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When I wrote about Vilém Flusser earlier, some commenters here at Crooked Timber weren’t happy: why am I spouting off about this obscure Czech-Brazilian media theorist?
At first I despaired at the lack of intellectual curiosity, but then I realized that they were right: Vilém Flusser isn’t famous enough to write about, given the inexorable dictates of the attention economy.
So I resolved to make Flusser more famous by aping the blithely bourgeois consumerism of the only newspaper that matters.
It feels like 2023 is the summer of Flusser! You can’t read anything about the goings-on with the artsy set downtown without encountering terms like the “Flusserian technical image” or “amphitheatrical discourse.” If you want to keep up, you better get reading!
But where to start? We here Pagecutter know that there’s nothing you hate more than reading a book unless you absolutely have to, so we’ve picked the perfect Flusser text for any audience and attention span.
If a big part of your artistic/literary practice is reading books in public, on the train or in a bar, furtively glancing to see if anyone is noticing you reading, this is the book for you. The absolute thrill of sighing and telling an inquisitive stranger that it’s “too complicated to explain” has to be experienced to be believed!
It’s also the fullest statement of his media theory, and thus his most immediately important book. Communicology synthesizes ideas he develops in more specialized texts, making it a technical and admittedly difficult read.
But. I think that the main question confronting social science today is “Why does everything feel so weird?” I continue to think that the answer is “the Internet,” but until reading Communicology, I was unable to break down this intuition into useful analytical components. Flusser’s discussion of discourse versus dialogue, of the evolution of codes of communication from image to text to technical image, both puts the internet in historical context and provides a much more specific formulation of the main question of today.
Yes, the fable about the Vampire Squid discussed below is less absurd than Flusser’s second major work, a nominally religious allegory in which he de-moralizes the seven deadly sins and explicates the role that each of them plays in constructing the human condition.
Flusser is a deeply religious thinker. When he escaped the Nazis, he brought with him only two books: a Jewish prayer book and Goethe’s Faust. The History of the Devil is a reading of both of these, refracted through two decades of largely independent reading of canonical Western philosophy.
This is my personal favorite, though not for the faint of heart. The chapter on Wrath is worth the price of admission, adumbrating a novel and poetic philosophy of science. The central contribution of the book, though, is existentialist. As a Czech (really, Praguian) by inclination, Flusser’s existentialism has a distinctive Kafkan timbre. The structure references Wittgenstein’s Tractacus ironically, but the argument is less logical than lyrical. Here are two choice quotes; there are many more in my archives, inquire below.
Nationalism is a sublimated secretion from shriveled testicles, but even so, it periodically manages to provoke an extreme orgasm.
Within society, the Devil seems to struggle against himself. But it is obvious that this is a fake struggle. Greed strengthens envy, and envy strengthens greed, and both have the same aim: to make society real.
This is Flusser’s version of McLuhan and Fiore’s iconic pamphlet The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan was the prophet of cool, and as much as he personally despised contemporary media culture, he knew that the only way to critique it was to ride the wave; hence, The Medium is the Massage, a beautifully designed book of aphorisms condensing the ideas he worked out in detail in Understanding Media.
Steeped in Judeo-Christian thought and attentive to developments in natural science, Flusser’s collaboration with Louis Bec is likewise accessible (for Flusser…) and immediately eye- and mind-catching. The discovery of a deep-sea “vampire squid from hell” in 1905 was the subject of much public attention, and Flusser uses it as a springboard for a kind of phenomenological fable. By imagining what it is like to be a vampire squid, Flusser reveals much of what we take to be objective reality to be physically, historically and socially contingent. Plus it has a lot of badass pataphysical sketches of the vampire squid.
Flusser’s autobiography, written and rewritten in several languages, was published in English for the first time in 2017 by frequent Flusser translator Rodrigo Maltez Novaes. This book is one of the strangest and yet most revealing autobiographies I’ve ever read. The final two-thirds describe his intellectual bromances with members of the Brazilian cultural scene he eventually joined, in such candid detail that showing the drafts to his friends caused more than one of them to have a major break with him.
He spends less time on his childhood and his young adult decision to flee the Nazis than he does talking about how his attempt to embrace Brazilian nature failed because Brazilian nature sucks. (He spends many pages describing how much Brazilian nature sucks.) Still, this is essential reading for understanding his intellectual trajectory. For example, he basically taught himself Spanish in order to be able to read Ortega y Gasset, primarily because of the latter’s exacting prose style. And despite being raised a “bourgeois Marxist” by default as a Praguian intellectual, he is brutally disillusioned by the Stalin-Hitler pact—a disillusionment that Western bourgeois Marxists had the luxury of avoiding.
What little we get the Nazi period is shattering. He describes the decision to leave as tantamount to killing his family, that it was only vulgar self-preservation which drove him to take the unforgivable choice not to stay and be slaughtered. This existentialist survivor’s guilt explains his Groundlessness, the first key step down his intellectual path. It works, insofar as he is able to later in the book describe the German language as the most significant victim of the Holocaust. This is clearly a tortured soul, all the more impressive for remaining alive and vital. We see his embrace of the absurdity of existence as the only alternative to suicide; an inspiration, for anyone, regardless of circumstance.
The answer, obviously, is no. And now that we have LLMs upending centuries-old institutions premised on the technology of writing, we can appreciate just how right Flusser was. The central thrust of this book is included in Communicology, but the specifics of the writing case are explored in more detail here.
The big question for Flusser, the author of both Does Writing Have a Future? and dozens of other books, is…what’s the deal? To understand him, we must accept his embrace of dialectical tension, the generative inconclusiveness of any argument. From The History of the Devil:
The struggle shall never end and the embrace shall never be
realized. However, we cannot even say that this process is over.
No one has won and no one has been defeated. We cannot even
say that the drama of our minds has come to a draw. Neither
God, nor the Devil has disappeared. We cannot even say if
they continue to exist, or if they ever existed. We cannot even
distinguish between them. The only thing left is this stage of
decided indecision. Could this be the overcoming of sadness
and sloth? Could this be damnation? Could this be salvation?
It is no use asking. It is no use writing. Therefore we continue
to write. Scribere necesse est, vivere non est. [Writing is necessary, living is not.]
Crooked Timber was inaccessible yesterday, due to a dns issue, but here’s another picture of Alexanderplatz:
Sometimes you come across people that permanently change the way you think. About life, yourself, or an area of study. They instill a sense of resolute optimism about the world and your abilities. Bear Braumoeller was that person for us. Wise, accomplished, brilliant, humble, and kind. Anyone who can be remembered that way lived life well. Bear is one of those people. He was our professor, mentor, colleague, and friend. We were richer for knowing him, and are poorer for his passing.
We first got the chance to meet Bear during our recruitment process to Ohio State. We gravitated toward him and his research. Bear went out of his way to bring in the best and brightest graduate students to the program, and was absolutely relentless in his efforts. He took phone calls from us, discussed all of our options, and went out of his way to procure funds and opportunities for every student. Bear was known to showcase some of the best places to eat in Columbus, too. We all got along with Bear immediately, and he became a powerful force in our proverbial corner, helping us navigate and thrive in graduate school.
We’ve been fortunate to have terrific professors, but Bear was an unusually good professor. In graduate seminars, we were exposed to a wide breadth of topics in political and social science. The breadth that Bear introduced in his courses was unique for a political science class. Most importantly, he taught us how to read books and articles critically and constructively. Graduate students are often great at tearing apart a piece of scholarship. And that’s important. But published works are generally published for a reason, he reminded us, and so it’s equally important to identify their strengths in addition to their weaknesses. That approach cultivated humility (there are always tradeoffs in research) but was also encouraging. If graduate students think pieces published by top scholars in good journals are bad because we only focus on their downsides, how could we possibly do good work?
Bear’s take on the literature and the discipline was just like his research interests: complex, rich, and nuanced. He loved what he studied, and his knowledge in these areas often seemed encyclopedic. He would recommend a citation and quote on a whim, from memory. He always asked big, important questions, and he did his best to answer them. His two books, The Great Powers and the International System and Only the Dead, address two important questions in international politics: how leaders and historical circumstances jointly shape major historical outcomes, and whether war is declining. He was methodologically sophisticated, but for him it was about getting closer to the truth. He truly didn’t care what method you used if it fit the question. He had a great academic pedigree (University of Chicago, University of Michigan) but he wasn’t elitist. He wanted to hear from smart people, and he believed in demystifying the academy, making it accessible.
Bear was a formal advisor, but also a tremendous mentor to us. He helped guide many important decisions in graduate school, from the type of training we needed, our choice of dissertation topics, to the construction of our committees. Bear’s was ready to provide feedback on any idea or draft, regardless of its stage of development. He was also kind when he didn’t have to be, and when no one would praise him for it publicly. It’s just who he was. His feedback was always constructive and intended to enable better work. When we made mistakes he would correct us – firmly, gently, and privately.
