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The “literature review” as “symbolic violence” and “epistemic theft”

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEBRUARY 28–AN INTERESTING, AND OFTEN AMUSING, SET OF COMMENTS, BUT ALSO SOME DEFENSES OF THE AUTHORS

I came across this curious abstract from the Applied Linguistics Review on Twitter:

Literature review becomes violent in the Bourdieusian sense because it imposes particular configurations of privileged knowledge on researchers. Thus, in this paper, we argue that literature review is an enactment of symbolic violence and, in the process, epistemic theft, and central to this practice is the construction of research questions. Literature review, as a site of scholarly conversations, dictates the kinds of questions we ask, thus unwittingly framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies.

Discuss.

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44 responses to “The “literature review” as “symbolic violence” and “epistemic theft””

  1. Gregory C. Mayer

    A parody?

    Reply
  2. John Rapko

    Nothing says 'symbolic violence' like being forced to read things on Twitter.

    Reply
  3. Jason Brennan

    I will interpret this as a modus tolens. I used to think non-defensive violence was presumptively wrong, but then I learned literature reviews are violence, so I thereby learned at least one from of non-defensive violence is presumptively good.

    Reply
  4. Dave B

    It looks to me like a Bourdieusian exercise in modern critical theory where the language and writing style are so alienating, and the claims so exaggerated, that nobody uninitiated in the cult would take the time or effort to determine if there's a reasonable point in there somewhere.

    Reply
  5. Brian Leiter

    I think there is an interesting point, about the creative role of the "literature review" in constructing a debate, but the odd jargon is indeed an obstacle!

    Reply
  6. Vicky L Brandt

    Let’s deconstruct the abstract. The first sentence is true and obvious. The second sentence gets off to a bad start with a very curious claim that the “central aim” of writing a review is “to demonstrate one’s knowledge.” No: the central aim of a review is to introduce readers to a field and point to questions that remain to be answered, alternative hypotheses that could explain the phenomena equally well, etc. They are typically read by graduate students, postdocs, and others who are relatively new to a given area of study and looking for an overview to structure their initial foray into a new field.

    In the biomedical sciences, journals will request authors they find to be reliable and interesting to write a review; this offer is most often rejected, because experienced scientists realize the difficulty of writing a great review as well as the fact that reviews don’t count as much for their cv as original research. Inexperienced faculty may think a review would be a good opportunity for their graduate student or postdoc to gain experience writing, but this is nearly always a mistake: a review worth reading requires perspective, which comes from being steeped in the field for many years. The mentor thus usually ends up having to redo the whole thing after the poor trainee has produced a draft that reveals only how much they don’t understand; hopefully everyone learns their lesson and gains a deeper respect for the difficulty of a good review.

    Granted, some scientists don’t take the responsibility that seriously, so there are mediocre reviews that fail to offer any insight but technically fulfill the journal's request. Some authors may agree to write a review to get their own work out into the world, but biased reviews don’t pass editorial or reviewer standards. Thus, even if the author is motivated solely by self-interest, to be successful they are still going to have to do a good job, and the criteria for a good review are as tough to meet as those for any other work of scholarship.

    The third sentence, that any literature “imposes” anything on anyone, seems patently ridiculous—literature can influence, yes, but part of our work as scholars is to analyze, question, wonder, pursue other trains of thought. This, in fact, is what the authors of this paper do: they set out on a project they thought would be straightforward, and as they got into the literature they realized certain assumptions had been made. They responded by reconceptualizing their project. So far, so normal. The fact that they reach the conclusions one would predict from their tortured abstract only goes to show that good methodology is no defense against bad ideology.

    Reply
  7. Vicky L Brandt

    To clarify: I'm referring to the full abstract, not the tweeted excerpt.

    Reply
  8. Gabriel Gottlieb

    Wait until you read their paper on abstracts.

    Reply
  9. Jeffrey Ketland

    Einstein, as a pacifist, cited no literature at all in his 1905 special relativity paper. He just thanked his friend.

    Reply
  10. Ludovic M

    It seems the semantic application so dilutes the definition of violence as to make it recursive in the sense of an endless—in this case psychological & physiological—loop without which humankind cannot effectively think or act. Is there ever a day when one doesn't experience an
    aggressive response, even if only latent?

    Reply
  11. witters

    Whatever the jargon, I hate the standard "LR". A Critical Notice, well done, is useful, but the usual LR is tedious, and so often is more name-checking than real thought.

    Reply
  12. Dean C. Rowan

    All good until "deconstruct." Don't you mean "analyze" or "interpret"?

    I'm just happy to learn that any violence is merely symbolic.

    Reply
  13. Johnny Eh MacDonald

    "It seems the semantic application so dilutes the definition of violence as to make it recursive in the sense of an endless—in this case psychological & physiological—loop without which humankind cannot effectively think or act. Is there ever a day when one doesn't experience an aggressive response, even if only latent?".

    Is the concept of symbolic violence doing violence to the concept of violence?

    Alternatively, sociologists claiming that there's this phenomenon of symbolic violence itself an instance of symbolic violence when they ram it down their students' throats or foist it upon the public?

    Reply
  14. V. Alan White

    Analysis has done this sort of thing and I've found it extremely useful. Now is this an argument for doing it in esperanto or something of the like? I wish I were kidding in even asking this given this seemingly serious piece.

