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Reading 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2006

Kirstie M. McClure
Kirstie M. McClure
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles (kmmac@ucla.edu)
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What has the discipline that calls itself “political science” to do with literary studies, anthropology, the philosophy of language, structural linguistics, or hermeneutics? With postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, and other such pursuits? Anne Norton's 95 Theses raises these questions at the nexus of “Politics, Culture, and Method.” Asked to consider this work both generally and with an eye to its potential impact on the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory and disciplinary or subfield divisions, I find myself caught between the terms of the invitation and the implosion of those terms for which the Theses offer no small spark. Curiously though, its most incendiary aspects appear not in Norton's own measured prose, but rather on its dust jacket. The back cover, for example, dubs it “an attack on the social science establishment,” while an inner flap applauds Norton as a “political scientist” who has launched “a polemic against the orthodoxy of her own field.” There, too, strident phrasing names the polemical target: “the antiquated and stultifying models in the textbooks on method, in courses on methodology, championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science.” Norton, we're told, “opens the gates to more new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria.”Kirstie M. McClure is Associate Professor of Political Science and English at University of California, Los Angeles (kmmac@ucla.edu).

Information

Type
REVIEW SYMPOSIUM
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 343 - 351
Copyright
© 2006 American Political Science Association

What has the discipline that calls itself “political science” to do with literary studies, anthropology, the philosophy of language, structural linguistics, or hermeneutics? With postcolonial theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cultural studies, and other such pursuits? Anne Norton's 95 Theses raises these questions at the nexus of “Politics, Culture, and Method.” Asked to consider this work both generally and with an eye to its potential impact on the discipline of political science, the subfield of political theory and disciplinary or subfield divisions, I find myself caught between the terms of the invitation and the implosion of those terms for which the Theses offer no small spark. Curiously though, its most incendiary aspects appear not in Norton's own measured prose, but rather on its dust jacket. The back cover, for example, dubs it “an attack on the social science establishment,” while an inner flap applauds Norton as a “political scientist” who has launched “a polemic against the orthodoxy of her own field.” There, too, strident phrasing names the polemical target: “the antiquated and stultifying models in the textbooks on method, in courses on methodology, championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science.” Norton, we're told, “opens the gates to more new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria.”

Readers inspirited or irked by this language, however, will be disappointed if they expect to find it mirrored in the book itself. Instead, they will find 95 brief theses,1

An energetic cataloguer at Northwestern University Library has obligingly included all the theses in the catalogue entry. Those interested in an overview of the theses as a whole can access the list by searching for the full title at http://nucat.library.northwestern.edu/. Accessed Dec. 31, 2005.

reflective commentaries on each thesis in turn, and an Afterword on the work's genesis and aim. By way of a general overview, let me take a leaf from the text itself and begin by noting a few things about its structure and intended addressees. Then, rather than assuming readers' familiarity with the book, I'll suggest a strategy for reading the Theses and try to convey a measure of its substance. Following that, I'll return to the issue of polemical writing, the genre under which the dust jacket nestles the work, and along the way engage the question of the book's relation to the discipline, political theory, disciplinary and subfield divisions, and the like.

Structure and Audience

As Norton reminds us, “the form that a paper or a document takes tells how that text is to be read. The forms indicate the other texts it may refer to, the appropriate evaluative standards, assumptions, and often specific ambitions and political aims. Forms give texts different effects.”2

Norton 2004. Thesis 69: “The form in which something is expressed determines its meaning. The signifier constitutes the meaning of the sign”; commentary, 103.

The ostensible model for the 95 Theses is marked by the title itself: the theses that Luther affixed to the church in Wittenburg. Norton's theses, like Luther's, are best understood as grammatical rather than logical propositions and, like Luther's, too, the ordering principle of their commentary is a combination of thematic elaboration, topical association, and rhetorical recursivity rather than a matter of logical argumentation from precise definitions to duly warranted conclusions.3

Luther's propositions were titled “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences;’ his commentaries grew out of the later Heidelberg disputations of April 1518 and were variously titled “‘Resolutions' to the 95 Theses,’” or Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences. In Norton's choice of this form we might discern also an echo of Roland Barthes, who characterized his own propositions as grammatical, as “enunciations, ‘touches', approaches that consent to remain metaphorical.” Barthes 1977, 156.