Bear created the MESO (Modeling Emergent Social Order) Lab, which has been supported by NSF and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It didn’t start as a lab, though. The first day some of us gathered in the conference room, it was just a group of people who Bear thought might be interested in an idea he had. We talked it over – a question about the relationship between hierarchical order and war – and decided it was interesting enough to pursue. One of the first things we did was to gather on a Thursday and just start working, the whole day, with no distractions, putting ideas on paper and into code. He would call them Hackathons, reminiscent of a Silicon Valley start-up. These early days made a huge impact on Bear. Numerous times after that, in presentations or conversations about what we were doing, he would mention that he had never before felt as productive as he did in those early research sessions. He realized that this was it, this was the way forward for him. This was not merely working on a project. This represented a change in how he was going to do research, in how he approached being a professor and working with graduate students.
International Relations is not known for collaborative research. The vast majority of major work in the field has a single author, more rarely two, and very rarely more than two authors. Some of us had co-authored with Bear before, but this was different. Whereas previous partnerships were more traditional co-authored research projects in which each author did their part, this was something bigger. Bear had a vision beyond group publications. He wanted us to grow into scholars who would think big, who wouldn’t be afraid to tackle questions that might seem intimidatingly broad, and who would pull the right minds together to tackle those problems. Our first project was “Hierarchy and War”, which addresses two of the biggest topics in the discipline. We were meant to say something new about both – and the relationship between them – in a single paper. The ambition was daunting, but that was Bear’s way: take big, important questions and swing as hard as you could at answering them.
As membership in the MESO Lab grew and expanded, Bear expanded the lab’s projects as well. As always, all projects are led by us, the students. Bear gave us remarkable autonomy and control over these projects: despite our status as graduate students, we had the final say over theoretical framing, modeling decisions, and data analysis. He gave us room to explore different paths, even if it meant delaying the progress of the project. In addition to developing us as scholars, he helped us develop as people. Bear understood that a good life outside of work with food, travel, and family, was of equal importance to doing great work. He expected high quality work from us, but the lab never became a source of stress or frustration. Being in the MESO Lab has been one of the greatest blessings from being Bear’s students. Just as a system is not equal to the sum of its parts, our lab produces scholarship that is more creative and fruitful than what we could individually create.
The loss of Bear leaves a gaping hole, not only in our lab but in our profession more broadly. People around the world have so beautifully expressed their appreciation and admiration for Bear, with an outpouring of tributes and memories. As is so often the case with grieving, those left behind expressed a desire for one more conversation, one more snarky comment, one more belly laugh, one more smile. His presence and reputation were felt with the same gravity and strength across the discipline. So many people felt as strongly and warmly about Bear as we did.
It is impossible to properly account for all the things Bear taught us. He taught us to be ambitious in our research. He taught us to be fearless when exploring and implementing new ideas. He taught us to be gentle and kind, with others and ourselves. His ideas and influence are all over our projects and dissertations. We will do our best to carry forward that work and legacy.
Rest in peace, Bear. It was a privilege and honor to have known you as a leader, mentor, and friend. Your memory is a blessing and you are missed.
About the authors
Maryum Alam, Andrew Goodhart, Michael Lopate, Haoming Xiong, and Liuya Zhang are political science Ph.D. candidates at The Ohio State University. Maël van Beek is an incoming postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. David Peterson is an incoming post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. Jared Edgerton is an Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Please consider donating to support Bear’s daughter, Molly Braumoeller.
I’ve been largely absent here – wrapping up my editorial work on two academic volumes and the various rounds of edits on the popular book on limitarianism. I promise I’ll be back with substantive posts by late August (after resting and travelling). In the meantime, I thought I might share this 45 minutes podcast episode in which I give an overview of the capability approach. Jack Simpson conducted this interview with me quite a while ago, but it only got released last week (congratulations on getting your PhD-degree in the meantime, Jack!).
Jack not only asked me to explain some things, but also asked me several times for “my take on” strenghts/weaknesses/inspiring examples in this literature – which is fun to talk about, since these are the kind of things you never put in an academic article.
Available via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, via RSS, or one of the other platforms that airs this podcast.
Looking forward to the next episodes of Jack’s podcast The Capability Approach in Conversation.
Daniel Ellsberg has died, aged 92. I don’t have anything to add to the standard account of his heroic career, except to observe that Edward Snowden (whose cause Ellsberg championed) would probably have done better to take his chances with the US legal system, as Ellsberg did.
In decision theory, the subsection of the economics profession in which I move Ellsberg is known for a contribution made a decade before the release of the Pentagon papers. In his PhD dissertation, Ellsberg offered thought experiments undermining the idea that rational people can assign probabilities to any event relevant to their decisions. This idea has given rise to a large theoretical literature on the idea of ‘ambiguity’. Although my own work has been adjacent to this literature for many decades, it’s only recently that I have actually written on this.
A long explanation is over the fold. But for those not inclined to delve into decision theory, it might be interesting to consider other people who have been prominent in radically different ways. One example is Hedy Lamarr, a film star who also patented a radio guidance system for torpedoes (the significance of which remains in dispute). A less happy example is that of Maurice Allais, a leading figure in decision theory and Economics Nobel winner, who also advocated some fringe theories in physics. I thought a bit about Ronald Reagan, but his entry into politics was really built on his prominence as an actor, rather than being a separate accomplishment.
The simplest of Ellsberg’s experiments is the “two-urn” problem. You are presented with two urns. One contains 50 red balls and 50 black balls. The other contains 100 black or red balls, but you aren’t told how many of each. Now you are offered two even money bet, which pay off if a red ball is drawn from one of the runs. You get to choose which urn to bet on. Intuition suggests choosing the urn with known proportions. Now suppose instead of a bet on red, you are offered the same choice but with a bet on black. Again, it seems that the first urn would be better.
Now, on the information given, the probability of a red ball being drawn from the first urn is 0.5. But what about the second urn. Strictly preferring the first urn for the red ball bet implies that the probability of a red ball being drawn from the second must be less than 0.5. But preferring the first urn for the black ball bet implies that the probability of a red ball being drawn from the second must be more than 0.5. So, there is no probability number that rationalises these decisions.
The title of Ellsberg’s paper was “Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms”. As a result, the term “ambiguity” has been applied, in contradistinction to risk, to the case when there are no well-defined probabilities. But this was not the way Ellsberg himself used the term. Rather he referred to
the nature of ones information concerning the relative likelihood of events. What is at issue might be called the ambiguity of this information, a quality depending on the amount, type, reliability and unanimity of information, andg iving rise to one’s degree of confidence in an estimate of relative
likelihoods.(emphasis added)
I’ve developed this point in a paper whose title Seven Types of Ambiguity is one of numerous homages to William Empson’s classic work of literary criticism. Among these homages, I’d recommend the novel of the same name by Australian writer Elliot Perlman (later a TV series).
The central claim in my paper is that all forms of ambiguity in decision theory may
be traced to bounded and differential awareness. If that sounds interesting, you can read the paper here. If you’re super-interested, I’ll be presenting the paper in a couple of conferences in Europe in July – email me at [email protected] for details.
Since the beginning of this millennium, I’ve been writing critiques of the “generation game”, the idea that people can be divided into well-defined groups (Boomers, Millennials and so on), with specific characteristics based on their year of birth. As I said in my first go at this issue, back in 2000 (reproduced here )
Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups à the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on.
Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.
My most prominent contribution to the debate was this piece in the New York Times five years ago, prompted by the Pew Research Centre’s announcement that it would define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation. After discussing the history of the “generation” idea, I made the central point
Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.
Now, I’m pleased to say, Pew has changed its view, partly in response to a “growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.”
From now on, they will take proper account of age, cohort and period effects, with the result that
our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.
What’s striking is that this is happening at a time when political views, at least in the US, UK and Australia, show a really strong age gradient, with old people far more likely to be on the political right. Understanding this is important, and the use of sloppy labels like “Boomers” (focusing attention on a demographic event 60-80 years ago) is unlikely to be useful.
There is an increasing focus in academic and policy circles on research-policy partnerships. These partnerships are often achieved through co-creation, or “the joint production of innovation between combinations of industry, research, government and civil society.” Co-creation is central to innovation in the hard sciences and technology, but its role in international relations scholarship and aid policy remains underdeveloped.
As scholars of international aid practice, we believe that co-creation can help us design and conduct more relevant, rigorous, and impactful research. It is also a core mission of the Research on International Policy Implementation Lab (RIPIL), whose co-creation process engages policymakers and practitioners in: 1) the generation of important, policy-relevant research questions; 2) research on these questions, through regular validation and consultation; and 3) the development and dissemination of findings and their policy implications, which often leads to the identification of important new research questions and opportunities.