    Reply
  15. praymont

    I felt violated by the final words of the text: "This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." Who licenses, and what are those thus subjected to the license forbidden to do?

    Reply
  16. AnonymousC

    "Literature review, as a site of scholarly conversations, dictates the kinds of questions we ask, thus unwittingly framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies."

    Why "unwittingly"? Isn't the framing the point?

    Reply
  17. S C

    Plain and simple: the point of citing a large swath of the literature about a topic, especially early in a paper, is to convince the reviewer that the author should be taken seriously. Or, more precisely, to convince the reviewer not to dismiss the author as an ignorant amateur, which is probably the reviewer's default position.

    Reply
  18. Maybe not violent, but still an exercise of social power

    Looking at the beginning of the paper, I think what the authors mean by "literature review" isn't so much the thing that appears as or in a published paper, but rather the *activity* of learning one's way around "the literature." So S C's comment seems on point, at least in spirit: "the literature" is what you have to show you know you're way around in order to be admitted to the conversation, in order to be taken seriously as an interlocutor. Granted, talk of "violence" seems overblown. But it's eminently clear that the word is being used as a technical term (compare the use of "rational" as a technical term in economics). And the second part of the title of the paper—"the imperative to ask new questions"—points, as Brian says, in the direction of an interesting point: even if "violence" isn't it, we should perhaps have *some* word for what's done to people who are ridiculed and belittled for having learned the "wrong" literature (or having chosen the wrong field of study entirely?).

    Reply
  19. Aaron Maltais

    Framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies = violence. Framing our research according to the epistemic demands of some other past and recent research studies we like better = good (there is after all a reference list in this paper). Presumably they are not suggesting that we should frame our research questions in relation to future and as of yet not written studies.

    Reply
  20. StevieB

    So when it comes to whooping ass, the pen really is mightier than the sword.

    Reply
  21. Charles Pigden

    Do you think of your discipline as a cooperative/competitive enterprise that has evolved to track the truth wrt some range of phenomena, where the truth is a relatively objective affair? Do you think that its procedures, though fallible, and sometime biased are at least moderately successful in tracking those objective truths? Then a literature review can be immensely useful, distinguishing those questions about which a reasonable consensus has been reached from those that are controversial (no consensus but rival views) and those that are open (no consensus and no well developed rival theories either). A literature review can tell you what is likely to be worth investigating: less so, those topics on which reasonable consensus had been arrived at (since you risk reinventing the wheel); more so, those questions that either controversial or open. Furthermore the review can give you the wherewithal to challenge the consensus if you think that it is not as reasonable as it is widely supposed to be, since a good review will explain the reasons why it *is* the current consensus. A review can even be useful in indicating unexplored avenues of enquiry: ‘Suppose that we are right about Y. This raises the following question Y, that nobody seems to be interested in. That’s the topic for my thesis!’

    But suppose that you think of ‘true’ as a kind of honorific that is bestowed upon theories that have (perhaps temporarily) won out in the ideological struggle. Your discipline is only *trivially* truth-tracking since there are no objective truths to track, ‘true’ being defined in terms the beliefs of the (current) winners. Then a literature review is a sort of map of where we are in an ongoing power-struggle. It tells you what kinds of intellectual moves are forbidden, which are permitted, which are encouraged and which are discouraged. It can help you to distinguish between high-risk/high reward strategies (‘You would really be going our on a limb here, but if you manage to pull it off you could win big time’) from low risk/low reward strategies (‘Well you are not going to get in any trouble for saying X, since it what big-shot Y has been arguing for years, but you are not going get many brownie points for saying it either’). Does this mean that a literature review *in itself* constitutes a sort of power-play within the discipline? The point is moot. By mapping out the current state of play a literature review *might* provide useful information for radicals and subversives. (‘This is what you need to do if you want undermine the current consensus.’) But it could be regarded as reinforcing the intellectual power of the currently powerful, and this I think is how the authors of the article tend to see it. Dissidence may be a high reward strategy, but it is also high risk, and academics, being on the whole rather timid folk, are not likely to employ it. Thus the information that a certain kind of move is currently discouraged will tend to discourage it even more.

    It is now one short step to the idea that a literature review constitutes an act of violence. Suppose that the exercise of power is inherently violent, particularly when it involves such things as forbidding, discouraging or ignoring (silencing). The literature review reports such forbiddings discouragings and silencings, thereby reinforcing them. Therefore it constitutes an act of violence.

    Reply
  22. AnonymousC

    "Dissidence may be a high reward strategy, but it is also high risk, and academics, being on the whole rather timid folk, are not likely to employ it. Thus the information that a certain kind of move is currently discouraged will tend to discourage it even more."

    Yes but isn't the idea of "transgressing the boundaries" sufficiently accepted as a move/motto that dissidence is acceptable within the field? Are certain moves really being discouraged that much?

    Reply
  23. Dave B

    I have questions about academic disciplines, canons, consensus, conventions and the like, and believe academics and others should seriously consider these issues, but–as someone who has not read that kind of jargon-heavy social theory for a long time and is more familiar with how "analytic" philosophers talk–the language and the extremity of the positions in that abstract are a big turn off.

