Keeping “critical” critical: A conversation from Culture on the Edge

Abstract

In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge—a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions—had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical,” terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that the members of the group thought it worthwhile to focus some attention on them. What follows is the transcript of their conversation.

Keywords

critical critique Culture on the Edge identification

Introduction

In the editorial that opened issue 2(1), 2014 of Critical Research on Religion, readers found the following:

In our editorial in the inaugural issue of CRR, 1(1), April 2013, we wrote that the journal “will critique religion not only from the outside but also from within.”By “critique,” we did not mean “undermine.” Our aim is not to diminish religion or make it obsolete. Religion evolves, in part, through “criticism and reformation from within,” and thus, critique can help strengthen religious ideologies, practices, and even institutions …

But understanding the notion of critique to imply either undermining or reforming something surely limits the role of the critic to a rather traditional debate—one in which the scholar is here either to correct those whom he or she may study (one thinks here of Richard Dawkins et al., but even Wendy Doniger and her interest to recover the authentic form of Hinduism that apparently escapes so many in India today) or, conversely, in which the scholar’s aim is to enhance, nurture, or improve the object of study (think here of the many calls among North American and European scholars for a so-called reformation of Islam in order to create and legitimize one that is more conducive to liberal democratic interests). For both of these understandings of critique carry with them an obviously normative streak and thereby fail to entertain that an alternative route could entail a form of critique somewhat akin to the notion of historicization, denoting a scholarly attitude in which our work rigorously examines situation and consequence, taking seriously the human and the happenstance, examining the contingent and the always interested basis of claims of identity and place. In this case, the scholar cares little about adopting either an insider’s or an outsider’s point of view (if we opt for those often-used names) and has no dog in the fight over whether to pull the rug out from under the item being studied or to nurture it so that it lives another day in some purer, authentic, or revised manner. This suggests that scholars can examine not why religion is either right or wrong, valid or invalid, thereby avoiding questions of how to improve it or dispense with it; instead, they can work to see how those elements of culture named religion function with regard to other segments of the larger cultural world, in order to make possible and credible the various regimes of truth that are presupposed in the traditional tennis match of inside vs. outside and reformer vs. critic.

Simply put, while we may come not to praise Caesar, scholars may also arrive on the scene to do something other than bury him.

It was with this set of concerns in mind—the concern to press this notion of critique much further than the traditional debate—that, in early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge (a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions) had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical.” What follows is the transcript of their conversation.

Russell McCutcheon (RM): For some time, scholars of religion have debated the limits of the field, what it can and cannot do, questions it should and should not ask, and the tools that are suited to its purposes. At first there was the epoché of the phenomenologists, then Peter Berger’s methodological atheism, and soon after Ninian Smart’s fine-tuning toward what he called methodological agnosticism (still prominent in much of the field, as evidenced in the world religions course). But today, while a number of scholars still think that questions of normativity are out of bounds, and despite many no longer claiming that objectivity or neutrality is even an attainable goal, we hear calls for the field to include the work of: “critical caretakers” (able to adjudicate religious questions); critical or post-secular theologians (those who claim to bracket belief while still assessing the adequacy of religious claims); and, as this very journal advocates, both the work of so-called secular and religious critics (perhaps not far off from Kurt Rudolph’s onetime notion of the History of Religions as a form of ideology critique). So it would seem that some attention devoted to this adjective, “critical,” as well as the nouns, “critique” and “criticism,” is in order.

Merinda Simmons (MS): I recently presented at a Religious Studies conference, where I found the unspoken limits of what counts as “critique” to be at play in the session in which I was invited to participate. The panel was made up of four scholars (including me) who were responding to a book on contemporary American race and class politics. While not getting into the finer points of the book or its argument, my own response focused on the terms I felt were taken for granted in the text, like “modern,” “class,” “race,” “democratic,” “progressive,” etc.—terms whose meanings were assumed from the outset. As such, they served, I said in my presentation, as insider codes that legitimized interests held by a specific group of scholars doing work on race and politics (read: social justice).

