social ontology – Jana Bacevic

Books this year

Blog, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

At the end of 2021, I published a list of & short commentary on the books I had read during that year, partly to amplify books written by women (and non-binary) authors, partly to highlight the persistent (and intersectional) process of devaluing, ‘forgetting’, or unknowing work written by women. This list is shorter; not all books are by women/NB authors (though most are), and I also wrote several blog posts (and articles) that engage with some of the work listed here in more detail (if you’re after that sort of thing). Judging by the length of the list, I read less (some of this has to do with general exhaustion/burnout, and some with other stuff that was happening in the year, including funding deadlines, running a new project, and leading EDI in my Department). I also like to think I read deeper.

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life

This eagerly anticipated book not only covers some of my favourite philosophers (Anscombe; Murdoch) but also presents a carefully executed study of the social and historical setting of Oxford (‘ordinary-language’) philosophy, so 10/10.

Oh, I’ve also read the other book on the Anscombe/Foot/Midgley/Murdoch ‘quartet’ that came out, only to check whether there was any accuracy in (multiple) reviewers’ perennial tendency to ascribe analytical acumen to books written by men, and ‘biographical’ and ‘descriptive’ detail to books written by women (which is in and of itself a kind of epistemic injustice/epistemic positioning, by the way). There isn’t. Thought so.

Christine Korsgaard, Self-constitution: agency, identity, integrity

It is perhaps a truism that if you start doing moral philosophy you never stray too far from Kant. True or not, this book was probably one of the best ways to come back to it. As I’ve written in a blog post that engages with the book in slightly more detail, over the past couple of years I have become increasingly interested in problems of normative theory – something I’ve been strongly opposed to most of my career thus far (I even wrote a PhD on why we’re prone to confuse epistemic with moral and/or political sentiments). Korsgaard’s approach to theories of identity and agency is decisively contemporary and has significant implications for how we think about the ability to choose, so it fit the bill perfectly. It is also one of the books that confirm the rule that women philosophers tend to write better than most people.

Sheila Jasanoff et al, Uncertainty

Disclaimer: I actually have a chapter in this volume, initially developed as a forum response in Boston Review (the text is part of my broader work on agency, unknowing, and resistance). I think all contributions are worth reading because they reflect the general debate about knowledge, prediction, and what science can do – and thus both its highs and its lows.

Michelle Murphy, Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty

Speaking of uncertainty: I think I initially started re-reading Michelle Murphy’s famous monograph last year because of my work on Covid-19 and institutional forms of ‘unknowing’ when it comes to things such as airborne spread. Reading it, I was reminded not only how brilliant, well-written, and pioneering Murphy’s work was, but also how institutional ways of ‘unknowing’ function when it comes to access to knowledge: namely, none of the libraries of the institution I work for have this book in physical form (it is accessible in online form), despite its pioneering status in the fields of public health, STS, and policy studies, all of which the institution specializes in. The availability of physical books in the library means students may encounter it just by browsing the shelves; books available online only get discovered if already assigned to the syllabus, which already requires someone (someone in a position of power, at that) to recognize and validate the book as key, mandatory, or at least relevant. Really makes you think about the materiality of objects, that.

Michelle Murphy, Economization of life

Once on a Murphy roll I kept going, so I bought and started reading (for the first time) Murphy’s 2017 Economization of life. It chimed well with the piece on ‘slow death’ (building on Berlant), as well as with a few other pieces on bio- and necro-politics I was writing at the time, but its emphasis on reproductive rights and reproductive justice was also a 10/10 in the year in which the US Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. Wade.

Max Liboiron, Pollution is colonialism

OK, full disclosure: I read most of this book in 2021 but it is so good I wanted to feature it again and in more detail. Actually, detail aside: this is simply the best book to read if you are doing any sort of scientific work. Or activism. Or politics. Or just, you know, living in the vicinity of institutions of knowledge production. Just read it. Seriously.

Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy

This is a really good example of a careful engagement with arguments in history, political economy, and sociology/anthropology of science to make a simple but often overlooked point: the construction of much of contemporary world required the translation of different sources – raw materials, human labour, and knowledge – into energy. In addition to the reproductive politics in Murphy’s book, it was also a reminder of how much of everyday existence depends on humans just willing themselves (or being willed to?) do something.