In this piece, we focus on the first phase: the co-creation of research questions. This is one of the trickiest phases of the co-creation process because it requires researchers and policymakers to find a common question and research design that aligns with academics’ incentive to publish rigorous research and policymakers’ incentive to feed evidence into the policy process. Future blog posts will discuss how to implement co-created research and disseminate co-created findings.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we initiated a collaboration intended to generate policy-relevant research questions on the changing nature of international aid. Our aim was to get a sense of whether the combined shocks of COVID-19, growing calls to decolonize aid, and the rise of populism and popular protest had changed the underlying power dynamics in aid.
Importantly, in this project, we did not just want to learn from practitioners based in Western Europe or North America. We wanted insights from key thinkers and actors from the context where aid dependency has been most acute: the African continent. We wanted to understand how these thought leaders viewed aid-related power dynamics and how research could help answer their most puzzling questions.
Between 2020 and 2022, we conducted one-on-one interviews, organized virtual focus groups, and hosted a high-level roundtable in Geneva with donor governments and international non-government organizations (INGOs) on power in aid, all to better understand the changing nature of aid and the research questions that matter to policymakers, practitioners, and key African thinkers.
A synthesis of our thematic findings is available here. In this blog, we discuss our four most important lessons learned about the co-creation process itself.
We saw our discussions as an exchange of knowledge. Therefore, we wanted to make sure that we brought something to the table. Before each meeting and workshop, we circulated a summary of the existing research and our discussions from previous meetings. Having set the stage with these syntheses, we then focused each interview and workshop on listening (not talking). This allowed us to build on the existing academic knowledge, and to use the conversations to identify how it diverged from the everyday experiences of our interviewees and workshop participants. It also allowed each participant to arrive feeling well-prepared, in part through the materials we provided.
Importantly, we began each workshop and roundtable with presentations by African scholars and practitioners. They helped shape the power dynamics of the conversation from the outset.
The process worked. Our preparation, planning, and careful facilitation enabled open and respectful communication among key African thinkers and representatives of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), donor governments, recipient governments, and the United Nations.
We wanted to hear what donors, recipients, and key observers had to say about changing power dynamics around aid. We wanted to understand the perspectives of people from different recipient and donor countries to see if there might be broader trends.
Most of the people who participated in our discussions did not know us or each other. To enable an open conversation, we had to create an environment where they could trust us, and each other. This took time. We had to reach out to people repeatedly; build relationships through one-on-one conversations at the beginning of the process; and use these one-on-one conversations and our repeated meetings over time to establish our own credibility. This paid off in the quality of the conversations we were eventually able to have in our focus-group discussions and, subsequently, in our high-level panel in Geneva.
If the point of co-creation is to spark new lines of inquiry, researchers involved in co-creation must be willing to let go of the questions they think they should be asking and be open to the questions that others think are most important.
In our initial one-on-one conversations, we focused on asking open-ended, big picture questions to get a sense of whether participants thought power dynamics had changed and, if so, how. In some cases, their answers confirmed our assumptions. In others, we were surprised by new insights.
For example, respondents indicated that the rise of populism in Africa was leading to a backlash against aid recipients and donors. This led us to start a new research project on aid and populism that we could not have imagined at the beginning of the process.
This is hard to understate. Co-creating research questions involves the translation and transfer of ideas between science, policy, and practice over an extended period. This means that researchers should not engage in co-creation expecting quick wins or immediate research results. Co-creation is not a quick strategy to increase your research output, but a long-term commitment to identifying important research questions and building the relationships necessary to answer them.
When done well, co-creation has the potential to improve the relevance and impact of research, foster greater collaboration and understanding between researchers and practitioners, and ultimately contribute to positive change in the aid sector. But it is time-consuming and requires patience, careful planning, regularly questioning one’s assumptions, and continuous communication.
We believe that the investment of adequate time up front has been worthwhile, greatly enhancing our understanding of the power dynamics in aid today and enabling us to ask (and answer) cutting-edge research questions. It has also given us the connections necessary to conduct research on these dynamics, ensuring that our research authentically reflects the views shared by African stakeholders and is relevant to aid policymakers and practitioners globally.
To learn more about RIPIL, visit https://bridgingthegapproject.org/ripil/.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a piece by Owen Kichizo Terry, an undergraduate at Columbia University, on how college students are successfully using ChatGPT to produce their essays.
The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step. You tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better.
As an example, I told ChatGPT, “I have to write a 6-page close reading of the Iliad. Give me some options for very specific thesis statements.” (Just about every first-year student at my university has to write a paper resembling this one.) Here is one of its suggestions: “The gods in the Iliad are not just capricious beings who interfere in human affairs for their own amusement but also mirror the moral dilemmas and conflicts that the mortals face.” It also listed nine other ideas, any one of which I would have felt comfortable arguing. Already, a major chunk of the thinking had been done for me. As any former student knows, one of the main challenges of writing an essay is just thinking through the subject matter and coming up with a strong, debatable claim. With one snap of the fingers and almost zero brain activity, I suddenly had one.
My job was now reduced to defending this claim. But ChatGPT can help here too! I asked it to outline the paper for me, and it did so in detail, providing a five-paragraph structure and instructions on how to write each one. For instance, for “Body Paragraph 1: The Gods as Moral Arbiters,” the program wrote: “Introduce the concept of the gods as moral arbiters in the Iliad. Provide examples of how the gods act as judges of human behavior, punishing or rewarding individuals based on their actions. Analyze how the gods’ judgments reflect the moral codes and values of ancient Greek society. Use specific passages from the text to support your analysis.” All that was left now was for me to follow these instructions, and perhaps modify the structure a bit where I deemed the computer’s reasoning flawed or lackluster.
The kid, who just completed their first year at Williams, confirms that this approach is already widespread at their campus.
I spent a few hours yesterday replicating the process for two classes in my rotation: one the politics of science fiction, the other on global power politics. Here are my takeaways about the current “state of play.”
First, professors who teach courses centered on “classic” literary and political texts need to adapt yesterday. We don’t expect students to make original arguments about Jane Austen or Plato; we expect them to wrestle with “enduring” issues (it’s not even clear to me what an “original” argument about Plato would look like). ChatGPT has—as does any other internet-based LLM—access to a massive database of critical commentary on such venerable texts. These conditions make the method very effective.
Second, this is also true for films, television, popular novels, and genre fiction. I ran this experiment on a few of the books that cycle on and off my “science-fiction” syllabus—including The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The Dispossessed, The Forever War, and Dawn—and the outcomes were pretty similar to what you’d expect from “literary” classics or political philosophy.
Third, ChatGPT does significantly less well with prompts that require putting texts into dialogue with one another. Or at least those that aren’t fixtures of 101 classes.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to help me create an essay that reads The Forever War through Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. The results were… problematic. I could’ve used them to write a great essay on how actors in The Forever War construct the Taurans as a threat in order to advance their own political interests. Which sounds great. Except that’s not actually Schmitt’s argument about the friend/enemy distinction.
ChatGPT did relatively better on “compare and contrast” essays. I used the same procedure to try to create an essay that compares The Dispossessed to The Player of Games. This is not a common juxtaposition in science-fiction scholarship or science-fiction online writing, but it’s extremely easy to the two works in conversation with one another. ChatGPT generated topics and outlines that picked up on that conversation, but in a very superficial way. It gave me what I consider “high-school starter essays,” with themes like ‘both works show how an individual can make a difference’ or ‘both works use fictional settings to criticize aspects of the real world.’
Now, maybe my standards are too high, but this is the level of analysis that leaves me asking “and?” Indeed, the same is true of example used in the essay: it’s very Cliff’s Notes. Now, it’s entirely possible to get “deeper” analysis via ChatGPT. You can drill down on one of the sections it offers in a sample outline; you can ask it more specific prompts. That kind of thing.
At some point, though, this starts to become a lot of work. It also requires you to actually know something about the material.
Which leads me to my fourth reaction: I welcome some of what ChatGPT does. It consistently provides solid “five-paragraph essay” outlines. I lose track of how many times during any given semester I tell students that “I need to know what your argument is by the time I finish your introduction” and “the topic of an essay is not its argument.” ChatGPT not only does that, but it also reminds students to do that.
In some respects, ChatGPT is just doing what I do when students me with me about their essays: helping them take very crude ideas and mold them into arguments, suggesting relevant texts to rope in, and so forth. As things currently stand, I think I do a much better job on the conceptual level, but I suspect that a “conversation” with ChatGPT might be more effective at pushing them on matters of basic organization.
