“I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”

Michel Foucault

In the old days, before there were journals, scientists would write letters to each other about their results. These would then be circulated and (if I recall my history of science correctly) the readers would add their own comments, sometimes the results of their own attempts to replicate those in the original letter. There was very little question back then about who your peers were.

Today we have too many peers to know exactly who we’re writing for, and even who we are. But that does not mean we can’t identify some of our readers concretely. I think too many academic writers see the journal literature as a completely anonymous authority, a faceless bureaucracy that you somehow have to force or fool into accepting your work.

In order to change this image of the journals, keep that old-fashioned circulation of letters in mind. As your research progresses, make a conscious effort to imagine your readers. Who might be interested in the results you are producing? Name these people, and learn something about them. Where do they work? Where do they publish? And don’t just imagine commmunicating with them. Write them emails. Seek them out at conferences. Arrange to visit their institutions.

Putting faces on your readership is a way of taking ownership of your writing. After all, it also requires imagining your own face on it. Publishing—which is to say, making your ideas public—is a way of communicating with other researchers. It is not just an exam you pass to impress your university administrators and further your career.

Much as I admire Foucault, I think his resentment (even ressentiment?) of academic writing is an unnecessary affectation. Why should sincere researchers, striving, shoulder to shoulder, in the pursuit of knowledge, leave anything to the police and the bureaucrats? We should insist on letting only our peers evaluate our “papers” (admittedly in another sense), i.e., those with whom we also sometimes speak face-to-face. It is their “morality” we should engage with when we write.

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*This is an old post from my retired blog.

When I talk about the “inframethodology” of the “craft of research” I’m trying to draw attention to aspects of the work that are much more obvious in skilled trades, i.e., in the work of craftsmen, artisans. Carpenters and electricians practice very tangible crafts and their competence is explicitly tied to a set of tools and a class of materials. They are also matter-of-factly “professionals” about their work: they have a job to do and must do it within clear limitations; they have to “deliver” something of particular quality by a particular date. All of these features of craftsmanship have analogues in academic work, though we sometimes forget it.

It’s something I spend a lot of my time talking to students about. They are often mystified by the competence we are trying to get them to acquire, especially when it comes to their assignments. They don’t know what they are supposed to do or when they have done it right. This, naturally, makes it very difficult for them to learn.

The metaphor I like to use is that of a joiner’s apprentice learning how to make a table. Imagine the master putting a pile of wood before the student and a box of tools. “Make an 80 x 120 cm dining room table,” she says. “Use only this wood and these tools. You have three hours.” Those are obviously not ideal conditions. But solving this problem will force the student to make decisions and the wisdom of these decisions will reveal his competence. There’s also some knowledge involved since the height of a dining room table is a matter of convention (76 cm, I’m told) and the master apparently assumes the student knows this. All the student can do now is get to work and build the best table he knows how. Future lessons can proceed from there.

This exercise is a lot like giving a student three hours to write a three-page essay on the basis of a case framed by a specific theory. The student is being asked to make a conventionally defined thing out of a given set of materials using a specific set of tools. The teacher has presumably chosen the materials and the tools with the course’s learning objectives in mind. In fact, the task is set up to make it easy for the teacher to determine whether the students have learned what the teacher has tried to teach them. The teacher is perhaps expecting something like a five-paragraph essay: a clear line of argument that can be read in about five minutes; five claims that are supported, elaborated or defended as needed.

Compare the master joiner who is faced with the task of evaluating the table. This would require little more than a quick visual inspection, perhaps a few measurements (though the master could no doubt easily “eyeball” the dimensions), and a bit of “stress testing”. The master might pick the table up and put it down again, jostling it back and forth a little, perhaps sitting on it. There is no mystery about what a good dining room table is. The trick here is to make sure the student didn’t just find one or get a 3D printer to make one. By specifying what tools and materials to use, the master has set a problem that constitutes a meaningful test of skill. The student must select the best materials and the best tools for the job.

Mastery here is revealed not just in a facility with the tools but in a sensitivity to the quality of the materials provided. Which pieces of wood should be used and which should be left out? Which should be used for the tabletop and which should be used for the legs? Which hammer is right for one task and which saw is right for another? In some cases, the time constraint plays into these decisions. The best tool for a three-hour table may not be the best for a table you have the whole week to make. Etc.

I think we overthink the difficulty of academic writing sometimes. I certainly think we overthink the individual assignment. We expect too much of it, in one sense, but we are also satisfied with an output that is too imprecise an indication of skill. It doesn’t indicate any “particular set of skills,” we might say, to quote that famous movie. It doesn’t allow us to measure competence very exactly. As a result, I’m sure students work way too hard on their assignments too.