    But suppose an academic discipline is "an ongoing power-struggle" and that "the exercise of power is inherently violent," and suppose an academic in a social science discipline–or in philosophy or elsewhere–believes that. How then do they conceive of their role as an academic? (I am not an academic.) Why would someone be an academic if they believe it's mostly just a violent power struggle? Do they not have something better to do, a better power-struggle to engage in, or at least one that does its violence in a way more likely to have affects on people's material well-being? And if they disapprove of all the symbolic violence within academia, and don't just want the power themselves to commit their own violence, why not instead get a more fun or relatively harmless job? Do they think that they're not also committing symbolic violence in their own work, or do they think that if they commit enough of the right kind of symbolic violence "from below" they will transform academia into something without heirarchy or power relations? Or are they too just players in the academic game, adopting the words and using the concepts that the powerful academics (like Pierre Bourdieu) themselves introduced and used, in order to further their careers and acquire personal power?

    I'm not just trying to be snarky.

    Reply
  24. Charles Pigden

    Well, to come clean, I suspect that there are some disciplines and subdisciplines, particularly in the Humanities, that correspond roughly to my caricature, not because there are no truths to track in their respective domains, but because the relevant disciplinary norms are no longer even moderately successful in tracking them. In such corrupt subdisciplines it may be cool to be ‘transgressive’ but such ‘transgressive’ scholarship probably does not transgress against the norms of the subdisicipline or sub-disciplinary sect in question. The high-risk strategy *there* would be to argue that the whole idea of transgressive scholarship is simply silly, politically reactionary in its effects and unlikely to lead to the discovery of significant truths. Thus if you buy into the bullshit about enacting violence, a literature review describing the state of play in such a sub-discipline might be said to enact violence against those who transgress against the norm of transgressivity .

    Reply
  25. s. wallerstein

    Maybe I'm missing something, but in literary studies (I majored in English and got an MA many years ago) there are certain conventions and ways of approaching a text that just about everyone abides by.

    Is that violence?

    Are table manners violence? When you sit down to eat a meal with others, there are lots of conventions, some of them rational like not spitting and many of them completely arbitrarily like eating your peas with a fork not a spoon when it's easier to eat them with a spoon.

    That's not violence. Ask the folks in Gaza what violence is.

    Seriously, there is a according to many a genocide going on in Gaza or at least a slaughter of civilians and somebody is worried that following certain conventions (which undoubtedly have to do with power dynamics, but not all exercise of power is violence) is violence.

    Reply
  26. Howard

    Though new to this debate, I'd draw from my experience as an MFA student in a program I was lucky to attend having some talent and not much background in theory.
    The idea was to workshop pieces having to do with people and life.
    My teachers, not to name names, had a profound knowledge of life and the people in it as well as the craft, and had wise, helpful things to say.
    They could outthink easily in concentric circles, the jargon in the sample above, which I don't bother to quote.
    Life and people and yes words are the thing itself.
    When you lose sight of that, the jargon becomes babble.

    Reply
  27. Ludovic M

    Isn't every instance of Bourdieusian violence arguably just as well an instance of counterviolence? E.g. from the point of view of the 'Founding Fathers,' a prophylaxis against the "violence of the mob."

    Reply
  28. Charles Pigden

    Dear Dave B,
    You ask:

    1) ’Why would someone be an academic if they believe it's mostly just a violent power struggle?
    2) Do they not have something better to do, a better power-struggle to engage in, or at least one that does its violence in a way more likely to have effects on people's material well-being?
    3) And if they disapprove of all the symbolic violence within academia, and don't just want the power themselves to commit their own violence, why not instead get a more fun or relatively harmless job?
    4) Do they think that they're not also committing symbolic violence in their own work, or do they think that if they commit enough of the right kind of symbolic violence "from below" they will transform academia into something without hierarchy or power relations?
    5) Or are they too just players in the academic game, adopting the words and using the concepts that the powerful academics (like Pierre Bourdieu) themselves introduced and used, in order to further their careers and acquire personal power?’