Fifth, ChatGPT still has a long way to go when it comes to the social sciences—or, at least International Relations. For essays handling generic 101 prompts it did okay. I imagine students are already easily using it to get As on short essays about, say, the difference between “balance of power” and “balance of threat” or on the relative stability of unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar systems.
Perhaps they’re doing so with a bit less effort than it would take to Google the same subjects and reformulate what they find in their own words? Maybe that means they’re learning less? I’m not so sure.
The “superficiality” problem became much more intense when I asked it to provide essays on recent developments in the theory and analysis of power politics. When I asked it for suggestions for references, at least half of them were either total hallucinations or pastiches of real ones. Only about a quarter were actually appropriate, and many of these were old. Asking for more recent citations was a bust. Sometimes it simply changed the years.
I began teaching in the late 1990s and started as a full-time faculty member at Georgetown in 2002. In the intervening years, it’s becoming more and more difficult to know what to do about “outside sources” for analytical essays.
I want my students to find and use outside articles—which now means through Google Scholar, JSTOR, and other databases. But I don’t want them to bypass class readings for (what they seem to think are) “easier” sources, especially as many of them are now much more comfortable looking at a webpage than with reading a PDF. I would also be very happy if I never saw another citation to “journals” with names like ProQuest and JSTOR.
I find that those students who do (implicitly or explicitly) bypass the readings often hand in essays with oddball interpretations of the relevant theories, material, or empirics. This makes it difficult to tell if I’m looking at the result of a foolish decision (‘hey, this website talks about this exact issue, I’ll build my essay around that’) or an effort to recycle someone else’s paper.
The upshot is that I don’t think it’s obvious that LLMs are going to generate worse educational outcomes than we’re already seeing.
Which leads me to the sixth issue, which is where do we go from here. Needless to say, “it’s complicated.”
The overwhelming sentiment among my colleagues is that we’re seeing an implosion of student writing skills, and that this is a bad thing. But it’s hard to know how much that matters in a world in which LLM-based applications take over a lot of everyday writing.
I strongly suspect that poor writing skills are still a big problem. It seems likely that analytic thinking is connected to clear analytic writing—and that the relationship between the two is often both bidirectional and iterative. But if we can harness LLMs to help students understand how to clearly express ideas, then maybe that’s a net good.
Much of the chatter that I hear leans toward abandoning—or at least deemphasizing—the use of take-home essays. It means, for the vast majority of students, doing their analytic writing in a bluebook under time pressure. It’s possible that makes strong writing skills even more important, as it deprives students of the ability to get feedback on drafts and help with revisions. I’m not sure it helps to teach those skills, and it will bear even less resemblance to any writing that they do after college or graduate school than a take-home paper does.
(If that’s the direction we head in, then I suppose more school districts will need to reintroduce (or at least increase their emphasis on) instruction in longhand writing. It also has significant implications for how schools handle student accommodations; it could lead students to more aggressively pursue them in the hope of evading rules on the use of ChatGPT, which could in turn reintroduce some of the Orwellian techniques used to police exams during the height of the pandemic).
For now, one of the biggest challenges to producing essays via ChatGPT remains the “citation problem.” But given various workarounds, professors who want to prevent the illicit use of ChatGPT probably already cannot pin their hopes on finding screwy references. They’ll need to base more of their grading not just on whether a student demonstrates the ability to make a decent argument about the prompt, but on whether they demonstrate a “deeper” understanding of the logic and content of the references that they use. Professor will probably also need to mandate, or at least issue strict directions about, what sources students can use.
(To be clear, that increases the amount of effort required to grade a paper. I’m acutely aware of this problem, as I already take forever to mark up assignments. I tend to provide a lot of feedback and… let’s just say that it’s not unheard of for me to send a paper back to a student many months after the end of the class.)
We also need to ask ourselves what, exactly, is the net reduction in student learning if they read both a (correct) ChatGPT explanation of an argument and the quotations that ChatGPT extracts to support it. None of this strike me as substantively all that different from skimming an article, which we routinely tell students to do. At some level, isn’t this just another route to learning the material?
AI enthusiasts claim that it won’t be long before LLM hallucinations—especially those involving references—become a thing of the past. If that’s true, then we are also going to have to reckon with the extent that the use of general-purpose LLMs creates feedback loops that favor some sources, theories, and studies over others. We are already struggling with how algorithms, including those generated through machine-learning, shape our information environment on social-media platforms and in search engines. Google scholars’ algorithm is already affecting the citations that show up in academic papers, although here at least academics mediate the process.
Regardless, how am I going to approach ChatGPT in the classroom? I am not exactly sure. I’ve rotated back into teaching one of our introductory lecture courses, which is bluebook-centered to begin with. The other class, though, is a writing-heavy seminar.
In both my class I do intend to at least talk about the promises and pitfalls of ChatGPT, complete with some demonstrations of how it can go wrong. In my seminar, I’m leaning toward integrating it into the process and requiring that students hand in the transcripts from their sessions.
What do you think?
Your department or college may be able to pay for your participation in ANY Professor Is In work, including our formal programs, as well as editing of your professionalization/job search/tenure documents. What follows is context and scripts for asking your department to fund your participation in Unstuck: The Art of Productivity and The Art of the Academic Article, and/or The Professor Is In Pre-Tenure Coaching Group, but you can use it to ask for any kind of professional development or program improvement support. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected] for more help!
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Your department might pay for your enrollment in this course, and the only you will find out is to ask. Don’t be afraid. Department heads get requests for funding all of the time. There is nothing shameful about it. In fact, learning how to ask is great practice for the rest of your career.
The best way to loosen the departmental purse strings is to show the money is going to solve a problem the department head considers worth solving.
So what problem does the course solve?
You also have to show the stakes of not solving the problem.
Stating the problem and stakes is not enough. You also have to show why this particular thing you are asking to be funded will solve the problem.
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Here is an example email that you can use to approach your dean, department head or PI to make the request that the course be funded. NOTE: IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO NOT USE THESE EXAMPLES VERBATIM, AS WE HAVE THOUSANDS OF READERS AND CLIENTS, MANY IN THE SAME DEPARTMENTS. WE SUGGEST YOU SLIGHTLY REPHRASE THE MODELS BELOW IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
>Dear <administrator>
I have an opportunity to enroll in a coaching program designed for academics to
//produce a full draft of journal article in 10 weeks
//support my success on the tenure track
//help me complete my research and writing for tenure
>and I am requesting departmental support to cover the costs. The course is being offered by The Professor is In, a career services organizations with well-documented and unparalleled success since 2011 in assisting academics in all phases of their careers.
>The benefit of
// The Art of the Academic Article, over other programs, is not only the extensive experience of the two coaches offering guidance but also the ongoing access to the online material. I will be able to use the course material for not just this article, but all future ones as well.
//The Professor Is In Pre-Tenure Coaching Group is that it provides individualized, confidential small group coaching as I confront the challenges of mapping out a publication trajectory, establishing an effective writing schedule, managing a sustainable balance of research, teaching, and service, managing the demands of conferencing and networking, and grasping the elements of a successful tenure case (including the role of external reviewers) to support my success in that arduous process.
>As we have discussed,
//I have XX articles in progress that are necessary/would improve my third year review/tenure review/post doc production/chances of success on the job market. This course would assure that I produce xx articles in the next year. It also increases my chances of publication in the mostly highly ranked journals because it includes instruction on positioning both in terms of discipline and journal rank.
//I have an active research program underway, while also being dedicated to effective teaching and productive service to the department. This coaching program will give me the support of Dr. Karen Kelsky- who has not only been a dedicated academic development coach since 2011, but is also a former R1 department head who in that role mentored 5 junior faculty to tenure – and a small group of peers who can together serve as a sounding board for decisions I need to make about publishing strategies, writing timelines, teaching dilemmas, and work-life balance – to name just a few topics the group covers. The program will assure that I avoid common pitfalls and focus my time and effort most effectively toward eventual tenure success in a way that is *individualized* for our specific field, department and campus expectations.
>The next session of the course starts on XXXX. Please let me know if you are willing to support this effort and I will purchase and submit the receipt for reimbursement/contact accounting to arrange payment.
OR [another style of approach- adapt as you see fit!]
As we have discussed, one of the critical components of raising the profile of our department is to increase faculty publications and the quality of those publications. This course would assure that I produce xx articles in the next year. It also increases my chances of publication in the mostly highly ranked journals because it includes instruction on positioning both in terms of discipline and journal rank.
It is no secret that balancing research, service and teaching is a challenge for all junior faculty here at xx. With this course, I will have the resources to achieve the balance required for success. With your support, I will be able to avoid common problems like false starts, writer’s block, and perfectionism, while assuring I choose the best journals to target, and submit a draft to a strong journal in an efficient time frame.