I used Russell’s blog post on so-called material religion (http://religion.ua.edu/blog/2014/03/its-alive/) as my initial way in and mentioned casually that I was working with a collaborative research group that is trying to take really seriously Jean-François Bayart’s claim (in his book, The Illusion of Cultural Identity) that “there is no such thing as identity, only operational acts of identification.” If we keep that in mind, I said, then we’ve got some work to do in our conversations about race and religion, where, it would seem, “blackness” and “Christianity” are categories that go almost entirely unquestioned. I might agree with or enjoy the vision promoted in the book about what democracy should look like in the 21st century, but that isn’t the point of scholarship. That vision, in fact, relies on numerous authenticity claims, especially where Christian ideology is concerned.

While the author thanked me for my challenges to the text and agreed that categories like “the South” are complicated, he said that he chose the labels deliberately with their “common uses” in mind and that, yes, he was being ideological. So what?

And right there is my interest in the concept of “criticism.” Strategic essentialism is just fine, it would seem, as long as you say you’re being strategic. Coming from a background in English Literature, sure, I saw a lot of “progressive” politics inviting assumptions and insider codes among scholars. However, “criticism” meant (at least for the professors under which I studied) a specific kind of inquiry that followed from the brand of questioning and analysis by Frankfurt School thinkers. Any scholarship that simply reads a certain thing out of texts—religion, feminist themes, what-have-you—was quickly branded criticism-lite or pseudo-analysis, as all it took was the intellectual equivalent of the Edit-Find function in Microsoft Word.

But in Religious Studies, the field in which I work, it continues to surprise me to find this kind of scholarship everywhere—even in the “progressive” sub-field of African American studies. And it certainly isn’t the only one! Panels on women, gender, or sexuality at the AAR often seem interested simply in praising or privileging this or that group’s “alternative” and yet—and here’s the thing—authentic take on “traditional” beliefs, rituals, etc. Where the book emphasized in the panel at the regional conference is concerned, Christian theology was offered as the answer to a host of social, economic, and racial problems in the U.S. But it was, of course, a certain kind of theology being promoted—not that of the segregationists, certainly, but the more authentic faith that was manifested in the work of proponents of the “social gospel.” Thus, we can keep ideological claims in our scholarship, as long as they fall on the right (or, as is often the case, left) side of a political stance.

Leslie Dorrough Smith (LDS): I was also initially drawn to one of the first questions about what constitutes criticism or critique. In my mind, criticism involves the ability to be able to see the connections between things that might otherwise go unspoken. There is a common critique against the type of work we do, I think, which says that because it’s so reductionist, it dissolves everything into an abyss of absurd abstraction.

But what I think Merinda’s hit on here is that there is a huge sector of our field that finds religious answers as the solution to religious problems. But in each case, only some of the power dynamics creating the situations are ever revealed. By “some” of the power dynamics, I mean that we can freely acknowledge the strategies implicit in racism but cannot acknowledge feminism as a strategy. And so back to what is involved in critique—it strikes me as a rather simple process—can we pair like with like? A certain sort of protectionism goes on there, similar to the longstanding refusal to interrogate “the sacred”—that refusal now extends to a wide variety of other things that, if one dissects them, don’t constitute unnecessary abstraction at all, but really reveal most social processes as iterations of the same sorts of dynamics—some we like, some we don’t.

MS: Yes, and in this case, the problem wasn’t even identified as a religious one. The book I mentioned is on racism and poverty, specifically in spheres of education in the U.S. South. That was “the problem” in need of critical analysis. But what that analysis was really about was, in my reading, a brand of so-called “progressive” Protestant Christianity the author deemed the solution to our present-day ills.

LDS: So what I guess I’m wondering is what’s at stake when scholars concede that what we’re all doing is some sort of strategy. This seems to be quite a concession—if not the ultimate one, so to speak—for many scholars. And is a concession that all is strategy the same as the claim that objectivity is impossible?

RM: With the demise of the once hoped-for goal of objectivity and neutrality there’s now this “come one, come all” view in our field, and many others, inasmuch as we are all now seen as having a stance, a position, a viewpoint, commitments, etc., so we’re all being strategic and we're all situated; so long as we acknowledge it then everything’s apparently fine. The trouble, of course, is that there’s many viewpoints, stances, positions, that are not tolerated even in this seemingly inclusive model (i.e., boundaries are always being drawn), commitments that are not allowed in the game, no matter how big the proverbial big tent is and no matter how self-aware the critic is—that is, there’s all sorts of people offering criticism who are judged illegitimate (much the same way you seem to have been dismissed [the correct word, I think] at that panel, Merinda). So the concession, as Leslie names it, disguises as much as the notion of so-called objectivity once also hid—normative, socially formative claims that are actively suppressing a variety of alternatives. So the question, to me, is not about openness or self-awareness but, instead, trying to figure out which institutions are home to which approaches—it’s not “come one, come all” nor will it ever be, for there are always gatekeepers. We’re all stuck somewhere, as I think I once phrased it (in chapter 5 of Critics Not Caretakers), but we’re not all stuck in the same place, with the same stakes. So it seems that there were two different zones, two different discourses overlaid or intersecting at your panel, Merinda, and the question then is which is properly at home in the publicly funded study of religion, or maybe the academy in general, and which is not (i.e., which comprises an instance of the thing we study); for if all we have to do is throw up our hands and say, “Yup, I've got vested interests,” then anything goes and that doesn’t seem much of a way to organize a field of so-called critical scrutiny.