    These are excellent questions to which I do not have the answers. I was trying to a characterise a conception of academic enquiry that makes some sense of Tupas and Tarrayo’s bizarre views. It is not a conception to which I subscribe. If my analysis of their argument is correct, ANY setting or resetting of research agendas counts as symbolic violence since it will encourage some lines of research and discourage others. But perhaps the Tupas and Tarrayo think that symbolic violence is justified in the service of the right kind revolution, and that by denouncing the authors of literature reviews as perpetrators of epistemic violence, they will pave the way for a more permissive and inclusive disciplinary situation in which a hundred progressive flowers are permitted to bloom. They write: ‘This does not in any way invalidate the usefulness of literature review, only that we need to be critically aware of what it does to us as we practice it. We must constantly question ‘knowledge’ that we recognize and erase, resist the temptation of yielding to dominant frames of understanding our ‘field’, and (re) imagine alternative tracks in pursuing what constitutes legitimate knowledge in our own research areas.’
    Unkind critics would probably suggest that they are they are just trying to establish a new regime in which *their* agendas rule the academic roost. (What is particularly telling is that the Tupas and Tarrayo) write in what I would describe as sort of pseudo-leftist, post-modern jargon which I do not speak myself and which takes for granted a range of theses with which I would disagree – for instance that there is nothing more to truth than what is accepted as such – thus excluding me (and others like me) from *their* conversation. Thus they speak the language of a new orthodoxy not of no orthodoxy whatsoever.) In fact Tupas and Tarrayo *do* want to discourage a particular lie of research – they want discourage research into into national Englishes – Thai English, Philippines English, New Zealand English etc – a) because they think that they are just social constructs rather than real things, and b) because Filipino English speakers allegedly don’t recognise themselves as speaking a particular dialect. (If this is true, which I very much doubt, then Filipino English speakers have a lot less self-knowledge than almost any other English speakers that I have ever met. I am well aware for instance that *I* speak an a blend of English English (specifically the English of South-East England with a Cambridge-educated but lower-middle -class accent ), Australian English and New Zealand English with a top-dressing of American English, due to the dominance of American culture and the many American colleagues that I have had contact with down the years. I say ‘I guess’ where once would have said ‘I suppose’ and ’gotten’ when once I would have said ‘got’, I pronounce ‘route’ to rhyme with ‘shout’ rather that ‘root’, and I use the words ‘ratbag’ (for a personality-type) and ‘duchess’ (as a verb) which I often have to explain to non-Australians. I use ‘bigot’ and ‘bigoted’ to describe the way people hold their opinions rather than the opinions themselves, so that for me, though not for some Americans, ‘He is bigoted believer in diversity and inclusivity’ is not a contradiction in terms. Like many New Zealanders I will casually sprinkle my discourse with Maori expressions and like an educated Englishman I will use Latin and French phrases in some contexts. In short I am a cosmopolitan English speaker but my cosmopolitan English is derived from regional roots.)
    However, it may be that all this conceptual huff-puffing on the part of Tupas and Tarrayo is designed to give a sort of faux profundity to the relatively banal point that the speech habits of English-speaking Filipinos are rather more diverse than the phrase ‘Philippine English’ might lead you to suppose, that there are many Philippine Englishes just there are many English Englishes and American Englishes, and that educated elites tend to switch between different versions of English according to context. The idea that this No-Shit-Sherlock thesis is *excluded* by the current consensus in as embodied in literature reviews seem to me wildly unlikely, but if you want to make a big deal out of the banal, one way of doing it is to suggest that your banal idea is being violently suppressed. Of course the fact that that there is more than one version of Philippines English does not mean that Philippines English cannot be distinguished from New Zealand English. The accents are different and speaker of Zealand English will employ Maori expressions in everyday speech whereas speaker of Philippine English (especially if they are from Metro Manila) are likely to lapse into Tagalog.

    Reply
  29. Charles Pigden

    Lord, I totally suck as a typist and proof-reader! Here is my post again, hopefully minus typos.

