Now clearly it is time to look to the larger scales that contextualize,
sometimes constrain, and sometimes directly intersect with research
practice as such.
I certainly agree with Diane about the unfortunate fall from altruistic
grace that bedevils so many grad students and junior academics. Most of us
did choose research in order to do good, including finding out more clearly
what the 'good' might be in specific contexts. In my own graduate students
days in the early 1970s there was a lot of feirce debate between my
generation and our professors generation, not over methodology and
philosophy of research (we were just beginning to hear about the new
paradigm then), but about the moral justification of research and of the
university as an institution.
Our elders agreed with us that altruism was basic, but we did not agree
with them that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was sufficiently
specifically oriented to doing good for people (or trees) to provide a
moral justification in and of itself. We suspected that academics
themselves were the primary beneficiaries of academic research, especially
in the human arts and sciences (and in many esoteric branches of natural
science as well). We suspected that universities were not in a critical so
much as a complicit role with the power and money greed of dominant social
elites. This latter view rather scandalized our elders who saw themselves
as the natural watchdogs of capitalism and democracy, keeping the corporate
and government interests honest by providing independent tests of their
claims.
The altruism of the Old School was grounded in a faith in tested knowledge
as necessarily a force for good, in the disinterested honesty of scholars
as an antidote to other interests' shaving of the truth. Pure research was
the university's primary role because no one else would do it, and because
you never could tell when it might be turned to social good. There was a
lot of sincerity in this view, and a lot of optimism and blindness.
The New School, I suppose, is less interested in the production of tested
knowledge and more in the creation of new and alternative meanings. Our
project is to imagine new possibilities for getting to the good, new forms
of the good, more diverse forms and pathways. Because we do not have the
certainties of Truth to rest our efforts on, we are more worried about the
moral, social, political, human, and ecological implications of all the
various possibilities. Because we see ourselves not as discoverers of
truths but as inventors of meanings, we must take our own standpoints more
into account; we are not insulated as persons from our research findings,
and neither are our institutional arrangements irrelevant.
Here, I think, is the core connection between epistemology and politics.
The Truth has no politics of its own. Meaning is political through and
through. Old school academics see their research as inherently apolitical,
even if it may have occasional political uses ('not my responsibility').
New Schoolers see everything they do and say as rooted in networks of
social practice in which you cannot seal political positioning off from
research processes and products. In the Old way, Truth must be Good. In the
New view, Meanings afford goods and ills differentially.
Who benefits? What we do and how we do it tends to determine how someone
else must be positioned in order to benefit from our work. The
institutional arrangements of universities seem to me for the most part to
nudge us in directions of work that are more likely to benefit people
already in privileged positions. What we do perhaps need to think through
more carefully is just what the distribution of relevant privilege is in
relation to the kinds of good our meanings (actual and realistically
imaginable) can afford.
What do I do, what can I do; how many people are positioned to benefit.
These are matters of degree and quantity. How much shift in what I do, in
what ways, would increase by how much the probability that how many more,
and which, people (and trees) could benefit?
I think, personally, that it is rather romantic and unrealistic to imagine
academic cultural capital placed at the disposal of the most oppressed
segments of modern society. Where these people have been placed, there is
not much of any way that they could use nearly anything we could reasonably
offer through our actual expertise. If we want to help them, we need to do
so not as researchers, but in other human ways. But there are additional
moral possibilities open to us. There are many segments of society who are
oppressed, perhaps to lesser degree, but who are better positioned to
benefit (working class students, working and middle class women and gays,
more privileged but still oppressed people of colour, etc.) from what we
have to offer. There are also many intermediaries in our mediated,
networked society. There are those who can translate our cultural capital
into more directly valuable benefits for those who need most help in our
societies: teachers who will work in oppressed communities, community
organizers, those who bring health and other services, etc. We can provide
them with benefits of research that will make them better able to provide
direct assistance to people who cannot benefit from our work more directly.
On a very distant scale of mediation, we could even imagine that writing
for our academic peers and for future researchers offers something of value
that they can translate for those who in turn can translate their learning
into direct benefits for those most in need ... BUT what are the ODDs?
quantitatively estimate them, and ask whether they are good enough to wager
the justification or your life, or the salvation of your soul, on them? And
if not ... how well focused one's work can reasonably be into a channel
where the odds are better.
I know that here at least I am preaching to the Choir. Perhaps I am
practicing my sermon for those who need to hear it more. Perhaps I am
focussing my own attention on my own research directions and decisions.
Maybe you know somebody you'd like to forward this posting to? feel free to
do so, especially anyone who might be at a point where these considerations
may need to be highlighted as they make decisions about research, or
career. And some of you may, of course, disagree with my view that academic
research can have only a very mediated moral justification. But better that
than none. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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