Martha Nussbaum, Therapy of desire: the theory and practice of Hellenistic ethics

Nussbaum was one of the first philosophers I grew to like on the question of morals and ethics; this book was, in a manner of speaking, a stand-in – I wanted to buy Upheavals of Thought, which I had started reading in the (first) winter break of my (second) PhD, but couldn’t afford it in 2015, so went for this one instead. Revisiting it recently was both an uncanny experience – I was reading marginalia from my 7-years-ago-self – and a reminder of the origin of some of the key theoretical questions I grappled with and would go on to shape my subsequent intellectual project, including the role of theory in relation to practice.

Joanne Barker, Red Scare: the state’s indigenous terrorist

Thanks to Sakshi who I think first mentioned this book on Twitter. I’ve always had an interest in settler-colonial histories, including that of United States (this was, by the way, part of my undergraduate training in anthropology 2000-2004 at the University of Belgrade – you can imagine my surprise at the realization that histories of colonization are still considered ‘controversial’ and/or are not taught in many ‘Western’ universities); Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks was a formative influence on my book on politics of class and identity in former Yugoslavia, and Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native is one of the best books I’ve read (and keep reading) in the past three years. Barker’s book joins this lineup with a thorough take on the criminalization of indigenous resistance – something that has profound implications not only for how we think about projects of decolonizing, but also about ecological activism.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Speaking of reading via friends: I know and like Nelson’s work (I started reading On Freedom in 2021 despite forgetting to include it in the blog post!, and have started reading The Red Parts last year), and I’ve wanted to read Bluets in a while. The opportunity finally presented itself when I visited Marina Veličković’s flat in Newcastle, where I found it on the shelf (yes, sorry, I know I have said this already, but having me in your flat means I will read your books). Promptly purchased my own copy and read it after moving to a (rather blue) house on the North Sea coast.

I have read William Gass’ On Being Blue in 2014; blue, and versions of, are effectively the only colour palette I like (the rest of my choices, both in terms of wardrobe and in terms of environment, oscillate in the triangle of black, white, and [shades of] grey). But I love almost all shades of blue; and, of course, the sea. Though, of course, that could just be a trick of the light, st(r)uck in the same triangle between white, black, and grey.

Adam Phillips, On Getting Better and On Wanting to Change

Adam Phillips is my sort of guilty pleasure (and, of course, one of my favourite books by Phillips – in addition to On Flirtation – is Unforbidden Pleasures). In other words, Adam Phillips is what I read when I feel in need of a self-help book. Last year he published two, and although short (and meant to be read in tandem), I found them quite different – On Wanting to Change seemed like a not-too-deeply developed iteration/repetition of much of his earlier work; On Getting Better was much better (sorry), which came as a surprise as the theoretical focus of the first is generally closer to my sphere of interest than that of the second. Oh, we change.

Adam Phillips, On Flirtation

This is not only one of my favourite books by Phillips, it is also one of my favourite books in general. I was re-reading it after about five or six years – my copy is the specimen some good soul left in the ‘books to adopt’ section in the old Cambridge Sociology PhD attic – and marvelling at how little I remembered of the original reading.

Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored

What can I say, I needed a lot of self-help this year.

Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People

I eagerly anticipated Berlant’s last book (technically, finished and published after they had already passed) and so far it does not seem to disappoint. The last couple of years have been, for me, marked to a rather significant degree by reading (and teaching) Berlant’s work, and since this special issue on ‘Encountering Berlant’came out towards the end of the year, I am looking forward to continuing to engage it in the things I am writing at the moment.

Simone De Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity

During a particularly dark period last year, I started re-reading de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, which I’ve first read during my PhD (in which ambiguity features rather prominently). Back then, of course, I read it primarily as an argument in existentialist ontology; this time around, I paid more attention to the ethics aspect, which is exceptional – but, as I kept thinking, also relevant for contemporary discussions, somewhat archaic language aside. Given that I’ve spent years entreating people to read Ethics of Ambiguity (the usual response, of course, being “oh I haven’t read it” – most people who claim to have ‘read’ de Beauvoir have barely made it past the first 20 pages of Second Sex; this form of sidelinining/domaining is something I’ve explored here), I decided to bite the bullet and asked online if anyone would be interested in a reading group – so far it’s at its third iteration, so you are more than welcome to join!

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where are you?

