of that being said, theoretically a single piece of writing can do both varieties of “prescriptive”, and “descriptive” even outside of the patterns above. After all, there’s no prescriptive theory that can be articulated outside of a descriptive theory that understands present conditions, even if that’s just common sense or “good sense” knowledge. It’s not that these necessarily have to happen in separate forums or articles or something, just that the university favors descriptive theory but doesn’t favor a prescriptive focus. So somehow the prescriptive aim requires a new set of commitments and motivations in order to have it be realized.
Some big questions are left open here. What are the substantive differences between these two? What methods differentiate them? can the prescriptive variety not just arise immediately from the descriptive — why is it the case that we do in fact see this divide? I’ve no idea what the answers are to these questions but i suspect the word hus “dialectical” is involved. Perhaps “immanent” too. So we could talk about this in our meeting
Socialists’ broad mission involves somehow integrating the descriptive and prescriptive varieties: “philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it”, etc. If a scholar views themself as a socialist, their task is to somehow do descriptive work that not only produces prescriptive stuff along the way, but which actually directly leads to those prescriptive theories (interventions in strategy). Obviously one person cannot simply elaborate every aspect of theory we need, and the ask is not for six-figure tenured professors to direct socialist movements, as Clover seems to warn against. What matters is that we as a movement have a descriptive kind of theory that does eventually integrate with the prescriptive variety, no matter the extent of the autonomy it takes.
That descriptive-powering-prescriptive work doesn’t have to take place in the academy, but it seems that we should ask if that can happen given the academy is already so dispositioned towards that kind of descriptive theory. That is kind of an empirical question (is the academy so overbearing and stifling in political possibility that descriptive theory to power a socialist movement can’t be done), thus I can’t answer it definitively in this non-empirical memo. But at least, if there are conditions to make this work within the academy, I probably have them, given cool mentors and relative freedom in what I’m writing, not very locked in career wise, many years left until the end of my degree, a number of relationships with different movement actors, unburdened at the moment by program requirements, etc.
So that brings us to the real question of: How can these two aims be integrated — without of course, those performing descriptive work necessarily seeing that work as providing credibility to themselves to direct movements? Well, only if the descriptive variety furnishes tools for the prescriptive kind — a kind of precondition for the prescriptive variety that identifies links, connections, trends, etc that the prescriptive theorist can bring tools out of.
So how do we know if it’s furnishing tools for the prescriptive kind? That would be the Big Question — a narrower, if obvious, phrasing of the “what is good scholarship” question I began with. Unfortunately my answers here are not very enlightening. Here’s a few initial answers, though.
First, If it has some kind of conclusive bent; it might not be strictly positivist in its character, but it absolutely is not solely a negative process of critique. So the point is not to show how a given logic is wrong or harmful, but to trace the growing and shifting forms of power that the logic manifests from. I’m reminded of this quote from [SEP]: ”[Immanent critique] does not criticize an ideological form of consciousness because it is immoral or unethical, but because of its epistemic, functional, and genetic features, i.e. for being false or distorted, for contributing to the reproduction of relations of domination, and for arising from within such relations in ways that are relatively immune to self-reflection. Consequently, the critique of ideology does not focus primarily on the injustice or domination found in society, but on the forms of consciousness, culture, practice, habit, and affect that make this injustice or domination seem natural or unavoidable.” (This is also why postmodernism as a premise feels incomplete to me in isolation.)
Second, it can furnish tools for prescriptive theory if it has a kind of broadening impulse, trying to make sense out of capital’s totalizing nature in any specific moment so that the prescriptive variety can respond to it. To be explicit and clear, this is different from generalizability, though they can overlap — generalizability hopes to take findings from one context and assesses to what extent they apply up to a general scale, often through abstractions, whereas I mean here that descriptive theory should constantly be analyzing the connections between still-specific struggles and issues in order to grasp how capital operates in these different settings. It performs an intervention by saying look, this is not just a phenomenon in X context, but something that resonates in Y locality as well. That broadening impulse, in order to continue to bear on the world, still cannot retreat to the general away from the specific. Poulantzas’ criticisms above may be interpreted as a quick turn to the generalizable without a meaningful struggle against the particularisms of a problem within which both real intellectual and political problems arise; so even though I find great meaning in the critique of capitalist totality within Marxism, a totalizing theory in and of itself is not a virtue.
Third, since the prescriptive kind of theory especially is a purely materialist one and the descriptive kind comes from and informs prescriptive kind, even an analysis within the domain of thought/reason/ideology has to surface some materialist connections. For instance, it cannot pretend ideologies manifest independent of material conditions, or that the intervention can be made at the level of thought or in the domain of the academy. For that reason it’s attentive to historical and geographical specificities, etc.
Lastly, it can If it forges relationships with the prescriptive kind, as briefly outlined above. Another consequence is that the descriptive variety is still meant to be read by and engaged with by people doing the prescriptive variety. But, to be honest, this is still not very compelling to me, as a circumstantial effect as mentioned before
OK, this is all phrased at the level of the very general and abstract, and the actual conclusions that prescriptive theory might reach or which they might receive from descriptive theory I still can’t wrap my head around, but several more specific forms fall out of the above general impulses once we consider what’s actually going on in the world. For instance, scholarship that makes sense out of the present state of technology has to situate itself within a longer trajectory (the coloniality of the valley project sedimented over hundreds of years, palo alto style) and understand how it’s shifting in this moment (a shift from liberal to fascist forms of coloniality, selective removal of the liberal air of neutrality, etc).
Finally, thinking about all of this has made me realize that although there are obvious constraints on what one person can do, I personally will never be whole unless I am in some capacity performing the prescriptive variety. Though that can be informal, like in these memos I’m writing with others in GEO on our current direction and strategy, etc.
more questions:
how do we assess if the descriptive theory actually furnishes tools for prescriptive theory (not only if it has the qualities to potentially do so)
- The scholarship in the first category below, for instance — what’s actually valuable about each of these, besides the high-level notes on method (specificity, etc) that the memo makes so far? What substantive conclusions or new knowledge have they provided, and what interventions or changes in socialist strategy can they be seen in a lineage with?
Where does this fit in with the fact that making scholarship for policymakers is not very appealing to me — the substantive half of this argument, that we have to speak in some form to an audience that is building power against the usual liberal policy audience FAccT types seem to want to cater to?