I used to be quite taken with the idea of militant research. I’m not any more. I think it’s often quite problematic.
I think the term and interest in the activities that go with it often express laudable impulses. Among those impulses are the desire to do good political work, the desire to do political work which is intellectual satisfying, the desire for one’s actions politically and intellectually to have some empirical basis, and the desire to do intellectually satisfying activities.
I think it can also be a vehicle for less laudable impulses. As Craig said in a comment here, “it would be fucking stellar if some radicals would come out with a full critique of academic writing and academic radicalism — that writing for your CV is not much of a revolutionary act, that JSTOR is not a space of “popular education” and that case-studies, as much as the academic researcher may be an ally, are primarily for the purpose of academic security and achievement, regardless how much rhetoric of ‘militant research’ gets wrapped into things (oh academics and finding justification and revolutionary potential in everything! [they do]). after two master’s degrees i still can’t help but find utterly offensive the way in which so many academics (some of whom i rather like ) switch around their academic work to be something of more societal importance than that of the work done by a garbage man.”
A while back I read whatever I could find on the subject and wrote a think piece, trying to get my thoughts clearer. I was then quite taken with all this. Writing about it led to doubts which have since become (sad) convictions about the problems with this stuff.
Here are some of those doubts:
“If one presses upon the concepts and practices of militant research, there is an aspect of militant research within all good organizing. In a sense, politics and organization does not occur successfully without some operation akin to militant research. Counseling activities are a type of research, in that the counselor and the other person produce at least some of the following: knowledge of each other, a shared relationship, the solution to some problem, and clarity and decisions as to goals and the steps needed to accomplish these goals. Even if the data, so to speak, are known in advance, the carrying out of the conversational form of the research still has a useful effect. (…) militant research in at least some formats has much in common with feminist practices of consciousness raising. It matters less if something has been said before about women’s oppression and more that this particular person or group of persons comes to be able to say it – and does say it – for themselves.
It is similar with workplace organizing. An agitational conversation, one involving, say, the question “what is your job like?” is less about the contents being articulated in order to extract knowledge than it is about a performative activity in which the person has an affective experience (becomes angry), makes a decision (to take a small action toward changing the workplace and coming together with others), begins to develop a relationship with the conversation partner, and begins to acquire the confidence, skills, and analysis needed to successfully organize their workplace. In this sense, then, in terms of its organizational-compositional effects, militant research is a perhaps ineliminable tool for organization in building itself or rebuilding itself (the way that a body builds new cells and repairs or, if need be, replaces old ones). It also has another use, which is for an existing organization to know about itself in order to be able to assess its wants and needs, assess its power, and make informed decisions.”
I also wondered about the roles of universities and academics in all this, inspired by remarks by the Colectivo Situaciones. I’m not pleased to say it but at least in the anglophone world I’m not convinced the CS succeed in meeting the criterion they articulate, that “[m]ilitant research distances itself from those circuits of academic production.”
In some ways I think I’m running into dead ends stemming from bad answers to these sorts of questions I’ve wondered about for a while. I wonder if a possible way out might come through digging back into Foucault on specific intellectuals, I haven’t thought about that in ages but from what I recall maybe some of this stuff I’m less than keen on might be a sort of specific activity in a context of labors of (faux) universalization. In that case, the rhetoric I object to still has negative effects in terms of who is in the conversation but might make for some opportunities. That would require, though, that the rhetoric not be sincere.
That aside, it seems to me that militant research at least as I’ve encountered it has problems in common with the autonomist marxist milieu, about organization. I’d say it’s soft anti-organization, leaves organization large underthought, and embodies forms of organization which are both precedented (usually unacknowledgly, pardon the ugly term) and unexamined (namely, the organization as publisher of a paper, a journal, pamphlets… I wonder if this is an example of what FRSO calls ‘miniature leninism’ (have to check that and find the reference)… And, if I’m right that all organization involves qualities that are or are part of what is called militant research, then I wonder both if there’s a problematic dynamic possible when there are specialists in some of those qualities (so-called militant researchers) and a problematic dynamic of those qualities being truncated or distorted in their form as separated from organization.
