Left Center Left

Kieran at Crooked Timber sees Paul Krugman speak at the American Sociological Association and comes away with these thoughts:

The worst [question], stupid as well as rude, asked whether economics was “too mired in the muck of right-wing thought” to do any good in the world….Questions like that are the bobblehead left-wing analogue to the pez-dispenser right-wing trope that if only you understood “Econ 101″ or “the basic laws of the market” you’d agree with every wingnut idea put to you. I have all kinds of criticisms and qualms about economics as a body of knowledge and a professional enterprise, and naturally I’d like to be right about all of them all the time. But, sadly, easy certainty is continually frustrated by the fact that many of the economists I know are much smarter than me and have the irritating ability to make good arguments for their point of view. And so even though I will of course prevail in the end I can’t just dismiss them out of hand. I expect the same consideration in return, the odd snotty economist (or, more often, their camp-followers in political science and law) notwithstanding.

He’s being a little tongue-in-cheek here, but his point holds nonetheless: scholars need to recognize that colleagues in other disciplines have reasons for the views they do, which does mean infallibility of course, but is a warning against an academic hubris which makes, say, a literary critic feel empowered to proclaim that economists or political scientists are simply part of bourgeois ideology (Marxist or poststructuralist variation) and therefore missing the real picture that they are able to see, after a couple of Wallerstein and Paul Smith books. (For the extreme of such hubris, read Alan Sokal’s hoax on Social Text.) This sense of disciplinary superiority, I feel, is what needs to be dropped from the humanities critical-theory hegemony more than any particular theory or school of thought. My fear, in fact, is that humanities scholars will proclaim poststructuralism passe without addressing the poor scholarly habits that in fact were the problem.

I have always like this passage from David Bordwell, film scholar. Attacking what he calls SLAB theory (Saussure-Lacan-Althusser-Barthes), he writes,

Such provincialism cripples SLAB theory as an intellectual endeavor. Any theorist who really wanted to pose questions about language would grapple with the work of Locke, Humboldt, Sapir, Whorf, Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky, Montague, Grice, Putnam, Kripke, Davidson, Dummett, Searle, Katz, and Sperber. Any theorist claiming an interest in psychology would certainly need to consider the contending ideas of Piaget, the Russian reflexologists, Vygotsky, Bruner, Fodor, et al. Any theorist seeking the sociopolitical functions of cinema cannot ignore Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, Parsons, Elster, and Giddens. A theorist who pronounces upon whether semiotics or psychoanalysis is a science ought to be familiar with the history and philosophy of the sciences. Yet inspection of current “theoretical” texts in our field reveals an embarrassing ignorance on all these scores. As it stands, SLAB theory constitutes a convenient way of not knowing a lot of things. Paradoxically, a movement that makes novelty its chief appeal seems unaware of recent developments in the fields to which it lays claim. SLAB theory wants to be new without being current.

I hate to admit that he’s spot on in his assessment, even 15 years after writing it (things are gettting better in film studies, but slowly). I wouldn’t want to throw any SLAB baby out with the provincialist bathwater, but his words are something I take to heart in making claims about film’s social and political function in American life.