Steven Ramey (SR): One component of critical inquiry became apparent to me in a new way just yesterday. A student came by my office frustrated with a class in another department. The professor had deconstructed the notion of race early in the semester and then discussed the problems and dynamics of stereotypes a few weeks ago. All was fine until the discussion of Ebonics, which was presented simply as Black language or Black Vernacular English in contrast to Standard English. When challenged, the professor referenced an “empirical study” of poor urban youth in Philadelphia. The professor failed, though (and the student saw this!), to critique the implications of the naming convention for so-called Black Vernacular English and its role in perpetuating assumptions of marginality and homogeneity. That critique of unrecognized assumptions, moving into practices of categorization, as with Merinda’s critique on the panel, is a vital aspect of critical study in various fields.

RM: It's apparent then—no?—that “critique” or “critical,” like so much of what we’re interested in studying as a group, is indicative of the user’s interests and hardly names some general attitude or universal method. For it is painfully obvious, if just the right question is asked, from a different vantage point, that this so-called critical disposition has limits, is not extended to everything (such as itself and its own conditions or foundation, for self-critique is great but, as the Logical Positivists painfully found a few generations ago, sooner or later sheer assertion seems to lie at the base of social systems; after all, there’s no empirical evidence out there to say that we need to base scientific claims on empirical evidence), is in the service of certain socially formative interests—like the many people who adopt a postmodern critique only to use it to unmask some dominant position with which they disagree, all in an effort to inscribe some new interests as the new and improved authentic, the original, the foundation, etc. (“Meet the new boss; same as the old boss”). To my way of thinking, such use of critical tools fails the test of methodological equal opportunity: the ability to treat all instances of human behavior, organization, claims, etc., no more or less interesting and deserving of study. That is to say, while none of us has time to study everything (as if “everything” wasn’t itself some ideological fantasy, as if we could somehow conceptualize the big picture, the elephant in the room that defies the proverbial blind men), whatever tools we adopt to do our work ought to be applicable to any situation anyone else would also opt to study—that’s what makes our work part of a science (in the broad, wissenschaftlich sense of that term, of course—a disciplined study). Anything short of that strikes me as very troublesome—unless you agree with the motives/effects of that particular work, of course, for then it’ll likely be seen as rigorous or innovative, perhaps akin to that panel you were on, Merinda.

MS: I like Leslie’s earlier question: “And is a concession that all is strategy the same as the claim that objectivity is impossible?” I think what points to some “way ahead” or answer to this query is Russell’s point that “whatever tools we adopt to do our work ought to be applicable to any situation anyone else would also opt to study—that’s what makes our work part of a science.” Yes, exactly! Even those academicians interested in promoting or advocating for a very specific idea, group, etc., would still, I think, not hesitate to call what they're doing “social science” or “human science.” That’s not such a provocative label to many scholars. And yet, they fail to take seriously the implications of calling a certain method or approach (even within the humanities) “scientific.”

Maybe this is where, then, the conversation might take note of the increasing emphasis on the term and role of “public intellectuals.” As soon as issues of community work/advocacy come into the mix, it seems to me that we’re no longer adhering to scientific method, at least not in the sense of cross-topic or cross-disciplinary applicability. Where the conversation falls apart—or, where it becomes apparent that critics and caretakers are not having the same conversation at all in the first place—is that I’ve found many responding to a claim such as the one I just made as suggesting that people should not do “the work of social justice” or advocate for communities that are important to them. And I find a little bizarre that this becomes the point. What people do outside their professional academic work is their business—certainly not mine! What vexes me, though, is when people try to have one kind of work stand in for the other. One can motivate or foster the Other inasmuch as we might pursue a certain set of interests over a host of different playing fields. But to stack up the humanities as a special place where one’s advocacy work and one’s academic work are one in the same is a very different issue.