The next session of the course starts on XXXX. Please let me know if you are willing to support this effort and I will purchase and submit the receipt for reimbursement/contact accounting to complete the registration/ xxx
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UPDATE: As a commenter helpfully pointed out, the person whose tweet I’m responding to was a political science Professor, not a historian. This kind of messes with the framing of this post but rather than stealth re-write it I’ll leave it as is and let you interpret my Freudian slip as you like
When I was in grad school, my Department’s grad student organization made shirts that read, “Political Science: Four sub-fields, no discipline.” Behind this joke is a common observation about political science, that it is defined by its focus rather than a formal set of methods or theories. Not everyone agrees with this characterization, and there have been some efforts to craft political science-specific tools. But generally political science is a field that draws on insights and tools from other areas to study politics. This is most pronounced in international relations. IR looks not just to other fields but also other sub-fields of political science to study the world.
Many present IR’s lack of discipline as a critique. They view IR scholars as a group of raiders, pillaging ideas and methods from other disciplines then returning to our barren homeland. Two recent Twitter kerfuffles, however, demonstrate that this aspect of IR is actually our greatest strength.
I don’t spend much time on Twitter anymore, but I still seem to discover the latest controversy. Two academic ones were related in their attacks on political science.
First, a historian responded angrily to a new article in the American Political Science Review by Anna Grzymala-Busse on European state formation. The historian suggested she used overly-simplistic methods to make a point that “real” experts on early modern Europe already knew (I’ve anonymized the tweet as I don’t like engaging in Twitter attacks).
This is a common complaint I’ve heard from historians studying international issues. IR and CP either take history’s insights and repackage them as our own, or don’t realize historians have already said this. Several academic institutions I’ve been a part of have included fierce and rather petty attacks by historians on political scientists.
As some respondents to this tweet noted, however, this historian isn’t really being fair. The role of religion in state formation is hardly settled ground–I took an entire class on debates over the role of religion in nationalism in grad school. Also, isn’t it a good thing to test and confirm certain arguments using a different set of data and methods? And when pressed, he couldn’t point to what historical works the author overlooked.
Critiques of IR and political science take the place of addressing real issues within other areas of study
In a follow-up tweet, the historian also makes an ironic call for interdisciplinarity. Ironic because this is an interdisciplinary work! Grzymala-Busse combined insights from comparative politics and history to generate new knowledge; this is in line with her other work, which involves careful attention to historical detail. Those calling for interdisciplinary engagement should cheer this, unless “interdisciplinary” just means listening to historians…
The second Twitter incident involved a data scientist. A data science grad student tweeted a broadside against the replication crisis in psychology, followed by attacks on political science and the social sciences in general. Another data scientist responded by pointing out that social scientists don’t conduct our own statistical analysis and instead get “real statisticians” to do it.
Again, people took issue with this. Some noted the data science grad student hadn’t really characterized the replication crisis accurately. Others asked for specific examples (which weren’t forthcoming). I’d also point out that it is true data science does have a real impact on our lives, but it’s hardly a positive one; one data science course I took focused on things like getting around CAPTCHA tests and tricking spam filters. And in practice “interdisciplinary” for data science often means using Python to study political or social issues without engaging actual subject matter experts.
These are very different controversies, and I’m sure these two people wouldn’t agree on much if forced to have a conversation. But both involve the perennial attack on political science (and IR by extension): we don’t come up with our own insights or methods, we just steal the former and implement the latter badly.
I thought of this debate recently while visiting the excellent Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England. The popular view of the Norse raiders known as vikings is of pillaging hordes, and that was certainly the case initially. But as often happens, they settled down. And in the case of Jorvik, they created a thriving cosmopolitan society enabled through their wide-ranging travels.
Maybe I’m pushing this metaphor a bit here, but I think of IR as Jorvik.
Yes, we got our start by combining economic models and humanistic insights. Yes, our research tends to include references from disparate traditions. Yes, our data is messier than other fields or even sub-fields within political science.
These issues all became strengths, however.
Because of IR’s broad roots we have to be conversant in different disciplines. When engaging with people from other disciplines, I often get the sense they’ve never really read anything from my field; their critiques are often caricatures. By contrast, many IR scholars are well-read in other fields.
Additionally, we recognize the difficulty of drawing on and testing different disciplines. That’s why you can find IR and political science discussions about combining methodologies or triangulating among competing schools of historiography.
Finally, the challenge of dealing with incredibly messy data has created problems for IR but also led to fertile debates. For example, the problem of selection effects in conflict onset has led to a useful back-and-forth.
Interdisciplinary means each side listens to and learns from the other, not that one asserts superiority and territoriality
Beyond that, these critiques of political science and IR take the place of addressing real issues within other areas of study. In C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians” (which I referenced above) the inhabitants of a classical city sit and wait for the barbarians to arrive instead of dealing with the problems in their civilization. We can sense this in some of the attacks I’m discussing.
Historians are rightly frustrated at the lack of support for and interest in the humanities from universities and the general public. They often, however, see political science as the problem, such as Grzymala-Busse making a splash by engaging in historical debates. I am also reminded of a seminar my grad school put on to help students prepare and turn their dissertations into books; we went around the room discussing our topics and one history student made a crack about how “relevant” mine would be in DC. Rather than finding ways to demonstrate the value of a humanistic and historical approach to contemporary issues, some historians seem to blame political science and IR for sucking up all the attention (and student interest).
Likewise, data scientists are rightly tired of inadequate statistical models and badly interpreted findings. But what many of them seem to miss is that this is not a problem of stupidity: it is over-confidence, something data science tends to exhibit. I also sense a bit of frustration that political scientists are still seen as the expert on…politics despite our lack of cutting edge programming skills. This could be solved by closer collaborations between data scientists and subject matter experts, something that is often lacking.
It’s almost like political science and IR have become the Other to our critics, alleviating the need for any deeper reflection. As Kavafy ended his poem: “those people were a kind of solution.”
So what should be done?
Well, I am just finishing a fellowship at Edinburgh University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), which was funded by the Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World. It includes fellows from across the humanities, as well as the social and natural sciences. Part of the fellowship is a “work in progress” talk, which I gave last week. The empirical subject was my new work using social network analysis to study international religious politics, but the broader theme was my ongoing effort to test concepts from the humanities using quantitative social science methods.
I was unsure about the reaction. I didn’t know if the crowd of humanities scholars would react hostilely to me as an interloper. Instead, it was an incredibly fruitful discussion. There were tough questions and critiques, but they were in the spirit of collaboration and community. They recognized that I valued their disciplines, and they did not see the fact that I drew on theirs and mixed it with others (i.e., my lack of discipline) as a problem.
In this context, interdisciplinary meant each side listened to and learned from the other, rather than one asserting superiority and territoriality. It’d be nice if that attitude spread outside IASH.
While visiting the exhibition by the artist Xadalu Tupã Jekupé at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, one of the works caught my attention. It was a monitor on the floor. On the screen was a modification of the game Free Fire, where it was possible to follow a virtual killing taking place from the point of view of an indigenous character wearing a headdress. For a while I couldn’t look away. I remembered a conversation I had with Anthony, a Guaraní-Mbyá professor that works with the youth of his territory. At the time I was also a teacher, working with marginalized youth. I remember Anthony’s distressed words—he was concerned about the time and attention young people were putting into games like Free Fire, creating a situation very similar to the one I lived when I worked with teenagers in the outskirts of São Paulo.
It took a while for me to get rid of the profusion of shots, bodies, and feathers that were frantically intertwining in front of the monitor. I took a few steps away from the work when my partner, who was with me at the exhibition, called my name. “Did you see it?” he asked me, pointing at the monitor. “I saw the Free Fire….” Smiling from the corner of his mouth, he said, “No, you didn’t see it… it’s a trap!” I thought to myself, yes, I know, it’s a trap. It took me a few seconds to realize that the monitor was positioned inside a beautiful bamboo structure, a kind of hollow basket in the shape of a pyramid, resting on one of the edges on the floor, with the opposite edge suspended by an ingenious system of capture made of joined pieces of bamboo. It was an arapuca, a traditional trap set to capture those who let themselves be seduced by the offer placed inside. A trap that captured me without even having the opportunity to resist.
This text is an outline of a proposal for a feminist and decolonial strategy to be and remain working and producing techno-scientific knowledge within academic institutions. I present the trap as such a strategy, a kind of low-intensity guerrilla technique so that we, marked bodies, can establish alliances and move within structures that are essentially bourgeois, masculine, and Western. This strategy is especially important for those of us who research with other scientists, or who have science and technology as the main focus of our concerns. It allows us to experiment with ways of researching that are simultaneously capable of carrying out the necessary denouncements while also experimenting with possible ways of production of techno-scientific knowledge that interests us.