I’ve written about Rooney’s third book (as well as a related novella, Mr Salary) in more detail here. Given I really liked Conversations with Friends (a book I picked up on a whim, based solely on its cover and the fact I was given some book tokens in exchange for keynoting at a conference, and was determined, deep in the throes of writing my PhD, to spend them on fiction rather than theory) before Rooney became A Name, and given I did not really like Normal People after it, I was apprehensive about this one. I really struggled with the first three quarters (or more like 5/6ths), but it picked up towards the end, making me think that there might have been something about my own pace of reading/processing at the time that it mimicked or repeated.

Margaret Atwood, Penelopiad

Atwood *and* Classics, furthermore Odyssey? Yes.

Maria Tumarkin, Axiomatic

“The past shapes the present—they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past—ours, our family’s, our culture’s—wields in the present?”

‘Axiomatic’ was the first of two books I picked up in Durham’s newest independent bookshop (outstanding collection of books plus a reading nook, coffee/tea and cake). Obviously, I was drawn by the title, but it turned out I couldn’t have picked better – Tumarkin is an Eastern European living in Australia (in her memorable phrase, from ‘Eastern European elsewheres’), and reflecting on commonplaces of moving, learning, knowing, and forgetting (including trauma), in a mix of fiction, reportage, and analysis. Let’s just say I left the book with my therapist.

Radmila Zygouris, Pasji život u bundi od samurovine i drugi psihoanalitički slučajevi (L’Ordinaire, symptome)

Speaking of both psychoanalysis and immigrant trajectories, I also read this book, translated into Serbian by one of my mum’s oldest friends. It is composed of articles and interviews with a prominent French Lacanian analyst – now in her 1980s – Radmila Zygouris, whose story (and career) combines Greece, Serbia, Argentina, Paris and Germany (!!). The book is sadly not available in English, but the closest edition is in French, here.

Jelena Nolan Roll, O blokovima se priča (Storytelling from New Belgrade Blocks)

It’s great when one of your best friends publishes a book; it’s even better when it turns out that the book is really good, a half-magic-realist allegory of growing up in New Belgrade’s equivalent of council house flats in 1990s and early 2000s. The book is so far in Serbian only; there are book launches scheduled for Bristol (where Jelena resides) and London, so perhaps the English translation is not too far off…?

Hella Pick, Invisible Walls: A Journalist in Search of Her Life

This is the other book I picked up from Collected on a late-November strike-day attempt to recover from the combined pressures of Autumn darkness and term-time exhaustion. Pick was, for a significant part of the second half of the 20^th century, The Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent. She was also on the Kindertransport from Austria. The story in between weaves together some of the most interesting parts of contemporary history (including early stages of decolonization, the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Cold War) and reminded me again – as I discovered in 2021, when reading Deborah Levy – that biographies are only boring if written by men.

It would have been great to close this year (and post) in oh-so-circular a fashion, with a biography (Pick), but sadly neither is Metaphysical Animals (only) a biography (it is, indeed, philosophy) nor are lives, blog posts, or books ever (fully) circular, so here’s instead a meta-reference to this – as well as to the book with which I closed 2020 and started 2021, A Tale for the Time Being:

Ruth Ozeki, Book of Form and Emptiness

I have (really) started Ozeki’s newest earlier in 2022, and have (really) picked it up again only in the last days of 2022, and I (really) so far like it less than A Tale, but given that (I hope) it is – in addition to a book that is also about itself – a meta-reference to Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, here’s to…well, not forgetting.

When it ends

Blog, Philosophy of social science, Politics, Reviews, social theory, Sociological fiction

In the summer of 2018, I came back to Cambridge from one of my travels to a yellowed, dusty patch of land. The grass – the only thing that grew in the too shady back garden of the house me and my partner were renting – had not only wilted; it had literally burnt to the ground.

I burst into tears. As I sat in the garden crying, to (I think) the dismay of my increasingly bewildered partner, I pondered what a scene of death so close to home was doing – what it was doing in my back yard, and what it was doing to me. For it was neither the surprise at nor the scale that shook me – I had witnessed both human and non-human destruction much vaster than a patch of grass in Cambridge; I had spent most of the preceding year and some reading on the politics, economics, and – as the famed expression goes – ‘the science’ of climate change (starting with the excellent Anthropocene reading group I attended while living in London), so I was well-versed, by then, in precisely what was likely to happen, how and when. It wasn’t, either, the proximity, otherwise assumed to be a strong motivator: I certainly did not need climate change to happen in my literal ‘back yard’ in order to become concerned about it. If nothing else, I had come back to Cambridge from a prolonged stay in Serbia, where I have been observing the very same things, detailed here (including preparations for mineral extraction that will become the main point of contention for the protests against Rio Tinto in 2022). As to anyone who has lived outside of the protected enclaves of the Global North, climate change has felt very real, for quite some time.

