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Executive Director
Professor Tony Addison
The Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI)
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creates and shares knowledge to help end global
Research Director
Professor Michael Woolcock
poverty.
Associate Director
Professor David Hulme
BWPI is multidisciplinary, researching poverty in
both the rich and poor worlds.
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Our aim is to better understand why people are
poor, what keeps them trapped in poverty and
Contact:
how they can be helped ■ drawing upon the very
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best international practice in research and policy
Brooks World Poverty Institute
The University of Manchester
Humanities Bridgeford Street
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Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL’
. United Kingdom
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The Brooks World Poverty Institute is chaired by
Nobel Laureate, Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Email: bwpi@manchester.ac.uk
www.manchester.ac.uk/bwi
bwpi
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illif
...... J.. A:
Mosse, D., (2004), Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice,
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K
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Foucault, M., (1984), “What Is an Author?” in P. Rabinow (ed), The Foucault Reader, New
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Mahfouz, N., (1993 [1966]), Adrift on the Nile, translated by F. Liardet, New York: Anchor
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Mahfouz, N., (1993 [1983]), The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, translated by D. Johnson-Davies,
New York: Anchor Books.
Mamdani, M., (1996), Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mistry, R., (1996), A Fine Balance, London: Faber and Faber.
Mitchell, T., (1991), Colonising Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mitchell, T., (ed.), (2000), Questions of Modernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Mitchell, T., (2002), Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley: University
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6. References
Achebe, C., (1958), Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann.
Ahmad, A., (1987), “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’”, Social
Text, 17: 3-25.
Ali, M., (2003), Brick Lane, London: Doubleday.
Ballard, J. G., (1987), The Day of Creation, London: Victor Gollancz.
Bebbington, A., M. Woolcock, S. Guggenheim, and E. Olson, (2004), “Exploring Social
Capital Debates at the World Bank”, Journal of Development Studies, 40(5): 33-64.
Benjamin, W., (1989), “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”, translated by M. Ritter,
in G. Smith (ed), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Benjamin, W., (1999), The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin,
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Booth, D., (1985), “Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse”, World
Development, 13(7): 761-787.
Booth, D., (1993), “Development Research: From Impasse to a New Agenda”, in F. J.
Schuurman (ed), Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory,
London: Zed Books.
Booth, D., (1994), “How Far beyond the Impasse: A Provisional Summing Up”, in D. Booth
(ed), Rethinking Social Development: Theory, Research and Practice, London:
Longman Publishing Group.
Byron, G. G. N. (Lord), (1973 [1819-24]), Don Juan, edited by T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and
W. W. Pratt, London: Penguin.
Collier, P., and J. W. Gunning, (1999), “Explaining African Economic Performance”, Journal
of Economic Literature, 37(March): 64-111.
Conrad, J., (1985 [1897]), The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea, edited and with
an introduction by J. Berthoud, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coser, L., (1972[1963]), Sociology through Literature, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Crichton, M. (2004), State of Fear, New York: Avon Books.
Crowley, M., (2006), “Jurassic President”, The New Republic, March 20.
Czarniawska-Joerges, B., (1992), Exploring Complex Organizations: A Cultural Perspective,
Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
Denning, S., (2000), The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era
Organizations, Woburn: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Edwards, M., (1989), “The Irrelevance of Development Studies”, Third World Quarterly,
11(1): 116-135.
Elliot, J., (2005), Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative
Approaches. London: Sage.
Emecheta, B., (1976), The Bride Price, London: Allison & Busby.
Escobar, A., (1995), Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, J., (1990), The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and
Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fielding, H., (1994), Cause Celeb, London: Picador.
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Kourouma, A., (2001 [1998]), Waiting for the Vote of the Wild Animals, Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press.
Kourouma, A., (2005 [2000]), Allah is not obliged, London: Heinemann.
Lahiri, J., (1999), Interpreter of Maladies, New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Lapierre, D., (1985), The City of Joy, New York: Warner Books.
Le Carre, J., (2000), The Constant Gardener, New York: Scribner.