    Dear Dave B,
You ask:
    1) ’Why would someone be an academic if they believe it's mostly just a violent power struggle? 
2) Do they not have something better to do, a better power-struggle to engage in, or at least one that does its violence in a way more likely to have effects on people's material well-being? 
3) And if they disapprove of all the symbolic violence within academia, and don't just want the power themselves to commit their own violence, why not instead get a more fun or relatively harmless job? 
4) Do they think that they're not also committing symbolic violence in their own work, or do they think that if they commit enough of the right kind of symbolic violence "from below" they will transform academia into something without hierarchy or power relations? 
5) Or are they too just players in the academic game, adopting the words and using the concepts that the powerful academics (like Pierre Bourdieu) themselves introduced and used, in order to further their careers and acquire personal power?’
    These are excellent questions to which I do not have the answers. I was trying to a characterise a conception of academic enquiry that makes some sense of Tupas and Tarrayo’s bizarre views. It is not a conception to which I subscribe. If my analysis of their argument is correct, ANY setting or resetting of research agendas counts as symbolic violence since it will encourage some lines of research and discourage others. But perhaps Tupas and Tarrayo think that symbolic violence is justified in the service of the right kind of Revolution, and that by denouncing the authors of literature reviews as perpetrators of epistemic violence, they will pave the way for a more permissive and inclusive disciplinary situation in which a hundred progressive flowers will be permitted to bloom. They write: ‘This does not in any way invalidate the usefulness of literature review, only that we need to be critically aware of what it does to us as we practice it. We must constantly question ‘knowledge’ that we recognize and erase, resist the temptation of yielding to dominant frames of understanding our ‘field’, and (re)imagine alternative tracks in pursuing what constitutes legitimate knowledge in our own research areas.’ 
Unkind critics would probably suggest that they are they are just trying to establish a new regime in which *their* agendas rule the academic roost. (What is particularly telling is that the Tupas and Tarrayo write in what I would describe as sort of pseudo-leftist, post-modern jargon which I do not speak myself and which takes for granted a range of theses with which I would disagree – for instance that there is nothing more to truth than what is accepted as such – thus excluding me (and others like me) from *their* conversation. [It also excludes non-elite speakers who have not learned how to talk this pretentious style of talk.] Thus Tupas and Tarrayo speak the language of a NEW orthodoxy not of no orthodoxy whatsoever.)
    In fact Tupas and Tarrayo *do* want to discourage a particular line of research – they want discourage research into into national Englishes – Thai English, Philippines English, New Zealand English etc – a) because they think that they are just social constructs rather than real things, and b) because Filipino English speakers allegedly don’t recognise themselves as speaking a particular dialect.
    (If this is true, which I very much doubt, then Filipino English speakers have a lot less self-knowledge than almost any other English speakers that I have ever met. I am well aware for instance that *I* speak an a blend of English English (specifically the English of South-East England with a Cambridge-educated but lower-middle -class accent), Australian English and New Zealand English with a top-dressing of American English, due to the dominance of American culture and the many American colleagues that I have had contact with down the years. I now say ‘I guess’ where once would have said ‘I suppose’ and 'gotten’ when once I would have said ‘got’, I pronounce ‘route’ to rhyme with ‘shout’ rather that ‘root’, and I use the words ‘ratbag’ (for a personality-type) and ‘duchess’ (as a verb) which I often have to explain to non-Australians. I use ‘bigot’ and ‘bigoted’ to describe the way people hold their opinions rather than the opinions themselves, so that for me, though not for some Americans, ‘He is a bigoted believer in diversity and inclusivity’ is not a contradiction in terms. Like many New Zealanders I will casually sprinkle my discourse with Maori expressions and like an educated Englishman I will use Latin and French phrases in some contexts (sans phrase, de rigueur, inter alia, longueurs, etc etc). In short, I am a cosmopolitan English speaker but my cosmopolitan English is derived from regional roots.) 
However, it may be that all this conceptual huff-puffing on the part of Tupas and Tarrayo is designed to give a sort of faux profundity to the relatively banal point that the speech habits of English-speaking Filipinos are rather more diverse than the phrase ‘Philippine English’ might lead you to suppose, that there are many Philippine Englishes just there are many English Englishes and American Englishes, and that educated elites tend to switch between different versions of English according to context. The idea that this No-Shit-Sherlock thesis is *excluded* by the current consensus as embodied in literature reviews seem to me wildly unlikely, but if you want to make a big deal out of the banal, one way of doing it is to suggest that your banal idea is being violently suppressed. Of course the fact that that there is more than one version of Philippines English does not mean that Philippines English cannot be distinguished from New Zealand English. The accents are different and speakers of New Zealand English will employ Maori expressions in everyday speech whereas speakers of Philippine English (especially if they are from Metro Manila) are likely to lapse into Tagalog. One wonders if anybody ever was so stupid as to suppose that Filipino English speakers use a completely uniform dialect with no regional, class-based or education-based variations, or that Filipinos (especially educated Filipinos used to addressing international audiences) don’t vary their speech patterns according to context. I suspect not, which means that Tupas and Tarrayo are rebels without a cause, since they are complaining about a supposed act of symbolic violence that does not actually exist.

    Reply
  30. John Pillette

    The interesting thing is that these guys are TOEFL instructors, not English/Ethnic Studies professors. That is, their day job is helping speakers of Philippine Vernacular English “colonize themselves”, by teaching them how to sound “white” like me—that is, helping them turn themselves into fluent speakers of Standard International Professional English. Preferably with a transatlantic accent.

    I imagine that most of their students want to be able to move from Manila to someplace like London or Los Angeles and accede to some relatively high-paying job. Some portion of this student cohort may want to go into anglophone academia—but learning the academic jargon *first* is putting the cart before the horse. You can always “de-colonize” yourself later, if need be, and I can’t imagine that taking more than an afternoon to accomplish.

    Does this mean that “Theory” has, like the plague, Ebola, et al., crossed a species barrier and begun to infect the (relatively) unpretentious world of professional communication?

    Reply
  31. s. wallerstein

    "Why would someone be an academic if they believe it's mostly just a violent power struggle?"

    Because any human activity which involves others is going to involve power struggles. Whether it's working in the Red Cross, going to a Zen monastery or an ostensibly harmonious family.

    Someone would have to demonstrate that academic life is especially characterized by power struggles.

    Reply
  32. Barry Loewer

    Sokol redux

    Reply
  33. Dave B

    I too believe that any human activity is going to involve power struggles. When I asked the question, I was thinking that an academic who believes that their discipline is only trivially truth-tracking, since there are no objective truth to track and what is "true" is what the current winners in the academia game believe, will have to think of their role as little more than navigating and making moves in some power-struggles within academic institutions. And if all exercises of power, even symbolic ones, are inherenty violent, then it's quite likely that their own academic work is just committing violence in an ongoing power-struggle and nothing much much more. My question then is: Why not engage in power-struggles that materially affect other people's lives (like working in the Red Cross) or try to minimize the amount of violence you do and seek more personal relaxation (like going to a Zen monastery)? It seem to me that if someone thinks everything inside and outside academia is all just a power-struggle and doing endless violence, the academic power-struggle–on what I take to be their account–is an especially egregious sham because there are no truths to track or real understandings to gain despite that being the pretense of the whole struggle. Since there are lots of power-struggles out that that aren't pretending to be about truth, knowledge, and understanding, and are also more socially useful or, at least, personally satisfying, why would they spend their life fighting that particular power struggle? If it's a battle they find fun, a hollow career that works for them, or they like to express their "cleverness" in an academic setting, I guess that's okay for them, but then they're not–as far as I can see–people with much intellectual or political seriousness.