In The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding asks: “Is it possible to use for emancipatory ends sciences that are apparently so intimately involved in Western, bourgeois, and masculine projects?” (p. 9, 1986). In this way, Harding displaces the question of women in science from a concern with proportionality and representativeness and moves instead toward questioning the very structures of the production of techno-scientific knowledge. As a result of Harding’s provocations, Donna Haraway writes the article “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), a classic of feminist studies of science and technology. Even today, a few decades after the article was first written, the questions raised serve as support for us to elaborate our thoughts in a scenario that is still structurally very similar to the one Harding described—bourgeois, masculine, western.
In the last two decades, the composition of the higher education body in Brazil has been changing through struggles that resulted in affirmative public policies, implemented by leftist governments from 2003 onwards. Some of these actions were: the construction of universities in peripheral regions of the country; the establishment of quotas in public university entrance exams for people coming from the public education system, black people, and indigenous people; and the funding of programs for people from the working classes to access private higher education. I myself am the result of this process, a worker daughter of workers. With this never-experienced-before entry into higher education by a greater diversity of people than ever before, the resumption and transmutation of the issues raised by Harding and Haraway is a necessary and effervescent movement, so that our occupation of these spaces does not end up swallowing ourselves in our differences. The institution is a machine for shaping bodies and homogenizing possibilities of futures.
Something we inevitably end up asking ourselves as marginalized people is whether we should occupy these spaces. Stengers (2015) addresses this issue, defending our permanence in spaces of contradiction, including the academy, as a way not to resolve this contradiction once and for all, but to at least get to know the terrain through which we are forced to walk—and, who knows, build new alliances capable of establishing other trails. If we want to remain researchers, teaching and working within universities, we need strategies to make our permanence viable. This obviously includes a constant struggle for better material conditions, but that goes hand-in-hand with the need to remain honest with our differences—which is only possible with a radical change in the way science is produced. It is necessary to cultivate techniques of insistence that, on the one hand, protect us and, on the other hand, allow us to continue walking and facing the overwhelming monster we are facing. Knowing how to produce traps can be one of these techniques.
An arapuca, a traditional trap (image made by Clarissa Reche)
“The nature of the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped.” It is in this way that Stafford Beer (1974) summarizes one of the most interesting attributes of the trap: the cybernetic character between the object, who designed it, and what it is intended to capture. These three nodes are entangled in a feedback system that works like a game of mirrors where, when we look at any of the nodes (capture-trap-captive), we will inevitably find the other nodes. In this game of mirrors, we can see not only the relationship of nodes with each other, but also with the environments they compose. The trap therefore participates in complex fields of interactions.
Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1996) sought in African traps a tool to think about the tension between the piece of art, specifically Western, and the artifact, arising from the so-called “exotic” cultures. Gell argues that the possible conciliation between these poles lies precisely in thinking of both as traps, in an exercise of horizontality that, in a single movement, empties Western arts of their specificity, filling them with ethnicity. The anthropologist makes an exquisite description of the conceptual modes of operation of a trap.
For Gell, the trap is the knowledge of oneself and the other turned into an object. The trap is a functional model of the one who created it, replacing the presence of the one through a “sensory transduction” (p. 27, 1996). The capturer’s senses are replaced by a set of “sensors” attached to the trap, such as a rope or a stick that can simultaneously sense and act as triggers. In this sense, the trap is an automaton. But, at the same time, it is a model of what one wants to capture, since in order to function it needs to emulate and incorporate behaviors, desires, tendencies, functioning as “lethal parodies of the umwelt” (own world) of the captive.
In addition to this spatial dimension, the trap also has a temporal dimension whose structure is based on waiting. In this way, the trap incorporates a scenario of a dramatic nexus between the capturer-captive poles. Gell describes this waiting as a tragic theater, where the trap places the captor and the captive in a hierarchy. The metaphor would be that who sets the trap is God, or fate, and who falls into the trap is the human being in his tragedy. The task of creating traps would therefore be to experiment with controlling fate. However, if we take into account Amerindian conceptions of the trap, such as the Guarani-Mbya practice/thought, this relationship becomes more complex, since a prey is only captured in the trap if there is consent from its owners, who are non-human entities responsible for the animals. Here, the attempt to control fate slips through the bamboo stakes—the tragedy is shared between captor and captive.
From an Amerindian perspective, in particular Guaraní, the trap can be understood as a “memory card” (Caceres and Sales, 2019) capable of storing information that accounts for a profusion of knowledge such as: the behavior of the prey in its environment, modes of production of traps, cosmopolitical relationships involved in hunting, etc. But this potential for keeping memory has been gaining other contours with the increasing destruction of nature and traditional ways of life. With indigenous peoples without possession of their territories and abandonment in the face of deforestation and land grabbing that agribusiness and mining advance, hunting is no longer a possible reality. The maintenance of traps in this scenario becomes a form of resistance, a way of safeguarding what is possible and transmitting that memory to those who are growing up and will soon be responsible for the struggle.
Returning to the idea of thinking about the trap as a strategy to be and remain producing techno-scientific knowledge within an academic context, I would like to list the following characteristics that may be useful to us:
Acquiring the necessary knowledge to build a trap also helps us to know how to identify one when we come across it on our walk. Stengers points out how a moment of relative success, when you move from a position of contestation to a position of an interested party, is also a dangerous moment. For many of us who insist on working at the university, coming from classes historically far from that space, life becomes restricted, in an eternal non-belonging. On the one hand, it shows the impossibility of “integration” into the ideal body of those who produce technoscience—we have no way of doing that. On the other hand, we are haunted by a constant (self-)accusation of betrayal, and in fact something is lost from our previous relationship with “our own.” Faced with this impasse, Stengers proposes that we be able to “foresee that there will be tension” (p. 89, 2015), that is, share common knowledge and experiences that help identify and avoid predictable traps.
Image of an arapuca, a traditional trap (image by Clarissa Reche)
Some traps of the scientific knowledge production system are quite obvious. We come across well-set traps that straddle the path as we advance along our academic careers. We see the trap and look around. The alternatives are to abandon the trail or to stay in the same place. Since the food is just inside the trap, standing still means starving, or at best surviving in starvation. If we want to insist on the journey, we must voluntarily surrender ourselves to the cruel trap placed in our path, in the hope that even captive, though well fed, we may be able to retort before being devoured.
The list of traps is long, but I want to describe a specific type that is prostrating itself in front of me at this point in my journey: the trap of publishing in international academic journals. In Brazil, a researcher and/or scientist who wants to pursue a career within universities will necessarily find a scoring logic that allows, or not, their permanence and advancement to more prominent and better paid positions. As in other national systems of science and technology, research funding is linked to a good score, mainly arising from productivity and measured through, for example, number of publications and citations. An important characteristic in the case of Brazil, which differs from countries like the USA, is that funding for scientific research is mostly public, organized through state funding agencies. For this reason, most Brazilian academic journals are free, both for publication and for circulation.
In recent times, the internationalization of research has been a requirement of Brazilian funding agencies. In this scenario, publication in high-impact international journals has become a necessity. In some science and technology systems in other Latin American countries, this requirement is even tougher, with the acceptance of only articles published in journals indexed in repositories such as Web of Science and Scopus, both maintained by private entities seeking profits. The overwhelming majority of journals indexed in such repositories charge a lot of money for publication and access to the article. The amounts that researchers must pay to have their articles published can reach around R$ 20,000. For comparison purposes, the value of the minimum wage in Brazil is R$ 1,320 (about 15x less than the publication cost of the article).
Although most of the time the money to pay for such publications comes from the institutions, not being paid directly by the researchers, the effects produced by this logic of professional permanence are cruel. At the national level, it intensifies competition between researchers and research centers, who need to outperform each other in order to obtain funding. Internationally, such logic keeps the knowledge produced by the poorest countries in the corner, unable to circulate in large centers. This trap works like colonial shackles to which we often have to submit.
But the traps that we will find in our paths are not always so brazen and so painful. In fact, the most dangerous traps are precisely those that we don’t immediately notice and that offer us pleasure. When we are finally able to recognize our status as prey, we are so committed that we try at all costs to convince ourselves that it is better to become captive than to give up the delicious offer they make us. What we are offered is a biochemical comfort well adjusted to the “pharmacopornographic era” of Preciado (2008), which for many of us means a substantial distance from situations of physical suffering and the most varied humiliations, especially intellectual humiliations. In a scenario of growing public attention regarding the degradation of working conditions that researchers are facing, made explicit for example in a vertiginous decline in the mental health of workers who occupy laboratories around the world, this “pleasant” counterpart of working producing technoscientific knowledge that I mention in the last paragraph can only be understood from a class point of view—academic/intellectual work is essentially different from the overwhelming majority of jobs available to workers.
