PhD Update

I recently read with interest Jonathan Dean’s piece in New Socialist, “Political Science in the Age of the Pol Prof” and it really helped clarify that what I’ve had to negotiate in the last three years is not particular to me, or my academic trajectory, but is in itself a political struggle within “political science”. Dean describes the figure of the “PolProf” which will be familiar to anyone on Twitter or who reads the news. Dean quotes Peter Evans and David S. Moon’s description of “Pol Profs” as those who

tend to launder what are broadly centrist or centre-right political views through quantitative data that is subsequently presented as non-ideological. The Pol Profs are typecast as residing in an online universe of ‘sensible’ political commentary that is supportive of a brand of centrist politics similar to that advocated by Tony Blair in the 1990s, nowadays voiced by political columnists like John Rentoul and Andrew Rawnsley. Along these lines, the Pol Profs regularly produce ‘takes’ on political events that are broadly favourable to the status quo of political institutions and policies, and bemoan the inability of those on the left to accept that their ideas are beyond credibility’.

In addition, Dean adds that “the Pol Prof frequently evinces a kind of masculine bravado, marked by an absence of self-doubt, and a penchant for performative contrarianism”. We all know the kind of men this is describing.

When I started my PhD, I was worried about having to force myself into a “balanced” centrism relying on quantitative research methods and data analysis in order to get through. This worry had to do with my MLIS being like that. I tend to think of librarianship as one of what in German is called “geisteswissenschaften” and which is usually translated as “human sciences”. A lot of my LIS research has challenged the priority given to positivism, empirical evidence, quantitative research methods and an envy first of the “hard” social sciences but then (behind that) of natural science itself. Dean argues that an envy of the natural sciences lies behind much of the phenomenon of the “Pol Prof”.

In a really important insight, Dean writes that this “harder” form of political “science” - driven by empirical observation, quantifiable surveys, etc, “came to define itself as the scholarly analysis of “the state”, as distinct from other domains of human life.” We’ve seen something similar in LIS, though the object of empirical study has not yet been settled (when I was doing my MLIS it was information-seeking behaviour, but there were a number of other contenders, and I assume this has changed since 2007). But in my Phd program, this kind of empirical work was something that I had serious misgivings about. So in 2020, when I changed tack from empirical work around AI and jobs to a critique of “intellectual freedom” from the perspective of political theory, I suddenly found myself on much firmer ground, much more sure of myself, and confident in the work that I began to produce. Indeed, something that Dean says about “Pol Profs” could stand as the thesis statement for my work around intellectual freedom and the politics of libraries: “What is more, the Pol Profs’ aspirations to evidence-based neutrality belie a clear and consistent set of ideological commitments.”

But even within my new project, I keep avoiding the (perhaps) typical questions of political theory, such as the state, constitutional procedure, voting, etc. I now realize that this is precisely because I don’t want to analyze political thought or ideology as if they are “distinct from other domains of human life”. My MA is in music and cultural theory - essentially, cultural studies - and I realize now that I’m bringing this cultural studies background (as amorphous and useless as it seemed when I started my PhD) to the work I’m currently doing, and it’s standing me in good stead. The critique of Intellectual Freedom that I am working on has to be historically grounded and culturally situated, it has to be about broader things than the relationship of Intellectual Freedom to, say, the Charter of Rights (though it is that as well).

And I realized how much my cultural studies background has also helped me to think about, for example, the AI-generated voice of Anthony Bourdain and the question of “true” genres like documentary film or photography. These are social-political-cultural questions, if for no other reason than they are ethical (and the essential identity between ethics and politics has been recognized as far back at least as Aristotle).

I think one of the things that has helped me really understand the role my cultural studies background plays in my political theory work (and in what I write about librarianship) has been digging deeply into the work of Stuart Hall for the past year or so. Reading Hall - moreso even than reading Jameson - feels like an organic unification of culture and politics that just makes sense to me. His undogmatic readings of Marxist texts, his prescient elucidations of the ways race and racism are constructed and deployed for political purposes, his explanation of the way ideology gets encoded in the media (and may or may not be decoded in the same way), all of these things “click” in my own readings of contemporary culture and politics.

So in the end, I’m approaching political theory from the perspective of cultural studies, which makes complete sense to me, even if it might not make sense to a “Pol Prof” (and be condemned, as Harold Bloom condemned cultural studies, as pure “political correctness” and no doubt playing into “cancel culture” and “cultural Marxism”). Luckily neither of my supervisors are Pol Profs.

One consequence of this recognition of the cultural approach to political theory (and, I suppose, political science in general) is that it has made me come to grips with hermeneutics as a methodology proper to what I am interested in studying and understanding. Far from the scientific method of which political science (and LIS) stands in such awe, hermeneutics is less about empirical observation, hypothesis, verification/falsification, etc, than it is about bringing oneself to the object of study in order to try to fully understand it, by interpreting it with every aspect of your personality, and in full knowledge that this kind of understanding is not the same as scientific “truth” and does not need to compete with it. It is truth in a larger, or at least a different sense.

Most of Hall’s essays are lengthy interventions into race, politics, and ideology, and so they probably need a little preparation for those who are new to them. Luckily, he wrote a preparatory piece in the form of the introduction to the textbook Representation (1997; second edition 2013) which lays out, I think, a lot of the major lines of cultural studies and cultural theory as it played out in the second half of the twentieth-century. That introduction is a good place to start for anyone interested in the non-Pol-Prof story of how culture and politics are deep and indivisible aspects of human life.

This didn’t end up being much of an update, but I think it conceptually marks where I am in this process. I’m on track to have the first draft of my dissertation done by the end of the year or early in January 2022, with defense (viva) pencilled in (in my head, if nowhere else) for April 2023 or so.