Right the fuck on. I think it is useful to do intellectual work and if one is going to have that work valorized that also serves a function of learning to think through and articulate ones thoughts on the organizing you are doing great. Otherwise, I am thoroughly unimpressed and think that in general militant research is a way of attempting to put social change into the metabolism of academia which is both nauseous and unproductive, much like “service learning” “civic engagement” and other more adequately critiqued forms of academic work…
hi D,
I think in some cases it’s a conscious attempt to do so, and in others it’s an inadvertent attempt. I’m willing to be convinced that it could be otherwise in specific circumstances, but I’m skeptical would like to see evidence first. I should say, I’m all for folks doing stuff they enjoy, I think that’s not the only or the most important thing in politics (I find joy overemphasized in political stuff sometimes, frankly) but it clearly matters for the long term live of our stuff. I’ve found that on balance stuff in left circles makes my academic experiences feel pretty flat – not in every instance, but over all, my intellectual life in left circles is at least as vibrant and challenging and so on as my academic life, often more so. In that sense then I think the academic stuff around militant research is well intentioned but at least for me, more of that stuff would mean less of the stuff that I get fired up about in left circles (fired up intellectualy I mean, as in, my intellectual life would suffer if I spent more time on all that).
take care,
Nate
ps- I’m gonna keep putting notes up on the American primitive accumulation post, I’d love to hear your thoughts as stuff goes on. Among other things, I recently found a 1912 book about the Supreme Court that talks a lot about primitive accumulation in the US…!
“in no way Alquati wanted to be called the inventor of conricerca. “ Political militants have always done conricerca. We would go in front of the factory and speak with workers: there cannot be organization otherwise. If I put shoes on and find a street full of stones, I cannot say I invented them.”
http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=320:operaist-freedom-for-romano-alquati&catid=38:documentation&Itemid=56
“what FRSO calls ‘miniature leninism’ (have to check that and find the reference)”
Where did you get that? I remember seeing it sometime ago and I thought it referred to a small group publishing a paper and promoting its ideas and thoughts as if they were a full on Leninist party following the formula of Lenin, when in actuality they are just that- a small group with some ideas.
hi Adam, i cant remember the document offhand, but i could email it to you. i havent read it closely yet but i plan to. i take the point to be about resources – tiny groups waste energy acting big.
gotta go
xo
n8
That’s an ambiguous comment – do you mean that as a positive or a negative thing? As in, do you mean something like “it’s a sincere attempt to use the academy for positive ends” or more like “it’s an attempt to press social change efforts into an academic orbit, which is either self-interested or counter-productive (or at least over-inflated), or both”? Personally, I think all of that is true.
hi nate,
i’m definitely interested in talking with you about this militant research stuff. i don’t quite understand why you’ve gone sour on it generally. do you have some empirical basis for thinking that it has become some new form of academic capital? as far as i have heard, the banner of ‘militant research’ doesn’t carry any weight in any established academic disciplines. do you have any evidence of any academics claiming to be ‘militant researchers’ who have used that to climb the academic hierarchies? You seem to imply that the Colectivo Situaciones are guilty of this (when you say: “at least in the anglophone world I’m not convinced the CS succeed in meeting the criterion they articulate, that ‘[m]ilitant research distances itself from those circuits of academic production.’”). I’m really surprised to hear that, because when I heard them speak in London last year they seemed quite anti-academic and quite embedded in serious social struggles in Argentina. Do you have some evidence of them using their militant research work for gain within the academic system? Maybe you could say that their scoring a free trip to London is evidence of that, but the event that they participated in involved very few established academics and was mostly movement-embedded researchers (people from EuroMayDay, Fels, the Carrotworkers collective, and cultural and precarious workers self-organizing projects from around Europe). Based on my meeting these folks who took on the ‘militant research’ banner, I have a hard time buying your critique of this stuff as “soft anti-organization,” because many of these folks were involved in some effectively organizing movements. Likewise, some of the people who came to the ‘beneath the u’ conference from Italy, Paolo Do and Claudia Bernardi, are involved in some self-described militant research with some impressive organizing projects in Italy: http://www.escatelier.net/ .