Maalouf, A., ([1983]), The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, London: Saqi Books.
Mahfouz, N., (1993 [1966]), Adrift on the Nile, New York: Anchor Books.
Mahjoub, J., (1989), Navigation of a Rainmaker, London: Heinemann.
Mahjoub, J., (1994), Wings of Dust, London: Heinemann.
Mistry, R., (1996), A Fine Balance, London: Faber and Faber.
Molteno, M., (1992), A Shield of Coolest Air, London: Shola Books.
Mwangi, M., (1976), Going Down River Road, London: Heinemann.
Naipaul, V. S., (2001 [1961]), A House for Mr. Biswas, New York: First Vintage
International.
Narayan, R. K., (1993 [1976]), The Painter of Signs, London: Penguin.
Neruda, P., (2003 [1947]), Residence on Earth, London: Souvenir Press.
Neruda, P., (1993 [1950]), Canto General, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Okri, B., ([1991]), The Famished Road, New York: Anchor Books
Ondaatje, M., (2000), Anil’s Ghost, London: Bloomsbury.
Ousmane, S., (1972), The Money Order, London: Heinemann.
Rush, N., (1992), Mating, New York: Vintage.
Rushdie, S., (1981), Midnight's Children, London: Picador.
Saith, V., (1993), A Suitable Boy, London: Phoenix.
Sepulveda, L., (1993 [1989]), The Old Man who read Love Stories, New York: Harcourt.
Shukla, S., (1992 [1968]), Raag Darbari, New Delhi: Penguin India.
Soueif, A., (1999), The Map of Love, London: Bloomsbury.
Soyinka, W., (1963), A Dance of the Forests, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tweedie, J., (1987), Internal Affairs, London: Penguin.
Vargas Llosa, M., (1975 [1969]), Con versa tions in the Cathedral, New York: Harper &
Row.
Walcott, D., (1990), Omeros, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, (1977), Petals of Blood, London: Penguin.
wa Thiong’o, Ngugi, (1989), Matigari, London: Heinemann.
Xingjian, G., (2000 [1990]), Soul Mountain, New York: Harper Collins.
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Recommended reading list of literary fiction on development
NB/ All books are English-language or translations. Different and other language editions of
these works may exist.
Achebe, C., (1958), Things Fall Apart, London: Heinemann.
Ali, M., (2003), Brick Lane, London: Doubleday.
Amado, J., (1965 [1943]), The Violent Land, New York: Knopf.
Ballard, J. G., (1994), Rushing to Paradise, London: Harper Collins.
Ballard, J. G., (1987), The Day of Creation, London: Victor Gollancz.
Borges, J. L., (2000 [1964]), Labyrinths: Selected Short Stories and Other Writings,
London: Penguin Books.
• Boyd, W.,*(1982), A Good Man in Africa, London: Penguin.
• Boyd, W., (1991), Brazzaville Beach, London: Penguin.
• Brunner, J., (1968), Stand on Zanzibar, New York: Ballantine.
• Buck, P. S., (2004 [1931]), The Good Earth, New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Camus, A., (1994 [1948]), The Plague, New York: First Vintage International.
• Carpentier, A., (1989 [1957]), The Kingdom of This World, New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux.
• Cohen, A., (1996 [1968]), Belle du Seigneur: A Novel, New York: Viking.
• Conde, M., (1996 [1984]) Segu, New York: Penguin.
• Conrad, J., (1990 [1902]), Heart of Darkness, New York: Dover Publications.
• Conrad, J. (1983 [1904], Nostromo, London: Penguin.
• Darko, A., (1995), Beyond the Horizon, London: Heinemann.
• de Bernieres, L, (1990), The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, London: Seeker &
Warburg.
• Desai, A., (2000), Diamond Dust and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus.
• Farrell, J. G., (1973), The Siege of Krishnapur, London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
• Fielding, H., (1994), Cause Celeb, London: Picador.
• Forster, E. M., (2000 [1924]), A Passage to India, London: Penguin.