Money, prizes, publications, and recognition are some of the achievements that academic work brings and that activate these biochemical pleasures. Academic work offers comforts that many of us would not have if we had chosen other paths. An example is the possibility of traveling internationally. All the international trips I took were for my academic work. On these trips, we have the possibility of getting in touch with a dimension of cultural capital that was previously inaccessible. When we make our way back to our homeland, we are already transformed. In this movement, it is important to always plant your foot on the ground, exercise your memory, recognize the terrain to know where you are stepping, and always take very small steps. After all, many of the traps are hidden in the ground.
Image of an arapuca, a traditional trap (image by Clarissa Reche)
It took me a long time to understand why Isabelle Stenger’s proposal (2000) of “not hurting established feelings” resonated so much with my colleagues as a strategy to create alliances with scientists and engineers. In my naive rebelliousness, that phrase sounded like a conformist attitude. I wondered if, in exchange for maintaining a “good” relationship, we wouldn’t be giving up the best of what we have as social scientists—our critical capacity. In my master’s degree fieldwork with biohacker scientists, I was surrounded by people who, from within their disciplines, sought to produce science in more open and democratic ways. Maybe that’s why it took me a while to realize that a posture based only on confronting and denouncing the ills of technoscience is fruitless, as it produces an alienating and perverse result: it hides from us, people who research from the human sciences, our responsibility as co-inhabitants of this same space where the scientists we are denouncing.
Complaints are important, yes, and we have lists of them on the tip of our tongues. But Stengers, Haraway, and so many other feminists concerned with technoscience point to the importance of not stopping there. Recognizing our responsibility as co-inhabitants of the scientific knowledge production system is also learning to establish and maintain dialogues, however difficult they may be. And they are. Difficult, tiring, and frustrating. However, the possibility of establishing alliances around common knowledge is also a strategy to keep producing science from joy, as proposed by Stengers (2015) when claiming that the taste for thinking is only possible through encounters capable of increasing our power of understanding, action, and thinking. The trap can also be a bridge to establish such alliances without, at first, hurting established feelings.
The first time that the trap was presented to me as a possible tool for thought-action was when I participated with a group of friends in the speculative anthropology project called FICT, at the University of Osaka. In the group were artists and people from letters, history, and anthropology. The objective was to produce “artifacts” from different timelines, different possibilities created from a fictitious past event: the Black Death had killed many more people, and the European colonial enterprise of the 16th century had failed. Thinking about it was not only challenging, but also quite painful. We were living a pandemic ourselves, with a denialist government, and many people close to us were suffering. But beyond that, the starting point of the project struck us as somewhat violent. By proposing a non-colonial reality, we were forced to think of a world without us, people whose full-life identity comes precisely from the fact that we are daughters and sons of colonial violence.
We refuse to think of a world where we do not exist. The story of how science was established in Brazil is precisely the story of how the dominant classes—politically, economically and culturally—tried to deal with the “problem” of miscegenation. Our first scientists were renowned eugenicists. Their busts still rest in white peace on university campuses, and their names baptize streets and buildings throughout Brazil. Our starting point in the project was a rebellion against the suggested starting point, in an affirmation of our uncomfortable existence. We are the incarnate memory of the violence against the land, against the original peoples of our lands and those who were uprooted from the continent of Africa. We are the incarnate memory of (scientific) racism. But how to exist within a project that predicts our non-existence? How to be there, keep occupying space and communicate to those who hope that we don’t exist that yes, despite everything we are here?
It was Joana Cabral, an anthropologist who works with the Amazonian Wajãpi people, who proposed the trap as a way of occupying the crossroads we were at. Our issue was a communication issue. We needed to communicate the existence of something that shouldn’t exist in the cosmopolitics we were in, but that did exist. Something present but invisible. I believe that this thought was the trigger for Joana to remember the Amerindian traps, especially the trap to “catch” the caipora, an entity from Tupi-Guarani mythology, inhabitant of the forest and owner of all hunt, with whom hunters must negotiate to catch their prey. Such traps were described by Joana as beautiful pieces braided in straw, positioned along the dense forest in the places where caipora usually frequent. The capture system is quite simple: enchanted by the beauty of the piece, the caipora’s attention turns completely to the moths, and their curiosity to learn more about the braid makes them stay there, undoing the braids. Thus, caipora “waste time” in the trap, while people gain time to move through the forest more safely.
At the same time that it holds the caipora’s attention, the trap also communicates its existence to those who walk unaware. We finally managed to make our artifact, a kind of dream diary where we report receiving dream knowledge about how to manage having a party where the most different people can be at. Thus, we seek to face colonialism not as a historical period, but as an entity, a drive from which we will not be able to get rid of—just as we exist, the colonial impetus also exists, persists, and is alive among us. The making of the trap revealed to us that in order to be able to capture, we ourselves need to become aware of our diverse prey conditions.
But the perception of our prey condition cannot be paralyzing. Our malice can certainly enable us to escape from some traps set for us—but not all, never. My proposal is that we cultivate the necessary calm and attention to walk in more or less safe territory, but, at the same time that we perceive ourselves captured and entangled, we are also capable of designing and setting our own traps to make the issues that we formulate capable of going through the academic toughness. Traps capable of opening and sustaining impossible dialogues. What I propose is an insurgent counterattack, or counterspell, to stay with Stengers. It’s a kind of low-intensity direct action, a guerrilla strategy to keep producing scientific knowledge. And so that we can protect our vulnerabilities, remain with joy in the process. It is important to repeat: the trap is not only something to be avoided, but also to be produced. We need to take ownership of capture technologies, collectivize them, and scale them up.
Caceres, Rafael Rodrigues; Sales, Adriana Oliveira de. Memória e feitura de armadilhas Guaraní Ñandeva. II Seminário Internacional Etnologia Guarani: redes de conhecimento e colaborações, 2019.
Beer, Stafford. Designing freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1974.
Gell, Alfred. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” Journal of Material Culture, v. 1, p. 15-38, 1996.
Haraway, D. “Localized Knowledge: The Question of Science for Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (Autumn 1988): 575-599.
Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. New York: Cornell University, 1986.
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008..
Stengers, I. In Catastrophic Times Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
___________. The Invention of Modern Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
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On Monday I submitted grades, and this afternoon I reviewed my teaching evaluations. That closes the books on my 14th year as a college professor. I am currently 42 years old, so by my math, I have been doing this for roughly one-third of my life. That is strange to think about! I’ve been a higher ed teacher for longer than I myself was in higher ed, and longer than I was in public schools. Over the next couple years, I will be going through a major evaluation, so I’m in a reflective mood. Obviously the way I’ve chosen to live my life indicates that learning is very important to me. What have I learned?
Other than a two-year period as visiting faculty at Kalamazoo College, my entire teaching career has been spent as part of the Shimer Great Books program, first at the independent school in Chicago and subsequently at North Central College. As I’ve written many times before, that program has a very distinctive ethos. All of our courses are discussion-based seminars based on important primary sources — no textbooks, no lectures, no high-stakes in-class exams. Since joining North Central I have been called upon to teach outside the Shimer program and have needed to fold lecture-based pedagogy back into some courses, but the discussion model remains my center of gravity. My goal is always, somehow, to get as close as I can to the day where my students can sit in a circle and talk open-endedly about what they’ve read.
This consistent pedagogical training has had a huge impact on me as a person. First of all, it has mellowed me out. I am still in many ways the irritable and impatient person that this blog made infamous when I was in my 20s, but that part of myself comes out much more rarely, and essentially never with students or colleagues. I’ve always been interested in some kind of intellectual community, but engaging with my students in extended dialogue day after day, year after year, brought home to me how much culvitating that community is an act of service and care. I was and still am attracted to the “sage on stage” model (which I am able to indulge periodically in invited lectures), but the kind of teaching I’ve been called upon to do has forced me to to stay more in the background, facilitating the process of other people working through ideas rather than showing off what I have figured out. This has led me to claim that I’m one of the only male academics out there who knows how to shut up and listen to others.
But it’s not just about listening. I decided early on that I would always be honest and straightforward about my own viewpoint and interpretation, whenever it seems appropriate to share. I find it off-putting and arrogant when professors proudly announce that, for instance, they want students to be able to get to the end of the semester not knowing whether they’re an atheist or a believer, or a Democrat or Republican. When I put forward a particular interpretation of the text — supported by textual evidence, of course! — my students set to work assessing it for themselves using those same means. Often I learn that my reading is half-baked and I need to go back to the drawing board. I’ve never had a student adopt my viewpoint because it was my viewpoint. This experience makes it hard for me to take seriously the idea that students are or could be indoctrinated in college.
