Good evening, and thanks again for reading.
Before we get to thematic matters, let’s start with how we got here:
I read this just a short while ago, and yes, dear reader, it was like the sky opened up, or rather a kind of structure, an actual system of argument crystallized around two or three persistent (and even bothersome) thoughts I have occasionally returned to over several years. What this tweet does is embed the current moment usefully, constructively, in an historical logic that unfolds outside of the academic world but which shapes its processes fairly radically. And while I am not an expert on the inner workings of the history of the discipline of Economics (such as it is), I do know something — quite a lot actually — about the recent history of my own discipline, that of Political Science.
How do I know so much? Well, it’s not the kind of knowledge gained watching from the shoreline as the distant shipwreck slowly goes down; rather, it’s the knowledge gained from being at the center of the storm, having to bail and becoming a piece of random flotsam, treading water for several hours and then barely making it to the nearest dry piece of land. In other words, it’s knowledge gained from the inside, or rather, the outside of the inside, that is, as something like the intended target of decades of explicit austerity and implicit purges within the discipline. I have become an insider because of my status outside the protected circle of tenured scholarship. If I want to talk or write about the kinds of work that have been cast out of that inner circle, if I want to know what kind of scholars have been excluded, I simply have to find a mirror.
Yes I know of course that I am not alone; a vast majority of courses on college campuses are taught by precariat faculty (something like 75%). There is solidarity in this fact. And yet what hasn’t happened for the most part, is a sustained and historically-sensitive examination of austerity as an intervention, as well as an examination of collective, aspirational responses to that intervention. A curious sort of dialectic, perhaps, and a very timely one in this specific sense: every step of the process, every stage along the way occurs in the present as a hedge against the future. On the administrative side, this happens on the surface of things, on a rhetorical level which engages in “tough conversations” and “hard choices” in a kind of Baconian move whereby an aleatory future — a future of best bets and guesses — becomes the logic for making cuts right now, “before it’s too late.” What’s equally interesting, though, and perhaps even more damaging, is the anticipatory action on the part of faculty and even graduate students, not only to predict the predictions, but to stay one step ahead of them, to hedge against various visions of catastrophe for the liberal arts (demographic cliffs, etc etc). So perhaps rather than a dialectic, which imagines forces in real opposition, the operative image here is instead one of a negative feedback loop: administration intervenes to impose austerity based on some catastrophic future (however distant the horizon: ten years, twenty years, who knows?), and not even as a response, but something like anticipatory intervention two or three steps ahead, the subjects of austerity act to minimize the damage, and even more ideally, profit from the misfortune of others.
I haven’t said anything controversial or even original, yet. What is interesting to me — and where the Jeet Heer tweet is relevant — is the way in which the process I have just described intersects with the history of what one might call “the culture of the discipline” over the past quarter-century. That history begins with the imperfect but nevertheless groundbreaking “Perestroika” movement. The movement sprang from a sense among many of us that the discipline was becoming dominated by behavioral and quantitative approaches, indeed that almost all of the R1 professorships were being captured and held by scholars who engaged in an endless recursion of mutual admiration and circular citation. (I remember for a period receiving the journal for the APSA once every quarter, opening it and skimming the titles and then immediately recycling it. It was full of statistics and game theory; whatever Theory was there was dominated by MOR liberal re-readings of Locke, Mill or Rawls.)
In the next installment I will write about the short life and death of Perestroika (RIP). Like a good mystery or true crime blog, moreover, I will talk about the murderer. Who killed the movement for pluralism? Hint: it wasn’t (just) austerity, but the one-two punch of austerity and aspiration. And the best place to see aspiration in action is the discipline’s own ugly version of 4chan: Political Science Rumors.
It is on Political Science Rumors, I will argue, that we can see the convergence of post-Perestroika behavioral positivism on the one hand, and the aspirational politics of MAGA/white grievance on the other. It is here that we can see the real id of the mainstream of the discipline behind liberal superego exhortations to civility. Under the pressure of endless austerity, power no longer has to operate in a top-down manner: it now circulates among graduate students and junior faculty who have become their own inner administrators. This sense of crisis-driven aspiration reflects the world of precarity. Disciplinary plurality — the blooming of a thousand flowers — might happen under better, richer, more generous times, but it seems we can longer think this way. PSR shows how the discipline has internalized the repression, paranoia and isolation that (yes, following Jeet) echoes the worst language of the Cold War and in a distant way (the so-called Behavioral Revolution in the social sciences during the 1960s) is influenced by it.
More next time. Thank you!