Readers unaccustomed to the style may find this unpleasant. As Norton notes with regard to the stylistics of much interdisciplinary work, this sort of writing not only builds in “multiple systems of reference simultaneously,” it also “presumes—and requires—a competent and attentive audience,” an audience who “will recognize the presence of interconnecting structures and arguments in an analysis that will appear chaotic to those less learned or unfamiliar with this style.”4

Norton 2004. Thesis 67: “Every method has an aesthetic”; commentary 100–101.

For Luther, the competence and attention of his Christian audience went without saying, as both the pattern and the object of his disputation were matters of common reference and understanding. Indeed, it was precisely this common language that opened him to polemical rebuttal by Johann Tetzel, the Domincan whose entrepreneurial marketing of papal indulgences was the target of Luther's criticisms. Here, we might discern something of a disanalogy, for the extent to which Norton's theses share a language with the community of professional political scientists is not something that can be taken as given. I'll return to this later in some reflections on the character of polemics; for now, however, it might be useful to turn to the related question of the Theses' audience of address.

As the book eschews a preface or introduction, we must look to the Afterword for a sense of the 95 Theses' aim and intended audience. Continuing the partial analogy with her work's titular namesake, Norton notes that the theses themselves, initially given at an American Political Science Association panel, were “directed against an orthodoxy” and “spoke to a hierarchy that is, if not corrupt, certainly at odds with the better practices of its clergy and laity.” The commentaries, however, are aimed elsewhere. It is “not to the methodological authorities in the discipline of political science” that they are addressed, but rather “to the students who have chosen better ways to work on politics.” An important clarification arrives here as well, for the theses are characterized not as leading onto new horizons, but instead as “following after practice.” More epitome than manifesto, they “attempt to capture, in simple terms, how many thoughtful scholars think of work on politics, culture, and method.” Long integrated into ongoing scholarly practices, they are “so taken for granted as theoretical governance that it is sometimes difficult to recover the textual sites where they are made explicit and the arguments that support them.”5

Norton 2004. “Afterword,” 139.

Contrary, then, to the dust jacket's enthusiastic reveling in the prospect of novelties, Norton herself frames the book as an exercise in recovery, a reprise of theoretical work that, however silently, underlies a good deal of contemporary scholarship on politics and culture. Similarly, readers incited by elevated rhetoric about an “attack on the social science establishment” will find substantial critical passages, particularly in the book's second half, but little in the way of heated language. Norton's discussions, in short, are a matter of condensed but simply phrased scholarly memory, a recollection of things better not forgotten by those who would study politics and culture otherwise than the latest textbooks on scientific methods might prefer. Authors, of course, may both intend more than they say and accomplish more than they intend, but thoughtful readers would do well to bear this in mind.

Reading the 95 Theses

These aspects of the Theses' structure, style, addressees, and aims suggest that the first dilemma offered by the book is not its positions on politics, culture, and method, but rather the more basic question of how to read it. Some, of course, may run through it as a task to be completed in a single sitting, cover to cover in a straight line from beginning to end. Others might browse, ramble here and there, like poachers looking for game.6

I take the imagery from de Certeau, 1984, ch. XII.

Both procedures risk forfeiting a good deal of the work's substance, on the one hand by a sacrifice of nuance to the demands of efficiency, on the other by inattention to the relations between the various theses in the order of the text. Let me offer a strategy, then, for reading the Theses by breaking its 95 commentaries into topical divisions. Call it a rough-hewn study guide, if you will, one that suggests both a regime of reading for those so inclined and a glimpse of the book's core concerns. Throughout, the theses are referenced by number rather than page, and notes reserved for more extended citations or remarks.

The place to begin is at the end, with a perusal of the Afterword. In the conventional architecture of the printed book, prefaces and acknowledgements are generally the last things written. Functioning as thresholds, such paratextual elements introduce the reader both to the topic at hand and, as rhetorical theory has it, to the ethos of the authorial persona. In the Theses these elements close the book rather than open it, so starting here might provide a comforting analogue to the more familiar form.7

Genette 1997, esp. chs. 8–10.

Then, returning to the original brief list of Theses, we might divide it into topical sequences. The broadest division, and one that functions as a conceptual hinge between two different sorts of enterprises, might distinguish theses 1–50 from theses 51–95. The first series might be said to focus on the area of politics and culture, the second to attend to the related question of method for the field of study so conceived.