That being said, I don’t think it’s boastful to say that I know a lot about a surprising range of topics. That’s the other side of the Great Books curriculum — since the center of authority is the class materials rather than the professor, scholarly expertise is not only unnecessary but can be a positive obstacle. I’ve spent most of my career at Shimer teaching outside my areas of expertise, and I’ve always found it pedagogically helpful for me to be learning alongside the students.
In fact, a big part of our training was to literally be learning alongside the students, by auditing courses. My first semester at Shimer College also marked my return to the classroom as a student, where I sat in on Humanities 1: Art and Music. Fine arts topics have since become a staple of my teaching, as I try to incorporate some art and music into every course where it’s halfway plausible. It’s been incredibly rewarding to reconnect with classical music and to gain a deeper appreciation for painting and sculpture. As a direct result of these teaching experiences, I am now a regular at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and I have the holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago virtually memorized.
The Shimer program pushed me to develop a whole new teaching competence in Islam, which is now becoming a scholarly interest for me as well. It gave me the unique opportunity to teach courses in the history of science, including actual labs — how many theology PhDs can say they have taught lab science courses? It has broadened and deepend my knowledge of the classics of the Western tradition and pushed me to engage with the classics of other traditions as well. I left grad school as a committed generalist, but my teaching has transformed me into what I consider a truly educated person — not just someone who happens to know a lot, but someone who has learned how to learn in a wide and expanding number of areas. As My Esteemed Partner characterizes my approach to teaching, my motto is, “I haven’t taught that — yet!”
That experience of broad and deep learning and the genuine satisfaction and joys it brings has in turn looped back to my teaching. I may have a special knack for this kind of thing, but I believe everyone can become an open-ended sincere learner and that they deserve the chance to do so. At the old Shimer College, we had students of all ability levels, and everyone who took the process seriously grew as a thinker and as a person — “it works if you work it.”
We had the advantage back then of working with a self-selecting group of students who had opted into a particular kind of intellectual culture. Now we have to work harder to reach students who might be simply checking off a box, who might even resent more traditionally academic classes as an unnecessary waste of time when all they want to do is get a job. I haven’t found the secret formula by any means, but I do manage to reach some — to connect them with a part of themselves that is curious and interested and therefore interesting as well. Sometimes I feel like I’m putting out so much energy that I’m shaving days or weeks off my life expectancy, but enough students seem to find my performance of intellectual curiosity compelling that my classes can basically work as sites of some kind of inquiry — even that oddball gen-ed senior seminar that half of them were told was going to be about sprucing up your resume and practicing mock interviews but turns out to be a study of utopian and dystopian futures.
I don’t want to paint an unrealistically rosy picture. There are bad days in class and just plain bad classes. There is drudgery and conflict and stress and precarity and status anxiety and all manner of disappointments and frustrations that I have not yet learned to handle with as much grace and dignity as I’d like. But I’m still collecting regular paychecks, against all odds, and still living the life I’ve always wanted to live.
great books
akotsko
My last post feels like a lifetime ago, along with the positive hopeful attitude it reflects. The end of the the semester is always a sprint, but it has become much moreso now that I have taken on a faculty governance role that entails participation in faculty meetings and Board meetings. I feel drained, exhausted, and irritable. But soon it will be over, and I will be able to experience my first “normal” summer in many years — uninterrupted stretches of time to devote to activities primarily of my own choosing. Between the pandemic, buying a house, and then doing a ton of travel, this hasn’t happened in a while. Other than the pandemic, all of those things were net positives for my life, yet they didn’t represent the kind of recharge and regroup I’ve thought of as a normal part of my annual routine.
This summer, we’re planning only one trip, to the UK, taking advantage of a conference invitation. There I will be presenting some initial research drawing parallels between the Apostle Paul and the Qur’an — which I believe to be a genuinely novel scholarly niche I’ve discovered. Before the conference, we will hang out in Edinburgh, then we will spend a weekend in London before heading back home. And then, aside from a weekend trip or two, I will be settled at home for the entire summer — a prospect I am relishing.
Obviously I have to prep for classes somewhat over the summer. For two of them, that shouldn’t be a problem. I am offering Logic and Critical Thinking through the philosophy department for a second year in a row. The first iteration was successful, and I have good notes that should make an updated syllabus the work of an afternoon. I also have the unique opportunity to teach a half-semester Honors Seminar on Watchmen, covering both the original comics and the HBO series. Reviewing those works and some of the critical literature on them should not be burdensome. Finally, I’m offering Shimer’s seminar course on logic and math for the first time — something I only wanted to take on once I had the standard textbook approach to logic under my belt. A retired colleagues has offered to work with me on that and give me some guidance in how to organize and run the class, which due to the subject matter tends to be more structured than our typical free-wheeling discussions. I’m hoping that working through some Aristotle and Euclid at first hand will lay more groundwork for me to eventually return to Hegel’s Logic — I have a book on Hegel and Aristotle pencilled in for my winter break reading.
My biggest project will be a book on Star Trek, for a University of Minnesota Press series on franchise storytelling co-edited by Gerry Canavan and Ben Robertson. I plan for it to be a relatively short work, somewhere between the length of Why We Love Sociopaths and Neoliberalism’s Demons. I am taking a somewhat unusual approach. Most scholarly overviews of Star Trek focus on the foundational moment of The Original Series and the huge popularity and cultural impact of The Next Generation, then conclude with a decline narrative as subsequent spin-offs enjoyed less commercial and creative success. Often the last nail in the coffin is the hated prequel series Enterprise, which is regarded as a total creative dead end.
I’m taking a different approach and actually starting with Enterprise, viewing it as the beginning of a new era for Star Trek — an era in which it becomes much more self-conscious of its status as a franchise, more self-referential, and increasingly obsessed with returning to its foundational moments. My chapter outline is as follows (with an intro and conclusion, of course):
The goal is to use what I call “late Star Trek” as a model for the challenges and opportunities that franchise storytelling opens up, as well as the obstacles and deadlocks that model inevitably confronts. And since this is Star Trek, I will naturally have to address the ways that commercial imperatives distort or contradict the franchise’s anti-capitalist post-scarcity ethos and the unexpected directions this famously “optimistic” and even “utopian” franchise takes its social commentary. I have actually managed to keep up some semblance of a research routine even in these extremely busy weeks, so I have some good momentum here — and it’s obviously a topic I am quite passionate about and have been thinking about a lot.
My hope is to have a full manuscript to submit by the end of summer vacation, though I don’t think it would be a big deal if I wound up taking a little longer. And because I am a weird person with a unique lifestyle, this whole process does not stress me out or intimidate me in any way. I am genuinely looking forward to it. I miss writing, and this is both a “fun one” and a labor of love. If I don’t point out the genuine artistic achievements of Enterprise, who will? Literally no one, that’s who!
And more than that, I am hopeful that this will help me continue my journey toward feeling more like “myself” after some really hard years marked by a lot of stress and uncertainty and some pretty serious burnout. Some of those things will obviously continue — I have one more year of meeting-o-rama due to this governance role, and my Shimer colleagues and I are going through back-to-back years of evaluations to finally regularize our faculty status at North Central after a long probationary period — but I hope I can regrow some resilience through a period of relative solitude and self-directed creative work.
So there you have it! Maybe not the best blog post I could have written, but I feel like I have to put some points on the board to keep up with Beatrice’s Substack, to which all AUFS readers will definitely want to subscribe.
beach-read
akotsko
After months, and perhaps years, of cajoling and haranguing the Hayseed Scholar, friend of the pod (episode14) Matt McDonald finally convinced Brent to turn the tables and become a guest on the podcast.
Matt interviewed Brent at the end of the International Studies Association conference in Montreal, in Matt’s hotel room.
Over a few beers and with much good cheer, they chat about Brent’s growing up in Iowa, attending Chicago Bears games as a kid, having two teachers as parents, and how golf shaped his college decision-making. They discuss Brent’s journey through graduate school, the PhD, and his positions at the University of Kansas and now the University of Utah.
Often pounding the table like some 1930s-era dictator, Brent talks about what the tenure process was like for him at KU, the difficult (but also life-changing) move to Utah, walking with Chase pups for all kinds of reasons, how he approaches writing, and how he unwinds and recharges by going back to Iowa and seeing his family.
Matt and Brent first connected in 2010 when Brent reached out to Matt about his IPS article. That leads to a discussion about how and why Brent sent those complimentary emails to scholars.
A number of F-bombs were dropped. Razzing of Jelena Subotic, Tony Lang, and Chris Agius ensued. Friend of the pod and special guest Cian O’Driscoll made an appearance towards the end of the conversation. It’s a whirlwind discussion, and one Brent remains self-conscious about. But it was also a rewarding experience.
FreshRSS 