• Frisch, M., (1959 [1957]), Homo Faber, New York: Harcourt.
• Fuentes, C., (1989 [1987]), Christopher Unborn, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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Galgut, D., (2004), The Good Doctor, London: Atlantic Books.
Garcia Marquez, G., (1997 [1985[), Love in the Time of Cholera, New York: Knopf.
Garcia Marquez, G., (1995 [1967]), One Hundred Years of Solitude, New York: Knopf.
Genet, J., (1988 [1958]), The Blacks: A Clown Show, New York: Grove Press.
Gordimer, N., (1978), The Conservationist, London: Penguin.
Green, G., (1991 [1955]), The Quiet American, London: Penguin.
Kadare, I., (2005 [1981]), The Palace of Dreams, London: Harvill Press.
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Kingsolver, B., (1998), The Poisonwood Bible, New York: Harper Collins.
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Kipling, R., (1987 [1901]), Kim, London: Penguin.
Kourouma, A., (1997 [1970]), The Suns of Independence, Teaneck: Holmes & Meier
Publishers.
17
Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy ready
made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such
as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish Into that
attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw
material of moral sentiment.24
24 Cited in Gill (1970:10).
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or else they are written in a more engaging and accessible manner.22 Furthermore, partly for
this latter reason, works of literary fiction often reach a much larger and diverse audience
than academic texts and may therefore be more influential than academic work in shaping
public knowledge and understanding of development issues. If more people get their ideas
about development from fiction than from academic writing, then surely the fiction of
development itself constitutes a potentially important site for the study of development
knowledge.
The challenge is therefore to understand better the relationships between different accounts
and forms of representation within development writing, as well as noting the multiplicity of
voices and logics. In the UK at least, the inter-disciplinary field of development studies has
for the past decade and a half been struggling with two persistent dilemmas. The first is the
“impasse” in development theory identified by David Booth (1985, 1993, 1994), while the
second is the tension between theory and practice set out most vociferously by Michael
Edwards (1989) in his accusation of the “irrelevance of development studies". We would like
to add to this list the idea that there is perhaps also a crisis of representation in development
research, which is highlighted by the power and success of the fictional accounts of
development ideas and processes which we have drawn attention to in this paper. In order
to properly understand and communicate notions of development, it is perhaps necessary for
us to develop forms of writing that can engage with the economic and political realities and
human struggles and challenges of development in ways that go beyond the conventional
academic and policy forms of development writing, and much may be learnt in this regard
from fictional forms of representation.
Ultimately, as Anthony Giddens (1984: 285) has pointed out, "literary style is not irrelevant to
the accuracy of social descriptions", because “the social sciences draw upon the same
source of description (mutual knowledge) as novelists or others who write fictional accounts
of social life". Indeed, this is something that is being increasing recognised in the opposite
direction, with literature studies now beginning to borrow from formal development writing, as
illustrated by the literary critic Olakunle George (2000) in a recent essay comparing
Mahmood Mamdani’s well-known political science monograph Citizen and Subject (1996)
with the literary writings of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Taking such efforts as an example,
it is clear that a richer and "truer" perspective on the experience of development is most
likely to be achieved by holding the insights and imperatives of literature, social science, and
policy-making in tension with each other, irrespective of which one is more “truthful”.
Ultimately, as Mario Vargas Llosa (1996: 320 & 330) has pointed out, although it may well be
that “novels lie”, it is also the case that “men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies”,23
and as such development studies can only benefit from broadening its sources of knowledge
to include what we might term “the fiction of development”. Indeed, it may even be an
essential precondition to reviving the discipline of development studies; as George Eliot
observed over 150 years ago:
22 While we are in this paper primarily concerned with fiction in the form of the novel, it could also be claimed that
similar objective could be achieved through a greater prominence of ethnographic writing about development - a
topicthat would require a separate paper.
23 We are grateful to James Dunkerley for bringing this citation - and that previously quoted by Sir Thomas More
- to our attention in his inaugural lecture for the Institute for the Study of the Americas delivered at the
Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London, on 25 October 2004.