I definitely agree with you that there is a constant danger of any so-called ‘militant research’ becoming recuperated for dominant projects, but I think that self-critique of such recuperating potentials is a constituent part of the ‘militant research’ tradition as articulated by Colectivo Situaciones and other (such as in Marta Malo de Molina’s ‘Common Notions,’ which describes how each of the four main predecessors of militant research was recuperated into academic or state institutions). Yes, I totally agree that such recuperation is a crucial danger that anybody who claims to be doing ‘militant research’ needs to develop a culture of resistance against (and develop ‘struggle concepts’ for such resistance, e.g., the concept of ‘recuperation’ that i’m drawing from Stevphen Shukaitis’s new book, Imaginal Machines, which he draws from the Situationists’ critiques of vanguardism as a kind of recuperation of movements’ insurgent energies). But, I think that this is a danger that needs to be grappled with continually rather than a danger that should be capitulated to. I mean, are you trying to say that we (i.e., we who straddle the worlds of academia and so-called radical activism) should simply separate our lives into two parts and give up on the militant research project of acting collectively on and across the borders between those two worlds? Hmmm… this reminds me of a very long conversation that you, me, and Eli T. had a year or so ago in a comment forum on one of your previous posts. We’re probably repeating some of the same arguments we made back then. The difference, for me, now is that I’ve met some of these ‘militant researchers’ in person and I’ve found them to be extraordinarily sincere, brilliant, and movement-committed-and-embedded people. So, those experiences are motivating me now to defend this ‘militant research’ project and its aspiring practitioners a bit more.
So, let’s talk about this stuff more soon! Maybe over coffee next week…?
solid,
Eli M.
hi Eli,
Thanks for your comments. I wasn’t clear (as usual!). Re: the CS, I have lots of affection and respect for their project (I worked a lot on the first draft of the translation their book 19y20, which will hopefully see the light of day eventually), and I’m not in any way trying to say they’re being careerist. What I meant was that their work in the anglophone world seems to me to be pretty much entirely contained in academic circles (and fairly theory heavy ones) and at best circles of people who have only recently left those circles and still have a lot of the cultural trappings of it. I’d say the same of the Precarias a la Deriva and of the conricerca stuff in Italy. But no, I wasn’t suggesting they were using their work for gain in the way you ask, I’m unhappy to hear that the post came off that way.
About the European networks, if you say that stuff is different then I’ll take your word for it. In my very limited experience in that milieu, the folk I’ve met are likewise academics or independent scholars with close academic ties and who to my mind have a lot of the trappings. Again the main point is not careerism, I wasn’t clear on that, I think the point is criteria of evaluation. I think there’s a transfer of criteria from academic ones to political ones, a way in which assessments about politics get made like academic ones. And I do think there are academic niche markets that trade on a sort of image of authenticity and commitment or radicality (I used to get a fair bit of mileage because of my labor movement background, I was told by a faculty member that that’s part of why I was accepted into my old program, which has always sat a bit funny) and I think there’s a chance of militant research being pulled into that orbit. I think this part of what’s going on w/ the crit mgt studies stuff in the UK (much as I’m loathe to say that, since I personally like everyone I’ve talked to in that milieu — that old talk I gave on militant research was a presentation at a meeting of their annual conference); I think this isn’t at all unique to militant research, though, it goes for marxist theory and other things like that too. I mean – look at Fredric Jameson. His being a marxist of some sort is part of his being the academic figure he is; I don’t have a problem with that, but I don’t see any evidence of any political important to his work. I have a problem with what I think are misattributions of importance or relevance. This stuff is interesting and intellectually exciting. That’s awesome. That’s all it needs to justify it. I’m skeptical of other justifications, ones in terms of politics (much of the time, not always — I liked Kolinko’s Hotlines book, for instance, which reminds me I need to find my copy).
About anti-organization, I wasn’t clear there either. I was obliquely referencing conversations in platformist and other organized anarchist circles (like on the anarchistblackcat and libcom forum sites) about mass organizations and political organizations. I realize there are numerous collectives and institutions of mutual aid and so-on. I was being terminologically sloppy, tied to conceptual sloppiness. I’m too tired to sort that out now, but the short version is that I think that stuff shades close to some bad politics in similar ways as autonomist marxism and insurrectionary anarchism does. I need to be clearer on the terms, though, because these folk aren’t anti-organizational per se (hence my trying out ‘soft anti-organization’) but are for what I think are insufficient and often problematic or under-scrutinized organizational forms and don’t seem to me to often engage with other issues of organization and form (like the union, and the party, to name two classic ones) or the long traditions of thought about those issues on the revolutionary left. And in some cases, like with Kolinko who, I think, come of the ultraleft milieu which is an old and important but in many ways still anti-organizational tradition in important respects. In that case, it might not be so much under-scrutinized as just wrong.