Craig Martin recently posted an online article to my Facebook wall. The Salon piece is about the calls for more (implicitly white) public intellectuals that ignore scholars of color doing that very work. I think it’s a great case in point. I am interested in the same communities as are cited in the piece, though its author and I may have very different ideas of what it means to speak to “them.” If anything, I find it patronizing to suggest that there’s the academy and then everyone else. After all, the examples used in the article regarding speaking to “the masses” are ones like cable news and blogging. I’d hesitate to suggest that the poor and disenfranchised are surfing Salon.com for community organization strategies. MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, for example, asks all sorts of good questions and facilitates a lot of conversations that I find interesting. But that's just it—I find them interesting. I am able to watch her show online with my coffee in hand between work chores.

I know I’m generalizing here and being perhaps a bit too facile. But the particular point of what it is we’re doing if engaged in a science is one worth pushing. Now, some would say that we’re relying problematically on a specific, Anglo-European conception of “science” and privileging it. But I think that raises far bigger questions about method, and I find those making that critique to still employ the academy as it serves their own interests. As such, it seems something of a disingenuous claim to me.

Monica Miller (MM): It seems to me that many of the examples that often come to mind in such conversations cast the social justice ilk as critically blind with respect to certain terminology, like race, racism, blackness, etc. I’m not interested to disagree, but to try and turn this blindness as well as our analyses of such blindness into data. With that said, it seems like we’re all largely in agreement as to our aims regarding what “critical” is and what it ought to do/accomplish. I do wonder, however, if there is a point at which the moniker “critical” starts to function in place of the ideological assumptions and methodological and theoretical blindspots exposed by a “right” or “orthodox” rendering of the term “critical.” To this point, I don’t know if I have a suggestion for staving off such inadvertent appropriation, but if looking at our discourse as data, then I think we ought keep such possibilities in mind.

With that in mind, I really like Leslie’s suggestion that criticism “involves the ability to be able to see the connections between things that might otherwise go unspoken.” I’m in agreement that criticism can be conceived as such. And I think in such a definition, we guard ourselves against the sort of thing I suggest above as a possibility. Power often works through suggestions that it is anything but, or it works through, protectionism, or through proxies like “sacred” or “nation-state,” or what have you. I think if we’re working to expose the connections between things that might otherwise go unspoken, then I’d say we have a sort of intellectual obligation to keep doing what we’re doing. Here, again, I wonder if we’re still running the risk, however, of not recognizing or exposing the power dynamics and connections that often “go unspoken,” in terms of each of our social positions, and the varieties of privileges making possible the discourse that we’re trying to steer. I’m not suggesting those explicitly concerned with social justice in their scholarship have more pressing obligations than categorical scrutiny, but the social world we love to discuss is never fully removed from our ability to discuss it.

I totally agree with Russell’s characterization about the camps in the field qualifying their efforts as interested or strategic. And indeed, the field seems too content with seeing those different “locations” as somehow similar or complementary. And we definitely see the collateral damage of this trend, not only in Merinda having been dismissed, but that through her dismissal, influence cannot be shared—power cannot be bartered. Maybe the field has become or has always been scared not of telling a sort of “reductive” truth about power—how it works, where it is, etc. (although this is also true)—but about losing a perceived sense of power, or a “real” power, whatever that might look like? For isn’t power what is at stake even in the question of who and what should be funded in the academic study of religion?

Also thinking about both Steven’s and Russell’s comments, I’m starting to wonder if we could add a caveat to Leslie’s definition of critical, with the addition being simply a two-dimensionality of unspoken connections, that of the relations between data, and the relations at work not between data and analyst, but between one analyst and another engaging similar data. In that light, I think Russell’s push for a “science” of religion makes sense, feels good intellectually, and I want it! But how can it happen if Merinda or me or Leslie or Steven or Russell, etc., etc. are shut down as reductionists or worse? (I’m really asking this.)