What made me break down at the sight of that scorched patch of grass was its ordinariness – the fact that, in front, besides, and around what for me was quite bluntly an extinction event, life seemed to go on as usual. No-one warned me my back garden was a cemetery. Several months before that, at the very start of the first round of UCU strikes in 2018, I raised the question of pension funds invested in fossil fuels, only to be casually told one of the biggest USS shares was in Royal Dutch Shell (USS, and the University of Cambridge, have reluctantly committed to divestment since, but this is yet to yield any results in the case of USS). While universities make pompous statements about sustainability, a substantial chunk of their funding and operating revenue goes to activities that are at best one step removed from directly contributing to the climate crisis, from international (air) travel to building and construction. At Cambridge, I ran a reading group called Ontopolitics of the future, whose explicit question was: What survives in the Anthropocene? In my current experience, the raising of climate change tends to provoke uncomfortable silences, as if everyone had already accepted the inevitability of 1.5+ degree warming and the suffering it would inevitably come with.

This acceptance of death is a key feature of the concept of ‘slow death’ that Lauren Berlant introduced in Cruel Optimism:

“Slow death prospers not in traumatic events, as discrete time-framed phenomena like military encounters and genocides can appear to do, but in temporally labile environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself” (Berlant, 2011: 100).

Berlant’s emphasis on the ordinariness of death is a welcome addition to theoretical frameworks (like Foucault’s bio-, Mbembe’s necro- or Povinelli’s onto-politics) that see the administration of life and death as effects of sovereign power:

“Since catastrophe means change, crisis rhetoric belies the constitutive point that slow death—or the structurally induced attrition of persons keyed to their membership in certain populations—is neither a state of exception nor the opposite, mere banality, but a domain where an upsetting scene of living is revealed to be interwoven with ordinary life after all” (Berlant, 2011: 102).

Over the past year and some, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of ‘slow death’ in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic (my contribution to the edited special issue on Encountering Berlant should be coming out in Geography Journal sometime this year). However, what brought back the scorched grass in Cambridge as I sat at home during UK’s hottest day on record in 2022 was not the (inevitable) human, non-human, or infrastructural cost of climate change; it was, rather, the observation that for most academics life seemed to go on as usual, if a little hotter. From research concerns to driving to moaning over (the absence of) AC, there seemed to be little reflection on how our own modes of knowledge production – not to mention lifestyles – were directly contributing to heating the planet.

Of course, the paradox of knowledge and (in)action – or knowing and (not) doing – has long been at the crux of my own work, from performativity and critique of neoliberalism to the use of scientific evidence in the management of the Covid-19 pandemic. But with climate change, surely it has to be obvious to everyone that there is no way to just continue business as usual, that – while effects are surely differentially distributed according to privilege and other kinds of entitlement – no-one is really exempt from it?

Or so I thought, as I took an evening walk and passed a dead magpie on the pavement, which made me think of birds dying from heat exhaustion in India earlier in May (luckily, no other signs of mass bird extinction were in sight, so I returned home, already a bit light-headed from the heat). But as I absent-mindedly scrolled through Twitter (as well as attended a part of a research meeting), what seemed obvious was that there was a clear disconnection between modes of knowing and modes of being in the world. On the one hand, everyone was too hot, commenting on the unsustainability of housing, or the inability of transport networks to sustain temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius. On the other, academic knowledge production seemed to go on, as if things such as ‘universities’, ‘promotions’, or ‘reviews’ had the span of geological time, rather than being – for the most part – a very recent blip in precisely the thing that led to this degree of warming: capitalism, and the drive to (over)produce, (over)compete, and expand.