I also should say, I don’t at all doubt the sincerity of any of the folk involved in this stuff. I’ve thought all this for a long while but kept it to myself for a while, particularly when I was more plugged in to those networks, because I like those people personally very much and didn’t want to say this stuff. And before that, I didn’t follow these doubts in my head (let alone in words outside my head) because I was resistant about drawing these sorts of conclusions about sincere, interesting, intelligent people who I like personally. I wish I had more positive assessments of their projects than I do, I want to think more highly of the work they’re doing since I like the people.
Lastly, yes, this is quite close to the conversation we had a while back. I’m basically for the split you suggest. Or rather, I think the split you suggest is the reality we live with (since I don’t rate militant research particularly highly), and we should own up to that. I think this split is basically what every radical who works for a living has to deal with (ie, splitting how they earn wages and how they’re engaged in radical politics) and I think that militant research doesn’t get us around that. I wish it did.
take care,
Nate
ps- coffee’d be great. or better yet, veggie dogs at the Weinery!
Hi Nate,
Thanks for your helpful clarifications! Sorry for misinterpreting your argument about CS as one of careerism. I see what you’re saying about different criteria of evaluation and about the CS’s work being trapped in academic circles. But, I think that its being so trapped is a situation that’s contingent on academics not doing sufficient work of spreading it and translating it into non-academic, everyday language. Your own work of translating it is potentially a counter to its being stuck in academia. (Speaking of which, you should talk with Malav about that, cuz he mentioned last week that he’s been wanting to get on that for awhile.)
Shoot… I have a lot more to say in response here, but I’ve gotta run… more soon…
cheers,
eli
hi Eli,
No problem re: the mix up, it’s not like I;m clear on this blog much of the time either conceptually or terminologically. I was actually gonna come back here anyway to add something – I said I respect folks sincerity but I said (and I think) some things that are in tension with that. I’ve seen stuff around academic circles where there’s an invocation of radicalness that strikes me as self-serving. Have seen stuff like that? Even in those cases I think folk are sincere (I work to make that my default position, assume sincerity), but that doesn’t make that stuff less self-serving. Maybe self-serving isn’t quite the right term, that’s certainly not my main gripe w/ academic stuff. I’m not making the point well…
It’s like… have you ever been in a setting w/ a high proportion of academics but not exclusively, and some of the academic folk fail at code-switching, either in their manner or topics of speech, or both? I have, a lot. It’s unintentional, sincere, but still a problem and deeply annoying. There’s a way in which these speech habits (another analogy – the way men in mixed gender settings often monopolize conversation unintentionally but in ways that they ought to notice — this is perfectly sincere, but no less annoying [in some ways, even more annoying for it] and in a way self-serving.)
I think something analogous is going on w/ this militant research stuff… I wrote a post on this a long while back, not militant research but interpersonal communication w/in academic circles and speech habits when academics move into other circles, speculating that academic and other professional work involves norms and practices of creating and maintaining conversational authority which tend to shape how people talk outside their work as well [to use the terms of a Precarias a la Deriva piece that I like a lot, the level of subjective implication in their work is high] – that old post is here if you’re interested: http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/01/05/is-lexical-rigidity/ – I think something similar is going on w/ the militant research stuff, at least in some cases, and that’s part of my frustrations. (Not all of them, there’s also what I tried to say about how there’s something like militant research in all organization building, which for me raises questions about why pull that component out of an organization building context? This may be more about types of organization, though, as your first comment suggested.) I want to add that it’s not only the manner of speech but also the contexts – not just how folk talk, but who they’re talking with and what about. So yeah, as you say, failure to translate. Seems to me a translation which is linguistic/terminological, but also contextual – who is in the room, and how are roles distributed etc.
take care,
Nate