I think a possible answer to “how” involves how we’re understanding the category of “critique,” and so a science of the study of religion could seem to serve as that model, but then I’m stuck thinking that “human science” is a bit of an oxymoron. In other words, we can have all the answers—we don’t, but we’re working hard)—but that doesn’t mean people will listen. That’s kind of my take away from Merinda’s earlier point. We’re dealing with apples and oranges, in the sense that not everyone knows their “location.” The oxymoron is reinforced, though, because if we tell each other their “locations” too strongly, then it sounds like we’re putting people in their place, reinforcing the already existing “locations,” and our work ends up merely sanctioning the distinctions. Is a “fact” ever disinterested, if it is “ranked” as somehow distinct from those who might be victimized by the construction of a “fact?” I guess that’s why I’m interested in the line where/when/if, etc., in which the admittedly nebulous but more or less cohesive sense of “critical” with which we’re working and writing and speaking is taken as normative. I guess another way to ask the question, and connecting back to what I said first, is: “What do we do now so we’ll never have to ask ourselves: When did our critical scholarship move away from the edge?”

MS: Can you say more about why you think the notion of “human science” is an oxymoron? I'm not sure I understand fully what you mean.

MM: I guess what I’m thinking is this: while I myself prefer (and use) the language of “human science”—a term far more expansive than what we usually distinguish as humanities vs. the social sciences—what often passes these days as the “human sciences” sort of deconstructs itself in that the over-determined, positivistic certainty granted to the empirical (much of what we see in sociology of religion, for example, or the large-scale assumption that “science” gets us closer to what is “really” going on, even if just in a methodological sense) follows a similar logic seen in the uncertain “certainty” or the certain “uncertainty” that so dominates the phenomenological enterprise—what we’ve seen expressed in and demonstrated by the “sociological” study of the Nones, for example (work that Steven and I have critiqued rather thoroughly, of course).

To get back to the oxymoron: human science is/might be oxymoronic to the extent that “data” fights back whether we want it to or not. Bluntly, my point is that someone can tell Merinda she’s wrong. Whether she is or not is not my point; the point is that power is cast vertically as well as horizontally in this thing called human sciences, both with respect to experiments as well as analyses, but also in the presentation of such material in scholarly venues. That is, we’ll always be wrong in someone’s eyes, and when we stop being “wrong” in their eyes, then it suggests that somehow, we’ve become the “caretakers.” The cool part is that awareness of these dimensions lets Leslie’s first characterization of critique work well in showing those connections. And the addition of this reflexive dimension ensures that as many connections are attended to as possible in any given schema. Another way of understanding what I meant would be to say that a “human science” (in order for these two categories to work together) is forced (i.e., by means of power differentials) to augment the Other. For them to fit together, concessions are always made. Either on the front end in terms of process, method, or theory, or on the back end, when someone stands up and tells “us” we’re wrong.

So, what I’m wondering is if these two terms—“human” and “science”—end up deconstructing each other or perhaps that’s not the concern and, so long as we’re privy to the tension, it works. So, “human science” on both ends, ends up being the logic of practice, so to speak. The measure or rubric of what is critical (over and against the model of the human sciences) can never be disconnected from a “scientific” register, broadly conceived, but neither can it ignore or negate the strategies at work between scholar and data, on the one hand, and between scholars across data, on the other.

MS: What I find compelling about the term “social/human sciences” is not the seeming ability or even attempt to get closer to what’s “really going on” (you're quite right that that’s an impossible and, to my mind, kind of silly venture). Rather, what I find useful about it is the notion of methodological applicability. It’s not a suggestion of the right or proper tools where the nebulous term “power” can get employed so quickly and carelessly to legitimate who’s doing what. Instead, it’s an appeal to scholars to not look at our data as what matters. Keeping one’s eye on the proverbial ball means looking at the pitcher—that’s part of the main argumentative strand around which this group works, as I see it. And in order for the piece of data not to be “the thing” one’s talking about in some kind of irreducible sense, there needs to be a methodology up and running that applies to anyone’s work, no matter the data set.

After all, of course someone can tell me that I’m wrong. Lots of scholars I've encountered think I’m wrong. That’s not nearly as interesting to me as are the tools we each use to inform our work and to land at some conclusion of rightness or wrongness or whatever the case may be.

MM: I love how you put this, Merinda! Absolutely spot on! We indeed need to look at the pitchers and, in order to do so, a method is of course necessitated in such a task. And I think that’s what we have been attempting here at Culture on the Edge, in my opinion.

A thought experiment: if critique is to uncover points of convergence not typically noted, then I’m just trying to do that … , perhaps at my own peril. As a method, how do we retain the critical edge of the human sciences without keeping it under as close of scrutiny as anything else? If a method is to cut across data, if there is to be a method, then it ought to include critique of itself so that it remains critical. It seems to me there is a thin line between method as method and method as ideology, a line we intentionally walk along—indeed, we might say this is the “edge.” But in thinking about the prospect of “critical caretakers,” a term perhaps as oxymoronic as “human science,” then we have to guard against our critiques turning into a kind of caretaking of method, lest we end up an example of critical caretaker.

I’m thinking here of a recent discussion with a colleague who suggested that he too was taking a “critical” position on race, methodologically speaking. In his scholarship, he’s focusing on how race comes to be made possible rather than what it “is”—rather than assuming that it looks like “this” or “that.” In that sense, in terms of what we’re up to methodologically, he was interested in keeping his eye on “pitchers” too. However, it would be possible to see his human science method as problematic, in an identitarian sense, such that he may as well have had his eye on the ball instead of the pitcher (i.e., the conditions that made it this sort of pitch vs. that). So what happens when method and identity are blurred? We ended up debating his human science against my human science, rather than the ball, the pitcher, or anything else.

I’d propose that when method becomes identity, then method is data. How do we deal with that? That’s why I think that, perhaps, a critical methodology must always remain critical (or reflexive) of itself so as to stave off our method collapsing into our identity. So a critical methodology would be inherently reflexive anyway (pushing the thought experiment further). After all, if method too is strategy, and social interests are part and parcel of this thing we call method, then methods too, even for the human sciences, are not disconnected from our “own” stakes. So, I’m interested in those stakes as much as a critical methodology.

How we deal with this problem, oxymoron, paradox, whatever, is an open question, I think, and I don’t mean to suggest that I even have a sense of what an answer would look like. But in the case of something like race, gender, and the like, this paradox is more than a logical/methodological pain in our asses. The stakes aren’t simply intellectual, or political in terms of identity, but practical. What we’re seeing in the asking of the question of a “critical caretaker” is the possible appropriation of the category “critical” for the sake of identity formation. Given this arrangement, method becomes identity; hence, there’s no method at all. It is now data. In other words, we end up thrown around and batted out of the park. To ground the metaphor, don’t we run the risk of having our method turned into someone else’s identity? Those who are our data can have their cake and eat it too, appropriating the term in a kind of sleight of hand where they don’t really have to change or improve their methodological rigor, while we become the operational acts of identification for others. Don’t we see this already happening when people label us “MTSR folks” or “NAASR folks” … , because we’re “critically” all the same, right?¹

So, might a “critical” “human science” (i.e., the systematic study of our species, one that defies the now outdated humanities vs. social science distinction, a study that problematizes that old notion of the enduring human spirit that one half of that pair supposed studied) preempt such an “attack” by situating ourselves (and our method) as some of our data lest we become fodder for someone else’s identity/data? Might that be how we stay on the “edge?” or how “critical” stays “critical?”

RM: The pitcher vs. ball imagery is useful, I think, to illustrate what I, at least, mean by the human science. Too many colleagues, I think, fail to see their object of study as an artifact of human beings who were themselves in happenstance (i.e., contingent, historical, etc.) situations where structure and agency continually intertwine and mutually constitute one another. In a word, they watch the ball—i.e., the object they happen to study—and fail to see it (whatever it is—a text, an artifact, an identity claim, etc.) as a remnant of human actions, judgments, choices, etc. Systematically studying the production of artifacts, or texts, of meanings, or identities (all examples of various balls being tossed around that some of us sadly can’t take our eyes off of, i.e., the products some “we” produce that, in turn, produces their sense of “us”) as productions, as historical circumstances, as the results of prior players, each embedded within settings that had constraints and opportunities of their own—this is what I’d hope the human sciences are able to examine, all the while mindful that we, qua scholars, don’t much care how the pitch is thrown but, instead, that it is thrown. We leave to those playing that particular game, in that particular location, to judge it for themselves, by their own contestable standards. For to us, the pitch, resulting from the pitcher, and the assessment of it, resulting from the batter’s or the catcher’s or the umpire’s or the fans’ viewpoints, are the things (or, better, social processes) that we study; to rephrase, we study competing representations and the situations in which they bump and grind, to this or that end, effect, etc. We study signification, broadly conceived. Whether, at the end of the day, we jog out onto the softball field with our mitt is, of course, up to us, but qua scholar, I’d like to think that we recognize that our game is rather different. That we reproduce a certain identity—that of scholar, as I’m undoubtedly defining her or him—by arguing for and using these rules, these distinctions, these methods, is, I think, an inevitable result, for we too are historical subjects in happenstance settings with issues of power, privilege, access, etc., at stake. That others might be interested in studying us in this regard, making data of us, rather than trying to be among us, is, I think, the sign that we’re onto something here, for in making us into their object of study, they’re making evident the utility of the distinctions and the rules that we’re working by—for, voilà, they work on data too! It's like those who try to dismiss Freud’s work by chalking him up to some obscure thing that happened in his childhood; what they fail to realize is that they have just confirmed the utility of his theory in their very effort to dismiss it. The committed Freudian would therefore be both pleased and amused by such a dismissal. As Merinda, too, should feel, I think, by her recent post-conference panel experience.