15
and “fiction” within a subject, and we argue that it is a useful one to consider. The purpose of
this example is not to suggest that one ‘version’ of the story of garment workers has more
merits than another, but instead to show potential complementarities between two types of
narrative, and to illustrate the ways in which the form through which knowledge is presented
has important implications for its readership.
4. Conclusion: development through literature
Without falling into the trap of intellectual relativism, in which all “stories” are viewed as equal
and thus none can claim to be superior, we have contended that relevant fictional forms of
representation can be valuably set alongside other forms of knowledge about development
such as policy reports or scholarly writing, as valid contributions to our understandings of
development. In this way, literary accounts can be seen - alongside other forms - as an
important, accessible and useful way of understanding values and ideas in society. Many of
the fictional accounts of development-related issues which exist reveal different sides to the
experience of development to more formal literature, and may sometimes actually do a
“better" job in conveying complex understandings of development in certain respects. While
fiction may not always be “reliable" data in the sense of constituting a set of replicable or
stable research findings, it may nevertheless be “valid” knowledge in that it may be seen “to
reflect an external reality” (Elliot 2005: 22).
At the same time, story-telling as a narrative form and research method has long existed
within the social sciences. It can come in the shape of case study material of individual
experience or more broadly as ethnographic writing within anthropological texts, for
example. While such narrative styles have long formed a part of the inter-disciplinary field of
development studies, they have been rarely been part of the mainstream. The same is true
at the level of policy, although individual narratives have found their way into policy
discourses from time to time, as the “Voices of the Poor” case illustrates, or less recently, in
the case of Ken Loach’s “Cathy Come Home” television documentary which influenced UK
social policy debates about homelessness in the UK. Yet we must distinguish here between
“stories" or “narratives” as a representational form of knowledge - a long acknowledged
research and presentation method in the social sciences (see Elliot 2005 for a good
overview) - and “fiction” as a literary form that we argue can contribute usefully to
development knowledge. While the World Bank's “Voices of the Poor" initiative offers stories
as illustrations within a meta-narrative, a novel such as A Fine Balance provides a visceral,
fine-grained account in which ordinary people are the narrative.
Works of fiction can thus offer a wide-ranging set of insights about development processes
that are all too often either ignored or de-personalised within academic or policy accounts,
without compromising either complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic
literature is often accused of doing. It is clear that literary works sometimes have a stronger
Geertzian “being there” quality than certain academic and policy works, they may cover
aspects of development that are often not made explicit in conventional academic accounts,
14
the joys and difficulties of her new life, magnificently situating it within wider descriptions of
the Bangladeshi migrant community in London that traces its fears, tensions, and
aspirations. A particularly important element of the novel is the juxtaposition of Nazneen’s
life in London with that of her sister, Hasina, who has remained in Bangladesh. Through a
series of letters, we see how Hasina’s life becomes increasingly difficult after she leaves her
violent husband, migrates from her village to Dhaka, falls afoul of prevailing gender norms,
and loses her job in a garment factory when she is accused of behaving in a “lewd manner”.