    (Charles Pidgen and others on here, I assume, believe that academia–whatever its flaws and whatever the power struggles all human activity might involve–aims at the somewhat cooperative pursuit of truth and understanding. There's no mystery to me about how they conceive of their roles as academics or why, in that case, someone would want to be an academic.)

    Reply
  34. Dave B

    Thanks for your reply. I only read the abstract in the twitter post, and what you tell me about the applied linguistics they are trying to do (and your own thoughts and experiences) is helpful. I'm familiar with the view that, crudely put, knowledge is just a social construct and truth a popularity contest, and I realize neither you nor anyone else commenting on Leiter Reports is apt to hold those views even in more sophisticated versions, but since you were willing to charitably interpret the author's ideas I thought you might be able to charitably speculate on their self-conception as academics.

    I also, perhaps with some charity on my part, tend to think academics who use quotes when they talk about knowledge or truth, and who frame academic practices mostly in terms of power and violence, are often parrotting the orthodoxy of their discipline and haven't really thought carefully about what they're saying and its implications. I suspect that–if they took the time to examine and reflect–they might realize that, despite what they say, they haven't really given up entirely on "knowledge" and "truth" and don't think of their work as just struggling over institutional power for what they think are leftist ideological ends.

    Reply
  35. Jack Stone

    It would seem so, but only for whooping 'symbolic' ass.

    Reply
  36. Dean C. Rowan

    This has been a fun and informative conversation, and I don't want to screw it up. I'll only mention that references to "violence" that wander from the specificity of Bourdieu's usage might be of a kind with use of the word in other fora, e.g., critics who condemn the "violence" or "harm" effected by so-called gender-critical feminism (still another vague bit of jargon). At the end of the day, it's purely rhetorical, which doesn't mean that it's pointless.

    Reply
  37. s. wallerstein

    First of all, I did not claim that all exercises of power are inherently violent, but that's not important.

    Second, I did not claim that "everything inside and outside academia is all just a power struggle" and that seems important to our conversation.

    Just as working at the Red Cross is going to involve some power dynamics and some positive changes in the world
    (I think that we can agree about that), so too working in academia involves some power dynamics and some positive changes in the world.

    By the way, we were and are talking about the humanities, I believe. I'm sure that we both can agree that teaching nursing or medicine, while involving some power struggles, can make the world a better place.

    You don't think that teaching Homer or Sophocles or Shakespeare or Nietzsche or Simone de Beauvoir to kids who probably would not otherwise read them is a good thing? For many it's going to go in one ear and out the other of course, but for a few of them their lives are going to be enriched (a vague word, I know) for having read them.

    I believe that good professor in the humanities can make this world a little bit less of a stupid place and I am certainly thankful (at age 77) for certain high school teachers and college professors who made my life a little bit less stupid.

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  38. Charles Pigden

    "Why would someone be an academic if they believe it's mostly just a violent power struggle?"

    Well, Wallerstein, this is Dave B's question not mine! I agree however that most human activities involve power relations and in some cases power struggles. So the emphasis has to be on the 'just'. If academic activity is *nothing but* a violent power struggle, there being no objective truths to discover, then Dave B's questions have critical bite. Why would anyone want to get into *this* one?

    And, if you will forgive me, I don’t think you are quite getting the dialectic here. Nobody thinks that there are no power struggles in academia since these are ubiquitous in human societies. It’s the ‘nothing but’ that most of us deny. Most of us think that there is more to academic enquiry than that, in particular the search after truth. On the other hand what Tupas and Tarrayo SEEM to think (on the most charitable reconstruction) is that there no genuine truths to be discovered so that academic research is *just* an arena for power struggles. If a discipline aims (with moderate success) to discover and communicate important or interesting truths, then nobody on this thread is particularly puzzled about why anyone would go in for it. The problem only arises if (as T&T appear to think) there *are* no objective truths to be discovered or communicated so that the whole thing is *nothing but* a site for the enactment of symbolic violence. *In that case* an academic life begins to look rather unattractive , since even if you are enacting symbolic violence for what you take to be a good cause, there are other arenas in which the exercise of the right kind of symbolic violence is likely to have for more beneficial effects (as for instance in in journalism or politics). So the question is not ’Why would anyone want to be an academic?’. That’s not a puzzler for most of us. The question is ‘Why would anyone want be an academic, if they think of academia as *nothing but* an arena for ritualistic power-plays?’ *That* is indeed a puzzler, and it to that issue that Dave B’s very insightful questions were addressed.

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  39. Dave B

    True. I haven't read my Bourdieu since college, but I'm very confident that he didn't think symbolic violence is like genocide any more than he thought cultural capital could serve as collateral on a loan. And I doubt the authors' of the piece in Applied Linguistics Review think anything like that either. So I have been sloppy. But, like you say, rhetorical uses of terms aren't pointless, and they aren't always "harmless" either (at least in the so-called gender-critical feminist usage.)

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  40. Dave B

    Yes, I do suspect "seem" and "appear to think" might be the case.

    From what I remember when dabbling in critical theory in college, there was some conflation between skepticism about CLAIMS to knowledge and truth, which can indeed be oppressive and ideologically objectionable, and skepticism about knowledge and truth, which are, I think, ideologically unobjectionable. (I was only in high school at the time of the Sokal Hoax, but I read about it later, and I recall part of his point was that people committed to leftist causes should embrace objective truth because it’s on their side, rather than deny it.)