It is true that these kinds of challenges – like existential crises – can really make people double-down on whatever positions and identities they already have. This is quite obvious in the case of some of political divisions – with, for instance, the death spirals of Covid-denialism, misogyny, and transphobia – but it happens in less explicitly polarizing ways too. In the context of knowledge production, this is something I have referred to as the combination of epistemic attachment and ontological bias. Epistemic attachment refers to being attached to our objects of knowledge; these can be as abstract as ‘class’ or ‘social structure’ or as concrete as specific people, problems, or situations. The relationship between us (as knowers) and what we know (our objects of knowledge) is the relationship between epistemic subjects and epistemic objects. Ontological bias, on the other hand, refers to the fact that our ways of knowing the world become so constitutive of who we are that we can fail to register when the conditions that rendered this mode of knowledge possible (or reliable) no longer obtain. (This, it is important to note, is different from having a ‘wrong’ or somehow ‘distorted’ image of epistemic objects; it is entirely conceivable to have an accurate representation on the wrong ontology, as is vice versa).

This is what happens when we carry on with academic research (or, as I’ve recently noted, the circuit of academic rituals) in a climate crisis. It is not that our analyses and publications stop being more or less accurate, more or less cited, more or less inspiring. On the other side, the racism, classism, ableism, and misogyny of academia do not stop either. It’s just that, technically speaking, the world in which all of these things happen is no longer the same world. The 1.5C (let alone 2 or 2.5, more-or-less certain now) degrees warmer world is no longer the same world that gave rise to the interpretative networks and theoretical frameworks we overwhelmingly use.

In this sense, to me, continuing with academia as business as usual (only with AC) isn’t even akin to the proverbial polishing of brass on the Titanic, not least because the iceberg has likely already melted or at least calved several times over. What it brings to mind, instead, was Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy, and the way in which professional identities play out in it.

I’ve already written about Area X, in part because the analogy with climate change presents itself, and in part because I think that – in addition to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and Octavia Butler’s Parables – it is the best literary (sometimes almost literal) depiction of the present moment. Area X (or Southern Reach, if you’re in the US), is about an ‘event’ – that is at the same time a space – advancing on the edge of the known, ‘civilized’ world. The event/space – ‘Area’ – is, in a clear parallel to Strugatskys’ The Zone, something akin to a parallel dimension: a world like our own, within our own, and accessible from our own, but not exactly hospitable to us. In Vandermeer’s trilogy, Area X is a lush green, indeed overgrown, space; like in The Zone, ‘nature is healing’ has a more ominous sound to it, as in Area X, people, objects, and things disappear. Or reappear. Like bunnies. And husbands.

The three books of Area X are called Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance. In the first book, the protagonist – whom we know only as the Biologist – goes on a mission to Area X, the area that has already swallowed (or maybe not) her husband. Other members of the expedition, who we also know only by profession – the Anthropologist, the Psychologist – are also women. The second book, Authority, follows the chief administrator – who we know as Control – of Area X, as the area keeps expanding. Control eventually follows the Biologist into Area X. The third book – well, I’ll stop with the plot spoilers here, but let’s just say that the Biologist is no longer called the Biologist.

This, if anything, is the source of slight reservation I have towards the use of professional identities, authority, and expertise in contexts like the climate crisis. Scientists for XR and related initiatives are both incredibly brave (especially those risking arrest, something I, as an immigrant, cannot do) and – needless to say – morally right; but the underlying emphasis on ‘the science’ too often relies on the assumption that right knowledge will lead to right action, which tends not to hold even for many ‘professional’ academics. In other words, it is not exactly that people do not act on climate change because they do not know or do not believe the science (some do, at least). It is that systems and institutions – and, in many cases, this includes systems and institutions of knowledge production, such as universities – are organized in ways that makes any kind of action that would refuse to reproduce (let alone actually disrupt) the logic of extractive capitalism increasingly difficult.

What to do? It is clear that we are now living on the boundary of Area X, and it is fast expanding. Area X is what was in my back garden in Cambridge. Area X is outside when you open windows in the north of England and what drifts inside has the temperature of a jet engine exhaust of a plane that had just landed. The magpie that was left to die in the middle of the road in Jesmond crossed Area X.

For my part, I know it is no longer sufficient to approach Area X as the Sociologist (or Theorist, or Anthropologist, or whatever other professional identity I have – relucantly, as all identities – perused); I tried doing that for Covid-19, and it did not get very far. Instead, I’d urge my academic colleagues to seriously start thinking about what we are and what we do when these labels – Sociologist, Biologist, Anthropologist, Scientist – no longer have a meaning. For this moment may come earlier than many of us can imagine; by then, we’d have better worked out the relationship between annihilation, authority, and acceptance.