In fact, they work too hard on their assignments and not smartly enough on their studies. They should recognize that they are training their facility and sensitivity. They should take a small problem and solve it well every day. They should become familiar with how the tools feel in their hands, how the materials respond to their attempts to work them into shape. Slow and steady does it. Then, when the exam question is assigned, they should make some decisions and get to work, knowing exactly what they’ve been asked to do and how best to demonstrate that they can.

In my last post, I invoked Heidegger’s distinction between the logical and the existential conceptions of science. Heidegger makes this distinction in Being and Time, where he distinguishes between science as “an interconnection of true propositions” and science as a “mode of Being-in-the-world” that discovers truths (H. 357). He is interested in the ontological conditions of “the theoretical attitude”, we might say.

But he emphasizes that it is not merely the opposite of a “practical” attitude. Science (“theoretical exploration”) is not a matter of “hold[ing] back from any kind of manipulation”. On the contrary, Heidegger says, science requires a great deal of practical activity: setting up experiments in physics, preparing slides for observation through the microscope, digging up artifacts for archaeological research. Here, already in 1927, Heidegger is heralding the emergence of what we today call “science studies”, i.e., the interdisciplinary study of science as variety of social and material practices. These practices are of great interest to me as an “inframethodologist”.

Writing plays an important role in them. “Even the ‘most abstract’ way of working out problems and establishing what has been obtained, one manipulates equipment for writing, for example” (H. 358, my emphasis). In fact, Heidegger defined human existence by rereading Aristotle’s characterization of human beings as “rational animals” as “that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse” (H. 25). In this sense, then, Foucault’s early work on “discursive formations” can also be considered an “existential” analysis of science, as well as an important part of the transition from the philosophy of science to science studies.

While writing is not the only practical aspect of modern research, it may be the most straightforwardly “existential”, as the slogan “publish or perish” reminds us. Indeed, Heidegger was sometimes uncannily prescient. In “The Age of the World Picture”, from 1938, he describes what might be called “the modern condition” (to play on the title Lyotard’s famous book), in which he sees a shift away from “scholarship” and towards “research”:

The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects. These, rather than the cultivating of erudition, lend to his work its atmosphere of incisiveness. The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses. He contracts for commissions with publishers. The latter now determine with him which books must be written. (QT, p. 125)

I think that, today, we all recognize ourselves at least partly in this description.

At the heart of Foucault’s theory of discourse — his “archaeology” of the human sciences — is something he called the Archive, which resonates nicely with the passage I just quoted from Heidegger above:

[The archive situates] a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. It does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of all libraries, outside time and place; nor is it the welcoming oblivion that opens up to all new speech the operational field of its freedom: between traditions and oblivion, it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to undergo regular modification. It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.(AK, p. 130)

This is why I read Foucault’s Order of Things and Archaeology of Knowledge as detailed empirical and theoretical elaborations of Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture”. Both thinkers were trying to show how “modern” or “classical” representation was contingent on historical processes, and that history appeared to be moving on. The “postmodern condition” is, perhaps, precisely expressed in this image of an archive, operating somewhere between Bolzano’s book of “the totality of all human knowledge” and Borges’s famous “Library of Babel”. It is the craft of making “statements” to be collected in this archive that I’m interested in.

We all know what meta-theory is, right? Although the Greek word “meta” actually just means “after” (“metaphysics” is just the book that Aristotle dictated after his Physics) we generally think of “going meta” as taking things “up a level”, going “above” or “beyond” whatever we were currently talking about. Meta-theory is the theory of theory, a metatheory is the theory of a theory, i.e., it is a conceptual framework for describing another conceptual framework, like a meta-language is a language for talking about another language (the “object-language”). Meta-theory, we might say, is the application of the philosophy of science to a particular scientific theory,  asking, “How is this a theory?” although sometimes it’s also simply a branch of the philosophy of science, one that answers the question, “What is a theory?”

In order to understand what “inframethodology” is we have to first notice that there’s a difference between method and methodology. Scientists have theories and methods, and they use method-ology to reflect on their methods just as they use metatheory to reflect on their theories. Inframethodology is an account (“logos”), not of our methods, but of that which lies “beneath method”, it investigates the subtle joints of the craft we call research. One way to illustrate it is by noting the difference between the methods astronomers use to analyse images they have collected from telescopes and the skills with which they operate those telescopes. “Method” guides the decisions they make; “inframethodology” is about how they execute those decisions. Inframethodology also includes the art of keeping records of data and taking notes from reading, as well as library and presentation skills. Not least, it includes the craft of writing, i.e., of communicating your results to your peers. An inframethodologist is interested in the rich array of informal practices that support our formalized methods.