    But if some academics’ rejection of knowledge and truth is more ideological than philosophical, I’m led to wonder just how strong their relevant beliefs are. And if a consequence of that rejection is that their own professional lives would amount to a tiresome power struggle enacting symbolic violence, I’m led to wonder whether they “deep down” believe what they profess to believe.

    Again, I haven’t read the Tupas and Tarray paper, but, ironically, considerations of orthodoxy and power might help explain what’s going on, should I choose (as I try) to think of them as intellectually and politically serious academics. They found, presumably in college, an academic discipline that resonated with them intellectually and politically, and adopted (without, to my mind, enough critical thought, but they were college kids at the time) its orthodoxies and joined the discipline as graduate students and then as professionals. The discipline, like any discipline, incentivizes conforming to and maintaining the basic orthodoxies, or at least not thinking too critically about them lest you start thinking that much the work of you and your colleagues have been doing is very misguided, which could risk bursting some egos including your own. Furthermore, professional advancement depends on at least paying lip service to orthodoxy (as you noted when talking about reward strategies.) Now they’re ensconced in the discipline and, given how the academy is structured, pretty much only talking to people within their own discipline. Add in survivorship bias with respect to people who seriously considered the discipline and its orthodoxies but rejected it (like me in college before I committed to philosophy) or who tried to meaningfully buck orthodoxy within the profession and failed or were spit out, and I can see how it would seem perfectly natural and correct to them to put quotes around truth and knowledge and to yammer on in jargon that frames everything as power struggles and violence. But given how superficial their rejection of truth and knowledge may be, and how that rejection may be belied by their own behaviors and their own commitment to an academic career, I’ll cut them some slack and view them as potential intellectual or political allies who can perhaps be reformed in their attitudes towards truth and knowledge.

    How to reform them, I don’t know. Mocking them outside their presence is good fun but won’t change their minds. (One of my pleasures and comforts in life these days is mocking Republican with my like-minded friends who despise the party, but I don’t start any discussions with Republican themselves with mockery.) A shock to the system like Sokal’s hoax might have seemed promising, but it apparently didn’t work. Elenchus might help, but I don’t know how you’d get them to genuinely engage given all the incentives at play.

    As for philosophical skepticism with respect to knowledge and truth (and normativity and anything else), I have absolutely felt the pull of those arguments, as I imagine others on this thread have too. But for me that leads to aporia and a desire to undermine the skeptical arguments or at least figure out how to manage the skepticism, not to an unskeptical conviction that knowledge and truth are merely constructs and that appeals to them are only power plays.

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  41. s. wallerstein

    Charles Pigden,

    Sorry I clicked on the "answer" button after your comment when I was answering Dave B's comment as well as adding my opinion to the thread in general and to the original post.

    In the future I'll refrain from using the "answer" button because it leads to confusions.

    I do believe that I understood the general idea of the thread (what you call "the dialect") and I was quite clear above in distinguishing between the idea that academic is just a power struggle and that besides being a power struggle, it contains other elements.

    This isn't your classroom (academia as power struggle) and it's Professor Leiter who decides whether comments are pertinent or not.

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  42. Dean C. Rowan

    I was well out of high school when the Sokal hoax hit the fan, and I had vested interests in its revelation. (Well, "vested.") I liked, and still like, Stanley Fish. I continue to appreciate Paul de Man's literary musings. I even selectively enjoy Derrida, but then I am a big fan of creative people whose output far exceeds my capacity to ingest it, musicians in particular. Anybody try to keep up with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Ken Vandermark…? But Sokal's experiment was in bad faith as I view it. Essentially, he figured he could fake bad scholarship in the way impressionists on SNL fake the utterances of celebrities. Everybody applauds, because Dana Carvey was almost indistinguishable from George Bush! Sure, the editors of Social Text screwed up and fell for the impersonation. I'm sure Social Text is the only journal that has ever fallen for a scam.

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  43. Dave B

    Oh, I agree, creative thinkers who make what I consider to be errors, even an awful lot of them or very fundamental ones, still have a lot to offer. That's, I hope, part of thinking of academia (and intellectual pursuit generally, since I'm not an academic) as a competitive/cooperative enterprise evolving over time to track truths, and I could name the number of thinkers I believe made no errors at all on one fingerless hand.

    And I take a pretty catholic view of intellectual exploration, just as I do with music and other creative arts. But since academic work is ideally supposed to track truths, creativity isn't enough–I'm not satisfied that something appears cool, pleasant, or even beautiful to me, or that it agrees with my ideological preferences, I want to dig into whether I should believe it's true. I can feel the paralyzing effects of philosophical skepticism about truth and I can have trouble figuring out how epistemic norms fit into a naturalized view of the world, but if I just gave up on them entirely, then I'd have to ask myself the same questions I was asking of critical theorists like Tupas and Tarrayo: if there's no truth and no truth-tracking reason that I "should" believe one thing over another, then why waste my time reading academic work, when I could go listen to some music, watch a movie, or read some fiction to enjoy human creativity–those things are more fun and they aren't pretending to be something they aren't! (Or, alternatively, if the reason I "should" believe one thing over another arises from my own uncritically-accepted ideological commitments, then it'd be better to pursue those goals by exercising real power through praxis than reflecting through theory.)