On doing it badly

Blog, Philosophy of social science, Politics, Reviews, social theory

I’m reading Christine Korsgaard’s ‘Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity‘ (2009) – I’ve found myself increasingly drawn recently to questions of normative political philosophy or ‘ideal theory’, which I’ve previously tended to analytically eschew, I presume as part-pluralism, part-anthropological reflex.

In chapter 2 (‘The Metaphysics of Normativity’), Korsgaard engages with Aristotle’s analysis of objects as an outcome of organizing principles. For instance, what makes a house a house rather than just a ‘heap of stones and mortar and bricks’ is its function of keeping out the weather, and this is also how we should judge the house – a ‘good’ house is one that fulfils this function, a bad house is one that does not not, or at least not so much.

This argument, of course, is a well-known one and endlessly discussed in social ontology (at least among the Cambridge Social Ontology crowd, which I still visit). But Korsgaard emphasizes something that has previously completely escaped my attention, which is the implicit argument about the relationship between normativity and knowledge:

Now, it is entirely true that ‘seeing what things do’ is a pretty neat description of my work as a theorist. But there is an equally important one, which is seeing what things can or could do. This means looking at (I’m parking the discussion about privileging the visual/observer approach to theory for the time being, as it’s both a well-known criticism in e.g. feminist & Indigenous philosophy *and* other people have written about it much better than I ever could) ‘things’ – in my case, usually concepts – and understanding what using them can do, that is, looking at them relationally. You are not the same person looking at one kind of social object and another, nor is it, importantly, the same social object ‘unproblematically’ (meaning that yes, it is possible to reach consensus about social objects – e.g. what is a university, or a man, or a woman, or fascism, but it is not possible to reach it without disagreement – the only difference being whether it is open or suppressed). I’m also parking the discussion about observer effects, indefinitely: if you’re interested in how that theoretical argument looks without butchering theoretical physics, I’ve written about it here.

This also makes the normative element of the argument more difficult, as it requires delving not only into the ‘satisficing’ or ‘fitness’ analysis (a good house is a house that does the job of being a house), but also into the performative effects analysis (is a good house a house that does its job in a way that eventually turns ‘houseness’ into something bad?). To note, this is distinct from other issues Korsgaard recognizes – e.g. that a house constructed in a place that obscures the neighbours’ view is bad, but not a bad house, as its ‘badness’ is not derived from its being a house, but from its position in space (the ‘where’, not the ‘what’). This analysis may – and I emphasize may – be sufficient for discrete (and Western) ontologies, where it is entirely conceivable of the same house being positioned somewhere else and thus remaining a good house, while no longer being ‘bad’ for the neighbourhood as a whole. But it clearly encounters problems on any kind of relational, environment-based, or contextual ontologies (a house is not a house only by the virtue of being sufficient to keep out elements for the inhabitants, but also – and, possibly, more importantly – by being positioned in a community, and a community that is ‘poisoned’ by a house that blocks everyone’s view is not a good community for houses).

In this sense, it makes sense to ask when what an object does turns into badness for the object itself? I.e., what would it mean that a ‘good’ house is at the same time a bad house? Plot spoiler: I believe this is likely true for all social objects. (I’ve written about ambiguity here and also here). The task of the (social) theorist – what, I think, makes my work social (both in the sense of applying to the domain of interaction between multiple human beings and in the sense of having relevance to someone beyond me) is to figure out what kind of contexts make one more likely than the other. Under what conditions do mostly good things (like, for instance, academic freedom) become mostly bad things (like, for instance, a form of exclusion)?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in relation to what constitutes ‘bad’ scholarship (and, I guess, by extension, a bad scholar). Having had the dubious pleasure of encountering people who teach different combinations of neocolonial, right-wing, and anti-feminist ‘scholarship’ over the past couple of years (England, and especially the place where I work, is a trove of surprises in this sense), it strikes me that the key question is under what conditions this kind of work – which universities tend to ignore because it ‘passes’ as scholarship and gives them the veneer of presenting ‘both sides’ – turns the whole idea of scholarship into little more than competition for followers on either of the ‘sides’. This brings me to the question which, I think, should be the source of normativity for academic speech, if anything: when is ‘two-sideism’ destructive to knowledge production as a whole?

This is what Korsgaard says: