Ideas and Theory: The Political Difference
By STANLEY FISHStanley Fish on education, law and society.
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The last of the 200 comments to my previous column declaring the political impotence of the everything-is-socially-constructed thesis accuses me of assuming that “ideas have no consequences.” Nothing could be further from the truth. “Women have long been marginalized and suppressed by a dominant male culture” is an idea. “Gays have been denied the rights that are theirs as citizens” is an idea. Each of these ideas has been enormously consequential; and each has been the basis of concerted action that altered our political and cultural landscape.
“Everything is socially constructed” is not an idea; it is a proposition at a high, indeed abstract, level of articulation. It is, if you will, a theory, by which I mean a thesis that flies above particulars but tells you in advance of their appearance what the shape and meaning of particulars will necessarily be. “Truth is a matter of correspondence with the facts as they really are apart from any ideological lens or paradigm” is a theory.” “Truths are confirmed or disconfirmed by facts that only are facts within a paradigm” is an opposing theory. (It is a version of everything-is-socially-constructed.)
Notice that neither theory of truth addresses itself to particular facts; each is indifferent to particular facts and says only that whatever they are, they are facts and true by virtue either of correspondence with reality or coherence with a set of paradigm — specific propositions. With respect to particular facts, as you might encounter them in a political or economic or legal context, the theories have nothing more to say; if you want to know what to do — as opposed to knowing the general epistemological conditions within which you will be doing it — they are of no help.
An idea can help. The difference between an idea and a theory is that the first can generate an agenda — a call to action — and the second cannot. Those who believe that women have long been marginalized and suppressed have something to do — propose legislation, stage rallies, withhold labor or sex. Indeed the idea demands that something be done. Those who believe that truth is a matter of correspondence with reality have nothing to do except debate (forever, as it has turned out) with those who believe the opposite.
An idea can help. The difference between an idea and a theory is that the first can generate an agenda — a call to action — and the second cannot. Those who believe that women have long been marginalized and suppressed have something to do — propose legislation, stage rallies, withhold labor or sex. Indeed the idea demands that something be done. Those who believe that truth is a matter of correspondence with reality have nothing to do except debate (forever, as it has turned out) with those who believe the opposite.
Suppose you are arguing with someone about whether a proposition is true; you cite some facts and the other guy says facts are only facts within paradigms. Your reply should be, “That’s not a contribution to the argument because it doesn’t tell us anything; if you’re right and facts are paradigm-specific, and therefore socially constructed, then that is the case with all facts and saying so doesn’t advance the dispute about these particular facts a bit; we’re right back where we started; and if you’re wrong , and the determination of fact is a matter of verifying propositions by consulting reality (whatever that would mean), that’s also true on so general a level that it doesn’t give us a handle on the question of the truth of these facts; so let’s get on with it and forget about spouting theories.” In short, theoretical formulations are not answers to political/empirical questions.
More than a few respondents reminded me that things do change — women get the vote; African-Americans get to sit at the front of the bus and at lunchroom counters; gays gain rights — and that change often occurs when established ways of thinking are challenged by a powerful idea or concept. I agree. I’m just saying that theories don’t have that kind of power because the level of abstraction at which they are formulated renders them substantively empty (that is the point of theory) and therefore incapable of addressing a situation where substantive issues are at stake. Substantive issues call for a substantive, not a theoretical, response.
Take the civil rights revolution. H. R. Coursen reports that Martin Luther King expanded his consciousness. King did that for many, but not by advancing an epistemology. He organized and led a stirring march. He wrote a letter from Birmingham Jail that conveyed with great verbal power the indignities he and his family and his colleagues suffered. He awakened the nation’s conscience. He did not get the nation to change its mind by promoting a theory of truth or social constructedness. To be sure, those involved in the civil rights movement occasionally had recourse to theory, but only as support for an argument (“we have been oppressed and disenfranchised”) theory did not generate. “Usually the suppressed and marginalized need to attach themselves to a ‘principle’ … to effectuate … their liberation” (Ahmed). The need is a rhetorical one and comes after the demand for liberation has emerged from real-world, not theoretical, contexts.
Another example. Nk reports that at one point gays began “asking questions like ‘how would you feel if you were treated as badly as we are?’” That is not a theoretical question; it is a question that invites others to put themselves in the shoes of those they have been marginalizing. What is being invoked is not empathy in general as a universal imperative (something Richard Rorty urges), but a particular empathy in relation to a particular population suffering a particular experience.
These examples do not undermine my point about theory’s political impotence; they confirm it. Some readers worry that without a theoretical fulcrum, politics will be frozen and the status quo kept in place. “It is incumbent upon us that we constantly have a metarule operating by which we question our first order assumptions” (Arbitrot). But in fact the reverse is true. Politics is short-circuited by theory’s false promise, by a faith that if we only get our theoretical concepts straight — have the right account of truth, the subject, evidence, fact, interpretation, etc. — political programs will just emerge. No, all that will have been done is rearrange the furniture on theory’s deck. The injustices you hoped to redress will still be there despite your possession of a fancy new theoretical vocabulary. If you are guided by a metarule like “question your first order assumptions,” you won’t know which ones to question. You can’t question them all, and without a mechanism of selection the rule will leave you directionless; direction, of a substantive kind, is what metarules can’t give you.
So what is it that you should do if you think some state of affairs is terribly wrong? Sean Pidgeon has the answer: “Pull out those rhetorical skills and argue.” He uses feminism as his example. “Feminists should not … say that patriarchy is social constructed,” as if saying so was a step toward dislodging it. Instead, “Feminists should come out and say patriarchy is wrong” and then say why by pointing to harmful, demeaning practices. Jonprof generalizes the point: “Only political action by those … thought to be non-entities will establish them as needing to be acknowledged and dealt with.”
All of this is concisely said by Richard Rorty in a throwaway remark: “Time will tell, but epistemology won’t.” That is, in the course of time changes in what we know and think will be brought about by many things, but epistemology — a general account of knowing that speaks to no particular piece of knowledge — will not be one of them. Epistemology — theorizing about knowledge in the abstract — is fun, but it does no empirical work.
You can test this by considering the present argumentative context, which is a theoretical one because no substantive thesis about racism or feminism or homophobia had been advanced. Instead we have been tracking a dispute between me and some of my readers about whether theoretical formulations have political implications. Let’s say you agree with me, or let’s say (as seems more likely) you agree with my critics. In either case when you descend from the aerie heights of theory, you will take nothing with you that will be of the slightest help in resolving the real-world dilemmas that will still confront you. Rather than being the necessary beginning of political action, theory is a political non-starter, which is not to criticize it but to recognize it for what it is and stop asking it to do things it just can’t do.
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