Folly though it be to attempt an epitome of work that itself epitomizes long-running currents of scholarship across many disciplines, let me trace the first division's perspective on politics and culture before turning briefly to the issue of method. The first nine theses provide a running start for those that follow—or, to shift metaphors, they set a capacious stage upon which all the rest play their parts.8

Norton 2004, 1–21: Theses “1. Culture is a matrix; 2. Culture is not a variable; 3. Politics is in culture; 4. Culture is political; 5. Culture is in language; 6. Language is political; 7. There is no neutral language; 8. We are in language; 9. Authority is political and literary.”

Here, Norton describes culture as a matrix or network of meaning, at once a linguistic and a material phenomenon, and deftly lays out the mutualities of culture, politics, language, and authority. Critical of the practice of taking culture as a variable, she focuses rather on the materiality of meaning (T2). These sections are rich in supporting notes and references, more often than not recognizable as the sort of recollection described in the Afterword as the theoretical basis of much contemporary work on politics and culture. The disciplinary homes of these textual sites are many and varied: anthropology, sociology, the history of science, rhetoric, cultural studies, social history, philosophy, and others.

Theses 10–16 begin to unfold the far-reaching implications of this opening by marking parallels between the text of literature and that of culture, most notable among them the practice of reading as a strategy and procedure of research.9

Norton 2004, 22-36: “10. Culture can be considered as a text; 11. Literary devices have direct counterparts in political strategies; 12. Culture constitutes the body and makes it readable; 13. Gender, race, and sexuality are cultural constructs; 14. Commodities serve as semiotic lexicons; 15. The natural is a cultural category; 16. Culture is an observable concept.”

These materials will be simple and familiar to many who follow theory and interpretive work, perhaps simplistic (or difficult) and strange to those who do not. Again, the supporting literature is substantial, and again its disciplinary homes range widely, this time across philosophy, literary and cultural studies, feminist and political theory, critical race and postcolonial theory, structuralism and semiotics, among numerous others. Here, too, the earlier criticisms of treating culture as a variable are extended briefly into an engagement with a recent methods text in political science.10

King, Keohane, and Verba 1994. See esp. Norton, T16.

Countering the supposition that culture is an unobservable abstraction, or at best ideas in peoples' heads to be tapped by appropriate measurement tools, Norton insists on the materiality of culture, its readability, as it were, in artifacts and documents, weapons and institutions, buildings and bodies, and elsewhere.

Theses 17–23 shift emphases from the materiality of cultural artifacts to culture as a matter of performance and practice in time.11

Norton 2004, 36–46: “17. Culture is made in practice; 18. Culture, as practice, is continually changing; 19. The formal is always accompanied by an informal counterpart, the structural by the antistructural and the unstructured; 20. Change comes from the limnal; 21. All cultures are syncretic; 22. All cultures are exceptional. No culture is exceptional; 23. Culture is wild and various.”

Persistently mutable, culture offers not only rules or norms but openings and opportunities for evading them. With formal rules always shadowed by informal elisions, structures are always nettled by “the antistructural and the unstructured” (T19); hence the liminal and peripheral are sources of both dynamic tension and potential change (T20). Such cultures, however, are neither whole nor pure. All are syncretic—olios of temporal and spatial others bound together in varying understandings of that mix. Here, again, Norton pressures the notion of culture as a bounded variable: as she puts it, “to ascribe autonomy and a hermetic integrity to any culture is to mistake both the particular character of that culture, which derives in part from its relation to others and its own, and the character of culture as a category of analysis” (T21). Theses 22 and 23 extend these themes. Noting that all cultures both are and are not exceptional, Norton is less violating the principle of non-contradiction than acknowledging that any culture conceived in these terms is at once “distinctive in certain, continually varying respects,” and unexceptional “for all cultures are alike in certain, varying respects.” The point here is the pertinence of research strategies attentive as much to similarly as to difference and attuned as well to “borrowing, circulation, and exchange” between cultures (T22). Thesis 23 caps this topic and offers a segue to another. Culture, Norton insists, “is wild and various” both because it is syncretic and because its discernible structures share “porous and uncertain” boundaries with the antistructural and unstructured. Such divisions, however, need not be schisms; they may be sources of identities bound together in a variegated “cultural constellation” that, by virtue of its diversity, offers critical vantage points on its norms and practices (T23).