Being on the edge, then, I think means that we never lose sight of the happenstance, the contingent, the ironic. Critique or critical, then, are words that we can apply to this attitude—it’s not a critique of the way the pitch is thrown, for I’m not a pitching coach, the position far too many so-called critical caretakers adopt. Instead, a thoroughgoing historicization of those who think they are qualified to assess the pitch with standards somehow authorized from afar. We situate systems of representation through critique.

MS: I often hear scholars complain about the kind of inquiry we’re up to in our group, suggesting that (to continue briefly with the sports metaphor) theorists are folks who “sit on the sidelines and refuse to get in the game.” It’s a complaint and claim, of course, about authenticity—there's a real game, as far as our critics are concerned, and what we’re doing is navel-gazing and enjoying the isolation of the ivory tower, just to mention a couple things of which I have been specifically accused recently by other scholars.

But here’s something I find interesting about that critique. I often abbreviate my data sets as theories of race, gender, and the South. Well, I find the above complaint about my work leveled constantly by colleagues engaged in race and gender studies. In both those domains, there is a clear and obvious “game” into which we need to involve ourselves, playing hard for common goals dealing with social equity and diversity (how we define those terms, of course, is rarely discussed, as it’s assumed we all share the same politics and/or definitions). So, my attention to classification, signification, and the processes by which people claim authenticity or legitimacy is often very unwelcome. It’s seen as a distraction—elitist navel-gazing by a privileged academic.

Here’s what's funny, though: I never hear that critique in circles within Southern Studies. For in that discourse, “the South” is seen as something we should complicate, deconstruct, expand, etc. It’s very invested in issues of classification because we’re all concerned with the complexities of something called “the South,” especially since its popular use still often points to a seemingly stable category despite how quickly competing claims of authenticity rear their heads (e.g., a conversation with University of Alabama students on the first day of class about where they’re from, and whether or not it “counts” as part of the South is but one very easy example). What’s more, scholars who are seen as promoting this thing called the South, in some kind of culturally participatory way, are quickly dismissed by others in this subfield as nostalgic romantics of a decidedly older generation—a problematic place to be, considering what associations attend such a designation if thinking about Southern politics and participants.

So, in certain discourses, “playing the game” strikes academics as an obviously bad idea, and in others, it’s seen as the only “real” or legitimate thing to do. As Russell said, it’s inevitable that we’ll be “reproduc[ing] a certain identity … by arguing for and using these rules, these distinctions, these methods.” What I find interesting is that scholars seem to play by different rules, depending on the proverbial game—which makes perfectly logical sense if you see the data set (e.g., gender, race, the South) as the scholarly and political pointe finale. However, if you see the data as ever-shifting and transferable, then a common set of scholarly rules can apply no matter what you're talking about.

RM: Wonderful point and great observation: my take-away is that “critique” or “critical” are contextually specific (like any signifier, of course); sometimes they mean we historicize ourselves along with everything else (Monica’s notion of reflexivity), while yet other times it means that we’re conveniently immune and we use it as a tool to historicize Others.

LDS: Having read through this thread, I’m struck by a couple of things. But before I mention those, I want to backtrack briefly to crystallize what we’ve already said. In great part, this is to make sure I’m following it all. So far, I see us (generally) saying the following things. The new thing I’ve added to this is at the end.

We are defining criticism as (to quote myself) “the ability to be able to see the connections between things that might otherwise go unspoken.” By “connections,” I mean not only causes and correlations, but also possible similarities and points of difference. In light of the previous conversation, I would now add to this that criticism can and should be multi-layered, in the sense that one cannot only find interconnections between things, but also between the people who define what things are worth deeming important, and so on. In other words, critique is applicable not only to the things we study, but also to the people who engage in this study and the modes of study they employ.

Many things in scholarship go unspoken because their normativity is presumed by scholars. Usually, the things that go unspoken are part of a classically liberal “social justice” platform that presumes that reasonable people will necessarily agree that the world should be organized in a particular way and then be willing to work toward that in their scholarship. Of course, this all depends on how you define “reasonable.” On the other hand, at other junctures very little goes unspoken, for just the opposite reason—scholars find the matter worth critiquing and uncovering precisely because they don’t find it normal, desirable, or obvious. Put simply, what scholars find of interest—that is, the moments when they choose to uncover and connect—often have to do with those things that cater to the agendas that they wish to forward.

Being a scholar and being an activist are not mutually exclusive identities, but this does not mean that scholarship and activism are identical exercises, nor does it mean that activism can replace scholarship (and activists would likely argue vice versa). Scholarship is supposed to be a critical activity, which thus makes connections between things (see above). Whether or not one takes on efforts to change society in a particular way based on those connections (activism) is another matter entirely. In fact, it’s entirely possible (and frequently happens) that one’s activism dictates connections that may have been much differently rendered were the terms under which the scholarship happened determined by the activism.

Consistently applying a theory or principle based on causality, correlation, or another form of presumed connection is one of the hallmarks of scientific inquiry. However, a recent trend in scholarship has been to use the impossibility of “pure” objectivity as a gateway for almost everything to count as scholarship, in the sense that if one simply admits one’s biases up front, the quality of the connections (i.e., critiques) that one makes are often seen as self-evidently worthwhile. Unfortunately, this is a great example of how objectivity has been confused with consistency of method. As a scholar, I cannot be aware of every position, connection, or similarity that’s out there—this is one of my limitations as a situated human subject. However, admitting that I have limitations doesn’t mean that I can ignore connections that are accessible to me, connections that may otherwise radically change my conclusions if only they’re given attention.

So what that consistency is—what I see us as trying to achieve in creating “good” scholarship—is the simple recognition that if something pertains to human behavior, then its historicization and politicization must automatically be on the table if we are to even start to understand the dynamics that made it interesting (i.e., worth studying) in the first place.

So if I’ve understood this all correctly, it seems to me that one very simple reason that scholars would be hesitant to see themselves as non-strategists (and thus non-data) is that an admission of strategy seems to be a concession of authority. In other words, it makes one pretty damn normal, and if all you are is another cog in the social wheel, then both your personal authority and the weight of your activist stance seem much less significant.

But is that all there is to it? I’m still wrestling with that, for it seems like an obvious conclusion to me.

MS: Regarding your sixth point, Leslie: I think that’s a big part of it. The other side of that same coin may be the fear that the authority of the cause or issue that motivates a particular activist stance would also have to be conceded. And while a scholar might be willing to admit personal positionality as a cog in the social wheel, I think it’s harder for said scholar to admit “this topic that I find hugely important is not infused with inherent meaning.”

RM: Obvious to some, Leslie, but hardly all.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biographies

Craig Martin is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, New York, former editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, and Executive Secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR). His latest book is entitled Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Russell McCutcheon is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he was Department Chair from 2001 to 2009, a position he now holds once again (2013–18). His latest collection of essays is entitled A Modest Proposal on Method: Essaying the Study of Religion (Brill, 2015).

Monica R. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, the Director of their Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and the author of Religion and Hip Hop (Routledge, 2012).

Steven Ramey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of Asian Studies at the University of Alabama. He is the author of Hindu Sufi or Sikh (Palgrave, 2008) and the series editor for one of Culture on the Edge’s book series (Equinox Publishers).

K. Merinda Simmons is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. She is the author of Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State University Press, 2014).

Leslie Dorrough Smith is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Avila University (Kansas City, MO). She is the author of Righteous Rhetoric: Sex, Speech, and the Politics of Concerned Women for America (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Vaia Touna, a doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), is the editor of the forthcoming essay collection, The Problem of Nostalgia in the Study of Identification (Equinox Publishers), and the series editor for Working with Culture on the Edge (Equinox Publishing), whose first volume, Fabricating Origins, is due out in 2015.