In an important sense, inframethodology is the study of the care the we take in doing our research. High-quality research depends not just on sophisticated theories and methods, or expensive equipment or many hours in the field; it depends on how we make use of those resources. It involves the careful reading of other people’s work and its accurate representation (and citation) in our own; it involves the careful observation of empirical facts and their accurate representation in our prose. Inframethodology is the study of how that care is taken and how we learn to be good at practicing it.

If Heidegger is to be believed, this makes inframethodology an “existential” matter. Indeed, I would argue that it is part of what he called “the existential conception of science”; science becomes a “mode of care”, a way of being-in-the-world. But, while I do like to think of myself as a philosopher, at least on some days, I think I should admit that inframethodology is perhaps more closely related to the rhetoric of science than its philosophy proper. It is very much about how discourse of science is maintained and transformed. But the stakes are grave enough, profound enough (i.e., deep enough, i.e., “below”) to justify an occasional philosophical excursion. At the end of the day, however, we are truly thrown into it. It’s a very practical problem.

“The aim of education or culture is merely the development of good taste in knowledge and good form in conduct.” (Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, p. 393)

What’s so good about knowledge? Why is it better to know than not to know? Indeed, is knowledge always a good thing? Is it sometimes better not to know? Certainly, we cannot realistically pursue a goal of knowing everything there is to know, even about a specific subject. And whatever we do know derives its value, its virtue if you will, from its contribution to the important business of living. Life, we might say, has an “epistemic” component, which suggests an epistemological issue.**

I worry about the epistemic component of the problem of living. That makes me an epistemologist, just as an ethnographer is interested in the “ethnic side” of life, if you will.** The ethnographer is not interested in becoming a better native, a more upstanding member of the community; the ethnographer wants to understand what it means to be native to a particular land. Likewise, I’m less interested (or at least I sometimes tell myself I’m less interested) in actually knowing something, than in understanding the difference that knowing it will make to our lives.

I’m not really very curious person, perhaps. But I am obsessed with what happens when we satisfy, or fail to satisfy, our curiosity. When I consider carefully how our research and teaching environments are organised (my experience is mostly with universities) I sometimes worry that we let real curiosity go unsatisfied, and glut ourselves with trivia instead. Sometimes, I think I’m against curiosity altogether. I suppose that’s a bit like an ethnographer who has a low of opinion of nationalism. You can understand something well enough to be afraid of it.

It seems life would be easier if we were less naturally curious. Or perhaps the problem lies with how easily we let ourselves be satisfied. Maybe I just think we have poor taste in knowledge.

I’d like to try to affect our taste in knowledge. In particular, I think we need to have a much more refined taste for social science. We’re much too eager to learn how society works, how people live together. We’re much too ready to believe what social scientists tell us, what some recent “study” has “shown”. We need to hold claims about the society in which we live to a much higher standard. After all, what we think is true of our society is very much a part of how that society works. If you think you live in a democracy your political activities look very different from how they’d look if you thought you were living in an oligarchy. If you think people’s decisions (including your own) can be manipulated by “priming”, your negotiating tactics will probably show it.

I’m interested not just in how we practice what we know, but in how we go about our knowing. What sorts of practices lead to better kinds of knowledge. Our knowledge will never be perfect, but there must be a sense that we’re striving to improve. What criteria, then, can we come up with for “good” epistemic practices? This is a somewhat different question than the one philosophers classically raise: what are the criteria for knowledge? Instead of asking how we can know that we know one thing or another, I want to describe a set of practices such that, if we practice them, what is likely to result is “good” knowledge. I think it’s much less important to believe the right things than to cultivate the right attitude about our beliefs. I think epistemology should be about that attitude, not about the beliefs that emerge at the end of it.

More later.

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*This post was originally published as part of a series on my old blog.

**It should be possible to distinguish between “epistemic” and “epistemological” as easily as we distinguish between “ethnic” and “ethnographic”. Knowers have have epistemic traits just as people have ethnic ones; our interest in these traits is epistemological and ethnographic respectively. When they produce “an ethnography” of a group of people (sometimes called “natives”) ethnographers delineate their “ethnicity”—the nature of their particular humanity, or what we call culture. When epistemologists produce “an epistemology” of a group of knowers (sometimes called “scientists”) they delineate their “epistemicity”—okay, that’s not a word, but epistemologists do delineate the nature of the knowledge, sometimes the nature of the knowledge that belongs to a particular group of knowers. Ethnos just means “people” in Greek. Episteme means knowledge. Foucault talked about epistemes in part to avoid talking about “sciences”. He preferred to talk about “field[s] of scientificity” over talking of “scientific theories”.