Five days after Stuart Hall died, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed accusing academics of self-inflicted public irrelevance. That same day, Larry Grossberg, a student of Hall’s, published an essay reflecting on his former teacher’s intellectual influence around the world. Grossberg ended his tribute with the line: “It is a time to remember that ideas matter as we try to change the world, and that bad stories, make bad politics.”
My take home message from this juxtaposition was that geographers should be putting out more “scholarly propaganda.” At a magazine I edited, scholarly propaganda was our name for theoretically informed and politically strategic information delivered in a format palatable enough for general audiences. The Kristoff episode proved to me that we need more of this. But we should also heed Grossberg’s advice that bad stories make bad politics. I want to suggest some concrete ways in which we could work more scholarly propaganda into our praxis and pedagogy.
Academics’ main response to Kristof’s column was basically: “Sorry, but we’re actually kind of a big deal.” This surprised me because we’re normally quite forthcoming about our insecurity and our weaknesses as—for lack of a better term—public intellectuals. Indeed, I find it hard to disagree with Kristof’s underlying point, particularly as you move toward the left of academia’s political spectrum. In fact, an index of our insecurity as public intellectuals is actually how much we love to hate people like Kristof—and even more so people like Richard Florida, Jared Diamond, and Robert Kaplan. And then, there’s Thomas Friedman, who is of course all these guys rolled into one single mustache.[i]
Why do these writers irritate us so much? It’s because they are beating us at our own game. When it comes to common sense geographical thinking about the world, they’re the ones winning what Gramsci called the “war of position.” They’re the ones shaping the geographical imagination. So if we take them seriously as intellectuals—in Gramsci’s elaborate sense—then, at least in practical terms, we have to ask ourselves: What, if anything, can we learn from them?
Gramsci and Thomas Friedman
Gramsci spent hours poring over the popular literature of his day (he did have a lot of time on his hands) trying to decipher how it helped shape what he often called the “molecular” level of politics. By this, he meant the thousands of little ways common sense is shaped in everyday life and how, in the process, we come to an entire conception of the world. Today, he’d be reading Friedman. And, as a critical exercise, so should our students. This would be one step toward training them in more deliberate ways so that they themselves become effective producers of scholarly propaganda. The point is to nurture specific skills that are useful for shaping public discourse.
Another assignment—this one combining critical thinking, rhetoric, discourse analysis, and writing—would be for our students to write a fake Thomas Friedman column. The Internet even provides awealth of satirical articles that literally provide instructions on how to do this. (Beware: There’s also an automated Friedman column generator.) Taking it a step further, students could write theFriedman column in Mad Libs form, so they would leave fill-in-the-blank cues—things like “Muslim-sounding place name” or “internet-related adjective” or “non-western proper noun.” It would at least shake up the monotony of grading.
On an even more practical level, we could teach our students how to write op-eds. It even doubles as a handy refresher on the five-paragraph essay. In my own classes, following the advice of a colleague, I found that students really appreciated the exercise, because they felt that they had learned a useful and applicable skill that transcended the subject of the course. An op-ed also makes it much easier to work with them on their writing. Topping out at about 700 words, an op-ed is a much more manageable format for providing feedback and showing them how to improve their writing.
But we shouldn’t ask our students to do things that we, ourselves, aren’t doing. Radical scholars should be publishing more op-eds. Ideally, we would go beyond the op-ed by writing more mainstream non-fiction and journalism. More than blogs, I mean media that circulates beyond established, like-minded audiences. And it’s encouraging to see that these kinds of engagements are increasingly valued towards tenure in some departments (a trend tenured professors could help push).
The list of books that have won an AAG Globe Award for promoting “public understanding of geography” arguably demonstrates the limits of our reach. They are obviously not bad books. They are great books and much deserving of praise and recognition, but you’re probably not going to find them at your average bookstore. You’re even less likely to find them at an airport bookstore, which we can take as the ultimate barometer of the contemporary workings of hegemony.
‘Bad Stories, Make Bad Politics’
It’s obviously unrealistic to expect that we can all become best-selling authors, but telling better stories could potentially help boost something much more important than our sales—our politics. Mentored by Stuart Hall, Grossberg has a very Gramscian critique of our role as academics. In his book Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, he writes:
When confronted with the changes and struggles that have defined the conjuncture over the past sixty years, too many political commentators continue to tell the same stories over and over. They explain repeated failure by claiming that people are incapable of discerning the truth or of recognizing lies. It’s an old complaint: if only they knew what we know, they would follow us (p. 64).
Grossberg is obviously not the first to critique this vanguardist view of the academic as the enlightened public intellectual whose role is to pull back the curtain and reveal to the masses their self-delusion. It’s the critique long made against notions of “false consciousness.” And it’s a critique that could be increasingly applied, paradoxically, to how now we’re all this or that kind of subject. In any case, Grossberg goes on to make a more interesting point:
The possibility that one’s political message no longer resonates with people’s sense of their own lives, hopes, and fears is rarely considered. The possibility that the stories we tell no longer make sense of the world as it is, is never examined (p. 64).
Grossberg adds that reinventing stories is not something we pull out of thin air; it requires intense theoretical-empirical work. When he says “stories,” he means it at least somewhat figuratively. He means the stories of how we got ourselves into the mess of a given conjuncture. He means a history of the present that shows the contingency and shakiness of it all as a way of identifying political openings for strategic interventions. But we could take this a step further.
When I think about “bad stories as bad politics” in terms of scholarly propaganda, I mean it in the completely literal sense—as in story-telling, as in narrative. In our writing, we should go beyond the ethnographic moment, the anecdote, or vignette. We need to become better at telling actual stories: the kind with interesting characters, with dramatic arc, with tension, suspense, and, above all, surprise.
Beyond thinking of our research as “what is this a case of,” maybe we need to do much harder thinking about stories. Anthropology has an interesting discussion about this that geography could learn from. American Ethnologist, for instance, had a great review essay comparing “stories of poverty” in India. The review compared Akhil Gupta’s Red Tape,[ii] Katherine Boo’s journalistic non-fictionBehind the Beautiful Forevers, and a novel called Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil. Without explicitly saying so, the essay is asking: What sorts of political work do these different genres assume, represent, and/or enable?
The importance of stories goes back to Gramsci’s “molecular” level of politics. Stories can be the most effective and affective form of political communication. Michael Taussig describes the everyday political work of stories quite nicely when he writes: “Surely it is in the coils of rumor, gossip, story, and chit-chat where ideology and ideas become emotionally powerful and enter into active social circulation and meaningful existence.”
Taussig is talking about how terror circulates in the jungles of Colombia, but the same could be said about Thomas Friedman’s ideas or about the circulation of ideas in general. What makes the writing of people like Friedman, Florida, and Diamond powerful is that they tell engaging stories and, while doing so, they make unexpected, compelling connections. The writing is effective because readers come away fulfilled. They not only come away having learned something new, they come away with a language that helps them express and explain what they’ve learned to others. The information becomes relay-able; it becomes viral, it becomes common sense—”the world is flat.”
We should constantly remind ourselves that we’re not entitled to an audience. But we should also remember that we could be much better at creating one. Geography offers an incredible repertoire, empirically and theoretically, for us to make interesting and unexpected connections about all kinds of current events. But we have to do so while being much better storytellers. Otherwise, our scholarly propaganda will remain, in Kristof’s words, “academic.”
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