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Monday, November 13, 2006
Free Hegel Criticism! Stop Selling Blue Jeans!
The first half of the title comes from a joke that made the rounds in the sabermetric community long before Michael Lewis’ Moneyball had been turned into an allegory of departmental hiring practices.* The idea was that sabermetric critics knew better than scouts, coaches, managers and general managers who should be on the field in a baseball game. Some players possessed skills—in particular, the ability to get on base—that sabermetricians thought criminally undervalued, so members of the sabermetric community would demand the “release” of these players via sarcastic email, newsgroup and BBS campaigns to “Free Such-and-Such!” Sure, Such-and-Such may clog the basepaths and be a butcher in the field, but his ability to get on base at a .390 clip—almost four times per ten plate appearances—means he contributes .31 more runs per game than that athletic-looking fellow over there.
Besides winning, the reason Such-and-Such should be prefered over that athletic-looking fellow was, as the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, famously said in Moneyball, “We’re not selling blue jeans.” And so “selling blue jeans” entered the community argot, becoming the phrase of choice whenever a superficially sound argument, typically based on conventional wisdom, wrongfully imprisoned another Such-and-Such.
Pace Bill’s post and another, by Chad Orzel a few months back, it seems that people increasingly want scholars in the humanities to sell blue jeans. Look how well it works in the sciences! Why don’t the humanities adopt a similar model? The answer to that question arrived, fortuitously, in the form of Joe’s conference paper on Hegel. By Bill and Chad’s criteria, Joe deserves a harsh sentence from a hanging judge, and yet…
The paper is clearly written to be read aloud. It makes frequent concessions to the audience—foremost among them the way in which Joe defines his terms as he goes along. This may seem like a small gesture, but audiences have a tendency to drift when a contested term like “ideology” is dropped, undefined, into a talk. “Whose definition of ‘ideology’ is she employing?” they think as the speaker continues upon her merry way. Admittedly, this may be the sort of “intellectual throat-clearing and scene-setting” Bill opposes, but a certain amount is necessary when entering into some conversations. Joe’s conference paper accomplishes what we all wish all papers could—it incorporates throat-clearing and scene-setting into its body, such that the argument is worked through instead of being “crammed” into the last five minutes.
So you know what I say? Free Hegel Criticism!
*It—being the first half of the title—is also quite the terrible pun.
Comments
Thank you, Scott! This is a wonderfully generous introduction to my paper.
I think there’s a difference between Orzel’s method and Bill’s. Orzel’s column smacks of very off-putting condescension from a scientist to his boring colleagues in the humanities. Chemistry and physics lend themselves to different formats than literary criticism and philosophy. What kind of visual aid am I supposed to use here? A picture of the dialectic? Of my hamster?
Bill, on the other hand, makes a valuable emendation to his short (and sympathetic) original post in the comments section. He writes:
It is certainly possible to compose an oral style presentation and write it down.
Without wishing to gauge my own success, this is what I tried to do. In fact, I was pleased to have the freedom to write the sort of suggestive first paragraph (about Bahktin, Derrida, etc.) that works better as the prelude to a Q&A session, than it does merely read.
"What kind of visual aid am I supposed to use here? A picture of the dialectic? Of my hamster?”
Actually, many physicists have the same problem. There’s a much-retailed story about Chandrasekhar, a famous theoretical astrophysicist, who complained at the beginning of a talk that all the observational astrophysicists got to spend a slide showing pictures of their equipment. His next slide was a close-up of a number 2 pencil.
So, clearly, you should have a dramatically lit picture of _The Science of Logic_.
In my upcoming presentation, I plan to use an illustration of the face of God. Since no one can look on it and live, the pressure should really be off once I pass that PowerPoint slide.
(Although it might not be the face of God—since I’m typing this, I obviously haven’t looked at it to verify.)
You can verify by showing it to others, though, that it has interfective power, and from the point of view of reducing stress, that’s what’s important.