    As for Sokal, I agree that hoaxing a discpline's journal to show its academics up for buffoons is in "bad faith." But the issue isn't just that the journal fell for a scam. The issue was that an article loaded with little more than falsehoods, meaningless jargon, obvious nonsense, and uncritical appeals to know-nothing disciplinary authorities was barely distinguishable from the "real" scholarship of the discipline. After all, a good part of what makes Dana Carvey doing Bush or Tina Few doing Sarah Palin funny–but also very disturbing!–is that comedians imitating those politicans by talking like idiotic clowns are barely distinguishable from the "real" politicians themselves!

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  44. Ludovic M

    What I find interesting is the possibility that Bourdieusian violence has, as it were, a dynamism all its own, though perhaps this is a given, as I must admit I haven't read even remotely deeply into the subject. The aforesaid self-dynamism or self-propulsion of Bourdieusian 'violence' would, of course, in reality be a reflection and projection of the subject's, but in any case it melds, highlights, and emphasizes the ostensible phenomena of symbolic violence, if one becomes of a mind to look for it, because of exposure to the concept of Bourdieusian 'violence' itself.

    For example, I just read an article in the Guardian about the German painter Gerhard Richter's Birkenau Cycle of paintings, which are definitionally about the worst forms of Nazi violence. But the paintings themselves are, unsurprisingly, controversial, not least because they were painted by a(n) (ethnic) German, such that he might be, however unwittingly so, accused of enacting symbolic violence by undertaking the subject per se, by the abstract method he used to represent it, etc., all within the operative context of the "power differential between social groups," namely, in this case, the ethnic German painter on the one hand and, albeit abstractly, the represented victims, largely Jews and other minorities.

    However, the point I would most like to emphasize, lest it be lost in too diffuse a verbiage, is the aforesaid seemingly autonomous and dynamic nature of this hypothesized Bourdieusian 'violence,' which becomes most manifest and dynamized when juxtaposed in the light of 'reality itself,' which becomes a sort of energizing diptych to the already completed and physically inert artifact of Richter's cycle. To wit, who could doubt that the Birkenau cycle is fundamentally about violence, but definitionally about a particular historically well documented and attested (indeed photographed in medias res, such photographs forming the underlying literal canvas for Richter's abstract paint strokes and strikes) form, event, and phenomenon of violence within the wider cycle of violence of the Second World War.

    However in light of present ongoing events in any case it occurs to me not at all inverisimilitudinous that someone, perhaps young and college educated, shocked by the nature of the ongoing events in Gaza might read about the Birkenau cycle in the Guardian and project upon this memorial to one of the symbols and instances of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War their own unwitting form of Bourdieusian or symbolic violence, namely a reflexive doubt regarding the very veracity of the event memorialized in the cycle, or perhaps, less 'violently,' an acute sense of the non-uniqueness of it, an acute sense of the dilution of its significance in light of ongoing global atrocities, a sense, at the very least, that the crimes of Birkenau are but a pale shadow, in importance and significance, to the 'condensed symbol' that Gaza has become and that the Israeli state has become a reenactor of the violence ostensibly being memorialized in the Birkenau Cycle to the point that the former's actions cast doubt on the veracity of the historicity of Birkenau itself.

    In other words, 'Gaza' may be activating among elite college educated students in the West, doubts about what is being memorialized in the Birkenau Cycle, doubts about the unicity and uniqueness of the historical phenomenon, about its positive or at least prophylactic symbolic utility, and perhaps even doubts, as said, about its very historicity. So a new subliminal system of Bourdieusian 'violence' may be not only in its cradle, but already crawling, not too far from 'Bethlehem,' in the psychic direction of a significant cohort of college educated, even elitely educated, students and graduates in the West, radicalized in a new variety or strain of Bourdieusian 'violence' specifically, acutely, quasi-uniquely as a result of the undeniably cataclysmic events in Gaza, which various recent generations in the West had up to now never been exposed to live, in the sense of contemporaneous with, nor so ubiquitously exposed to owing to the new communication technologies and because of the 'addiction' of recent generations to the aforesaid novel technologies, which in the looming nature and form of AI tech threaten to become yet more 'addictive' via their destabilizing saturation of most of the aforesaid in themselves already highly compulsive online communication technologies, in their particularities and as an ecosystem which is arguably already so pregnant with Bourdieusian 'violence' as to be almost inconceivable and inalienable from its fundamental 'coding.'

    So that Bourdieusian 'violence' as such, through the reification, manifestation and magnification of particularly anomalous proxy traumatic events, such as the war in Gaza, may represent something approaching unprecedented catalysts for the gestation and manifestation of new forms and cycles of symbolic violence outside its traditional confines on the extreme right or left, that is henceforth, mutatis mutandis, increasingly more frequently 'infecting' bourgeois college-bound students, including, and perhaps especially a not insignificant cohort of elite college-bound students, if for no other reason than that of their likely tendency to be political and geopolitical news and information 'addicts,' coupled with the alleged higher levels of 'analyticality' associated with higher intelligence or at least higher academic proficiency.

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