A new topical series spans Theses 24 to 50. As previous remarks laid out the general terrain of culture, these might be understood to focus on three of its core political problematics: identities, community, and domination. Theses 24–34 return to the theme of performance, this time to elaborate the relational aspects of identity.12

Norton 2004, 47–61: “24. Subjects have multiple identities; 25. Identities are performed; 26. Identities have multiple expressions; 27. Every identity is in reference to a collective; 28. Identity and community are coeval; 29. Identity and alienation are coeval; 30. Every political institution calls for identities; 31. Identities make interests. Interests make identities; 32. There are no “interests.” There are “interests of” and “interests as”; 33. Every identity is partial; 34. Community entails alienation.”

Drawing on various critiques of the unified and autonomous subject (ranging from psychoanalysis to analytic philosophy to classical literatures), they limn the multiplicity, partiality, and internal divisions of social subjects in relation both to their performative dimensions and to broader collectives, groups, social roles or social types. “Every identity,” Norton argues, “is in reference to a collective,” even the most intimate and ostensibly private ones, for all take their meanings from the range of categories on offer in particular cultural matrices (T27). This, however, is no paean to identity politics, for identities do not come in whole cloths. Rather, identity and alienation go hand in hand for each person is at once part of and distinct from their various communities of belonging (T27–29). Political institutions, too—states, parties, legislatures, bureaucracies, etc.—play their parts in the mix. They “convoke, provoke, and evoke collective and individual identities” by defining both actors and the categories of those acted upon. Further, they “call forth not only those who will govern, but those will study,” because they interpellate or “hail” scholars and scholarship as well as those invested with official positions (T30). This series contains as well a number of possible questions and techniques of research,13

See, for instance, Norton 2004, T26: “Subjects can not only be seen but also can be precisely (if contingently) delineated, as changing constellations of identity. One can ask which identities are operative in which contexts, at which places, at which times, for which audiences, for which ends. One can ask how a particular identity is expressed: with what gestures, through which media. One can ask how the performance of a given identity creates and changes it in time and space. These are all researches that map subjects in time and space, and in relation to others. These maps indicate complex relations within and between identities. As these are mapped, one can begin to investigate how this complex terrain is negotiated and to explore the strategic possibilities that particular configurations of identity open and preclude.” (52)

and it works up to some caveats about the study of “interests.” As identities are neither natural nor unitary nor given, but multiple, riven, and constituted in language, so too are their “interests” and the available forms of rationality through which these might be understood and pursued (T31–32). Thesis 34 draws out a core implication of this view of identities and again bridges to a new topic: if identity includes both belonging and alienation, if it is at once collective and relational, partial and particular, then community itself “entails alienation.”

Theses 35 to 43 delve into that problematic of community.14

Norton 2004, 61–71: “35. Belonging may be expressed as affirmation or rebellion; 36. Each institution calls for its own resistance; 37. There is no culture without resistance; 38. There is no culture without internal critique; 39. Meaning is made out of difference; 40. Power is productive; 41. Opposition is productive; 42. Lack impels. Lack is productive; 43. Power comes from the absence of power.”

The theme of alienation broached earlier finds material form in the related phenomena of affirmation and rebellion, both of which may express ways of belonging (T35). Opposition and resistance here echo the earlier thesis that structures, rules, and institutions are bounded by the antistructural and unstructured. Policies and actions become “objects of affirmation or rejection,” and the diversities of the latter, like the institutions that elicit them, “are multidimensional.” In culture, one might say, there is division all the way down. As Norton puts it, “the economy of allegiance and resistance maintains the external boundaries of a given culture and gives it its internal articulation,” and “there is no culture without internal critique” (T38–39). The sites of such differences are loci of political meaning, networks of dynamic relations across time and place. Norton's earlier criticisms of conventional notions of interests find shape and substance here, as such networks of meaning include both “the ordinary structures of practical institutional politics” and elements of “the conceptual, the mythic, and the imaginary” (T39). At once prohibitive and “productive,” power generates “not only institutions, laws, and regulations but also dispositions, neuroses, perversions, tastes, norms, standards, and inclinations” (T40). As these will include aspects of opposition, desires born of lack, and the gelling of potentials at the peripheries, they too will be productive (T41–43). Like previous commentaries, this one also offers practical strategies for research into the politics of culture so conceived.15

Norton, 2004. For example, one might study how the figures of cultural outsiders change in time, or consider the ways in which “the diverse resistances interpellated —and joined together” by any particular institution offer vantage points for researching coalition politics (T35, 36). One could track the conditions under which “the other” is “demonized” in particular contexts, or the ways in which individuals negotiate “networks of meaning and materiality” (T38). In these and other areas of political concern, the idea that meaning arises from “difference” encourages a focus on the constitutive oppositions of culture, and in this respect “enables one to map the networks of meaning that culture comprises” (T39). The recognition that power is productive suggests the fruitfulness of such once-unconventional research sites as “systems of knowledge, regimes of truth, and economies of desire” (T40), while the notion that opposition is productive offers a cautionary counsel that research agendas seeking the grounds of consensus and stability should be augmented by others looking “for the recognition and the maintenance of differences, for the fostering of debate, and, occasionally, for change, reform, and revolution” (T41). Similarly, the idea of the productivity of “lack” might remind researchers and policy makers alike that it is not only “the satisfaction or the diminution of needs that should be sought, but also their extension and proliferation” (T43). Finally, cognizance that power arises from its absence encourages attention to solidarities generated at the periphery of institutional reach, and presses for research into the articulation of different forms of power in practice (T43).

Theses 44–50 again shift topics.16

Norton 2004, 71–78: “44. The most effective domination is internal; 45. The most effective rule is invisible and appears as inevitable; 46. Domination is through and of the senses; 47. Prohibitions produce institutions and resistances. Prohibitions interpellate identities; 48. Ruling structures constrain the rulers as well as the ruled, the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged; 49. That which is overcome, remains; 50. Nothing runs ahead of its time. Many things run ahead of their time.”

While earlier comments noted the mutual constitution of power and resistance and its implications for research, these burrow into the materialities, internal and external, of domination. Spurning brawny notions of hegemony, Norton recurs to the Gramscian nuances of the term to emphasize the internalization of cultural norms—and the subtle ways in which this affects “the capacity of rule to call forth resistance” by governing “thought and the categories of thought, desire and the objects of desire” (T45). Again understood as a material practice, this is one that works in and through the senses. In activities both public and private “domination is sensual,” and this materiality opens neglected aspects of power to the scrutiny of scholars with an eye to see their traces (T46).17

Norton 2004. Clothing, photographs, postcards, public monuments, painting and the visual arts, familiar sounds and smells and tastes: all “give access to the boundaries of cultural communities and their norms.” More pointedly: “What people eat, where they shit, whether they have water, whether they can be clean,” all these “are questions that bring domination home” (T45).

In this context, Norton returns to the point that prohibitions “produce institutions and resistances” as well as “interpellate identities,” but now considers those advantaged by hegemony as well as those exploited by it. The focus here is on the effective generality of structures of cultural constraint, and the caution is not to mistake advantage within a system for intentional control. Because such structures “manifest themselves in what is taken for granted, what cannot be questioned, in what appears natural and given,” their potent constraints “operate on the rulers as well as the ruled” (T48).18

Norton 2004. The examples here are constraints imposed on men by codes of masculinity and on heterosexuals by the regime of heterosexuality. The list could have been extended to contexts of racial or ethnic as well as class domination, not to mention the “intersectionality” of such structures in particular contexts, but the larger point remains that in such structures all “are called on to behave in certain ways and punished for deviations” (T48).

None of this, on Norton's account, is reducible to the facticities of present constraint. The punishments exacted by hegemonies might recall to attentive readers previous theses on the productivity of the margins, the energies generated at the boundaries between the unstructured, antistructure, and structure, and the resistances and oppositional dynamics that powers and institutions contingently evoke. But they also recall allusions to the temporal dimension of culture and politics, and it is to this that Theses 49 and 50 turn. Because politics is matter of conflict and overcoming, “some win, some lose, some causes prosper, some fade.” A victorious cause, however, “overcomes both its opposition and itself” as it is either institutionalized or assimilated to that which goes without saying. Even in defeat, though, losers are not necessarily lost; “though overcome … they remain in record and memory.” In this Norton refuses the pastness of the past, and emphasizes rather its presence in the present. Remembered, the defeated remain “to present alternatives … that can be taken up again in altered form,” possibilities preserved because both “the memory of the victory and the identity of the victor depend on that which was overcome” (T49). This temporal door swings both ways; looking forward rather than back, “nothing runs ahead of its time.” Politics emerge from that which has gone before—“from and in relation to particular cultural configurations: institutions, social structures, and other conditions, systems, and forces.” And yet, Norton suggests, “many things run ahead of their time” in the sense that the “meaning” of an act or word “is not exhausted in the moment of its enactment or utterance.” The consequences of present actions reach into the future, though these effects are often things their initiators “neither intended nor foresaw” (T50).

With this we reach the focal hinge of the Theses, for the rest pursue the title's rubric of methods—or what in the context of Norton's arguments might more suitably be called “practices of inquiry.” Those wishing to read polemically may find matter here to get excited about, though Norton's own tone and tenor is more one of scholarly disagreement than the flashy phrasing of invective. Rather than detail these materials, let me just note some of their highlights. Most prominent here are Norton's criticisms of the basic vocabulary and research practices of some current canons of the scientific study of politics, as well as the alternative idioms and practices she offers in their place. Like their predecessors, these commentaries condense long-running scholarly currents into basic frames and their claims will seem familiar to many. Their gist is equally simple: the study of politics and culture as sketched in the first half of the book requires other lights than those favored by proponents of the latest scientific methods.

Rooted in the view of politics and culture outlined earlier, these commentaries offer counterpoints to a series of standard assumptions of social scientific inquiry. According to that view, categories of perception and understanding are resident in language; hence so long as there are human perceivers, nothing is outside of culture. No less true for the ostensibly analytic categories of scientific procedures than it is for other categories of linguistic currency, this commitment necessarily denaturalizes numerous distinctions that for many serve to draw a bright line between scientific and non- or extra-scientific dimensions of political studies. Facts versus values, contexts of justification versus contexts of discovery, neutral research versus political commitment, explanation versus understanding, explanation versus description, causal analysis versus narrative: all these and others are stripped of their purported epistemic security and understood, instead, as conventions that both carve the world up and organize practices of research in particular ways.19

Norton 2004. Thus we find theses and commentaries to the effect that facts are made rather than found (T51–53); that neutrality is impossible (T54–57); that what counts as evidence is an artifact of method (T58); that in principle nothing is non-contributory to a particular research question and that no account is comprehensive (T59–60, 62); that description entails analysis (T61); that representation alters the represented and that quantification distorts (T63–64); that formalization obscures (T65); that all methods entail both evaluative hierarchies and aesthetic criteria of satisfactory research (T66–68); that categories constitute rather than reflect, that no category is internally homogenous (T69–72); that correlation is not causality (T73); that prediction is not proof of correct reasoning, that replication is not proof, and that repetitions alter what they repeat (T74–76); that falsification is no litmus of validity (T77); that systems of truth are systems of power and that such truths are interior to culture (T79–80); that experience itself yields only limited understanding and that even lies are meaningful (T81–82); that theory does not require causality and that causal schemes are narrative fictions (T84–85); that cultures have both spatial and temporal dimensions and that the past is only available in the present (T86–90); that no method is perfect, that the ideal resides in the material and the general in the particular, and that theory cannot exhaust the particular (T92–95).

Some will probably misread all this as a repudiation of science. At issue here, however, is not science per se—whatever that overbroad term might conjure—but the presumptive primacy of formal and statistical methods in political inquiry. In this respect, the second half of the Theses might be taken rather as an exercise in leveling, a puncturing of the balloon of privilege that for many elevates those techniques above all other modes of inquiry. Read in these terms, and recalling the interdisciplinary currents that surge through the book, the Theses resonate deeply with the European research traditions of les sciences humaines, and particularly those inflected by historical, critical, and interpretive concerns. Having detailed the ways in which the Theses attempt to epitomize those concerns, I'll leave their criticism to those better prepared than I to argue for the independence of science from language and culture. Let me close, instead, with a brief reflection on the question of polemics and the related issue of the implications of the Theses for the discipline of political science and its subfield distinctions.

Polemics, Disciplines, and Fields

As Melancthon described the controversy over retailed indulgences, Luther's criticisms incited Tetzel and his supporters to extremities. They not only engaged in public debate, but ripped Luther's theses down for a public burning and accused him of heresy. Riddled with invective and personal attacks, these were indeed polemics.20

Melancthon 1996 [1547–48], 6. Melancthon's history itself continued the controversy in similarly polemical terms: “Tecelius [Tetzel], true to his character, and also hoping he would obtain favor before the Roman Pontiff, calls his Senate, a few Monks and Theologians lightly imbued in some way or other with his own Sophistry, and orders them to cobble something together against Luther. Meanwhile Tecelius himself, so that he would not be a silent actor, brandishes not just Public Debates, but thunderbolts, he cries aloud everywhere that this Heretic must be condemned to fire, he even publicly hurls Luther's Propositions and Debate concerning Indulgences into flames. These ravings of Tecelius and his Henchmen place the necessity on Luther of more expansively discussing these matters and of preserving the truth.”

Norton's Theses, I've suggested, are bereft of such polemical intonation, but there is a broader issue here to be considered. Earlier I suggested that the polemics sparked by Luther's theses were made possible by a common language, and I asked whether such a common language was characteristic of the community of professional political scientists. By common language here, however, I mean not what linguists call a natural language, nor yet what philosophers call ordinary language, but rather something along the lines of what Bakhtin characterized as a “speech genre”: that is, a relatively stable amalgam of “thematic content, style, and compositional structure” characteristic of a “particular sphere of communication,” in this case, a secondary speech genre in the sphere of professional communication. Crucial to such a speech genre is its addressivity, which in turn includes “the apperceptive background” of addressees—whether they are “familiar with the situation,” whether they have “special knowledge of the given cultural area of communication,” and other elements constitutive of the possibility of “active responsive understanding.” In professional research, Bakhtin suggests, the relevant apperceptive background “all comes down to the scope of [the addressees'] specialized knowledge.”21

Bakhtin 1986, 60, 62; 95–96.

Understood in these terms, the question of polemics rests upon the extent to which professional communications in the discipline of political science manifest such a commonality.

I doubt that I'm the only one who doubts this. From this point of view, the question of the Theses' potential impact on the discipline of political science or its subfields seems to me a question badly posed. Both the purported polemical character of the book and the question of its effect on ‘the discipline’ presume at the outset the distinctiveness of a secondary speech genre of professional communication in the field. Aye, there's the rub, for the days in which university disciplines could be imagined by analogy to territorially bounded nation states with distinctive objects and characteristic idioms of inquiry are done—if, indeed, they ever existed.22

For accounts of the fluidity of disciplinary boundaries in economics, philosophy, english, and political science, see Bender and Schorske 1998. Particularly thought-provoking here are accounts of various forms of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, metadisciplinarity, and, most recently, transdisciplinarity, that rippled diversely across these four disciplines in the last half of the twentieth century.

True, they persist as units of university administration, sites of faculty appointments, and venues of graduate and undergraduate education, and this generates no end of practical professional and pedagogical dilemmas.23

For an admirable and robust series of exchanges on the pedagogical face of this in the important context of undergraduate teaching, see the discussion posted on the site of the Bryn Mawr College Center for Science in Society: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/local/scisoc/snow.html

But across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities the phenomenon of interdisciplinarity has rendered fantasmatic any attempt to view disciplines as distinctive territories of common research. In this sense what seems to some the discontents of a methodenstreit in political science might be better phrased as the dilemma of a political science within the currents of methodenstreiten percolating throughout the self-styled disciplinary landscapes of the modern university. Across various social, mathematical, and life sciences as well as philosophy, one strand of this interdisciplinarity strives to promote the technical idioms of formal or quantitative methods as a stand-in for a lapsed or missing lingua franca in the confines of particular disciplines, and in political science this strand is a site of long-raveling controversies over method, including but by no means limited to the recent phenomenon of Peristroika.

It is in this broader context, not within “the discipline of political science,” that the question of the Theses' relation to the subfield of political theory arises. It has long been known among theorists that the APSA's categories of normative and historical theory bear little relationship to the many kinds of work theorists pursue.24

See Wolin 1969, esp. 1062. For a recent invocation of Wolin's original, see Frank and Tambornino 2000.

Annually glossed in methods classes for entering graduate students as the outmoded cousins of properly scientific theory, these categories now only repeat in revised form the post-war disciplinary prejudice that construes political theory as limited to the study of values or the history of ideas. Today, it is this view itself that is obsolete. The last half of the twentieth century witnessed what has been aptly called “the return of grand theory to the human sciences,”25

Skinner 1985. This collection includes chapters on Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, Kuhn, Rawls, Habermas, Althusser, Lévi-Srauss, and the historians of the Annales school and contains a useful bibliography. More recent resources, debates, and compendia might include Lechte 1994; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1995; McDonald 1996; Mongia 1996; Fay, Pomper, and Vann 1998; and Bonnell and Hunt 1999.

and it is fair to say that these diverse forms of theoretical work are loosely braided into another strand of the grand methodenstreiten noted above. Though marked by considerable internal disagreement, these eruptions of theory typically have in common a critical view of the positivist and empiricist strains of social science, and a significant portion of them are indebted to one or another variant of continental philosophy. Largely extruded from American philosophy departments since the 1950s, these forms of critical theory have found diverse homes in other corners of the academy: literary studies, anthropology, sociology, geography, history, and political theory, among others.26

For accounts of this extrusion, see the philosophers' contributions to Bender and Schorske 1998, or, more pointedly and controversially, McCumber 2001.

These critical energies find in Norton's Theses a partial epitome; and in this sense the book is a summarizing wave in a broad ocean of theoretical eddies, rather than a odd blip on the parochial radar screen of disciplinary policing.

Some may generally agree with these observations, but be tempted to see them through the prism of the so-called Two Cultures debate set off by the (yes, polemical) interchange between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis in the 1950s.27

But this would be far too easy, for once again it would beg the question of professional communication by pointing to a controversy in common speech between public intellectuals. The point, in other words, is not, as Snow had it, that scientists could read Shakespeare while humanists were ignorant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but rather that scientists who read literary works are no more familiar with formalist poetics, genre theory, new historicism, deconstruction, and other professional idioms of literary analyses than non-scientists are with the equally specialized analytics of the various sciences. In short, professionalization and the creation of specialized idioms of naming, categorization, analyses, and scholarly communication go hand in hand, and so too do the forms of mutual unintelligibility and sometimes disdain that this typically entails.28

To the extent that this is a sociological phenomenon rather than simply a matter of epistemology, it arises within any number of disciplines. See, for example, Gowers 2000 for an imaginative account of theoretical mathematicians incredulous about the ignorance of combinatorialists unfamiliar with such things as quantum groups, mirror symmetry, or Calabi-Yau manifolds, not to mention the Yang-Mills equation, solutions, or cohomology. And yes, I share that ignorance.

If it seems, then, that I've belabored the issue of reading the Theses, the reason may now be apparent. For some, that epitome may have only intensified the sense of a missing apperceptive background, the lack of a common professional idiom, between the Theses and political science. For others—say, those to whom the book acknowledges indebtedness—it may have seemed excessive detail for an apperceptive background already shared. We might imagine the first muttering, “damned theorists,” while the second struggle to hide their yawns. The question, though, is whether there are further fractions, readers fluent both in various idioms of les sciences humaines that the Theses epitomize and in various of the scientific idioms for which they offer contrapuntal practices of inquiry. The term of art here is not interdisciplinary but transdisciplinary, a notion that in some hands might traverse the divisions of the grand methodenstreiten noted earlier.29

Some political scientists may recognize the term “transdiscipline” from Epstein and Axtell 1996, 2. That account of Sugarscape as a complex adaptive system aspires to “a more unified social science,” but it also hopes to transform what that might mean, including the way social scientists think about “explanation” (19). This transdisciplinary endeavor touches on many of Norton's criticisms by including considerations of the heterogeneity of “groups,” the interrelationship of space and time, the localisms of information, the dynamics of non-equilibrium, and the phenomenon of “emergence” (14–19). To glimpse the breadth of transdisciplinary practice, however, one's sense of the relevant literature should be broadened to include contributions to science studies more generally, as well as related critical perspectives within particular disciplines. In the context of agent-based modeling, see for example, Sengers 1998. More broadly, see Hayles 1999, or the account of computational theories of action in the area of Artificial Intelligence in Agre 1997. For an example in economics of a Wittgensteinian inflection of general competitive analysis and game theory, see Khan 2002.

One would be hard put today to find a departmentalized discipline in the social sciences and humanities free of institutionally sited frictions between the various species of formalists, empiricists, hermeneuticists, historicizers, semioticians, ethnomethodologists, contextualists, deconstructivists, and others who populate the intellectual bestiary of Norton's footnotes. If, in such a context, there are no common speech genres of professional communication within the erstwhile disciplines, there may yet be congeries of scholars who are fluent in more than one idiom across them. Indeed, even among those idiomatically challenged by the strictures of their own training, there may be more than a few who have both the capacity to bear the cacophony in good humor and the ability to see beyond the length of their own tools.

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