The novel thus encompasses a wide range of themes centred on development and social
change: the experience of migration to the UK, the politics of organising within migrant
communities, inter-generational relationships, rural-urban migration, tensions around gender
and culture, and the activities of charitable non-governmental organisations among destitute
women workers in Dhaka. As the first book to enter in the UK mainstream to feature the
broad subject of Bangladesh and Bangladeshi people - which provides a substantial and
increasingly visible immigrant community in the UK, and forms the location of one of Britain’s
largest aid programmes during the past thirty years - it is arguable that Brick Lane has
contributed to wider public understandings of development in ways that no academic writing
ever has.19
There is also another reason why this novel is particularly relevant to our contention about
the value of literary sources of knowledge about development. While it is reasonable to
suppose that an author’s reasons for writing a novel are bound up in a complex bundle of
creative, personal and professional motivations, Brick Lane is at least partly inspired by
recent academic research on Bangladeshi women. At the end of the book, the first
acknowledgement is to the University of Sussex Institute of Development Studies academic
Naila Kabeer, “from whose study of Bangladeshi women garment workers in London and
Dhaka (The Power to Choose) I drew inspiration” (Ali, 2003: 371 ).20 Kabeer’s (2000) book is
a study of gender and labour markets within the context of the simultaneous growth of
women’s employment in the garment sectors of Dhaka and London. The book contrasts
employment conditions for women among Bangladeshi communities in the UK, where
women work as home-based machinists in an apparent throwback to a nineteenth century
form of economic organisation, with those in Bangladesh, where women from the 1980s
onwards have increasingly moved out of seclusion into wage employment within modern,
large-scale, export-based garment factories. Ali first became aware of The Power to Choose
while working at Verso Press, which published the book.21 Here then is a novel which builds
on academic research to construct a fictional narrative, responding no doubt to the powerful
and evocative testimonies provided by the real women who speak through Kabeer’s book.
The Kabeer/Ali story is an example of an unusual relationship that developed between “fact”
19 In a recent discussion held by the Development Studies Association with senior staff from DFID, it was
acknowledged that learning more about, and contributing to the strengthening of, public understanding of
development through development education was a key DFID priority for the future.
20 It is interesting to note that the novel also pokes fun at academic work. At one point, Nazneen’s husband
Chanu cites the London School of Economics “World Happiness Survey" to support his argument for returning to
Bangladesh: “Research led by professors at the London School of Economics into links between personal
spending power and perceived quality of life has found out that Bangladeshis are the happiest people in the
world. And LSE is a very respectable establishment, comparable to Dhaka University or Open University.” (Ali,
2003: 290). A further irony here is that despite this LSE study being cited from time to time in the press and on
websites, we are unable to find any conclusive evidence that it ever existed.
21 Naila Kabeer, personal communication.
13
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novel that concerns itself with almost unbearable hardship and tragedy, but Mistry manages
to entertain through the deployment of a style that borders on the ethnographic - a
representational method that has only rarely been evident within the development studies
mainstream - that invokes the essential “being there" quality that convinces a reader over
and above “either a factual look or an air of conceptual elegance" (Geertz 1988: 4). The
book is particularly carried by the powerfully-drawn characters inhabiting this vividly
described world, and A Fine Balance clearly has an edge over academic or policy texts as a
result, as demonstrated by the fact that the novel has as become a fixture on university
reading lists for courses on subjects such as rural-urban migration, urbanisation, and
“livelihoods”, over and above much of the extensive academic and policy scholarship that
exists. This is however very obviously a function of the fact that Mistry’s novel is a work of
fiction, which meant that he had the freedom to carefully craft his characters in such a way
as to reflect the dramatic social reality of impoverishment in India unhindered by the need to
respect the inevitably limitations of - always imperfect’and partial - empirical research.16
A Fine Balance's powerful narrative also allows it to transcend its difficult, even unattractive
subject matter and edge towards a universal appeal based on a kind of “humanism with
politics”. At least partly as a result of this, it has been taken up by a wide audience, selling
over half a million copies in the US alone by 2002, a much wider circulation than any
academic or policy work on the same subject.17 This is clearly another way in which literary
fiction can claim to often be “better” than academic or policy texts, as it is clear that they will
generally reach far more people and may therefore be more influential than academic or
policy works in shaping public knowledge and understanding of development issues, which
is of course crucial in terms of building public support for development policies, insofar as
this is rarely determined merely by their content.18 Sometimes this is clearly the result of a
specific conjunction of events. For example, the US invasion of Afghanistan and continuing
“war on terror" have obviously played a significant role in the success of Khaled Hosseini’s
extraordinarily popular novel The Kite Runner (2003), which has arguably done more to
educate Western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan (under the Taliban
and thereafter) than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or
social science research.
The same is also true of another recent Booker Prize-nominated novel, Brick Lane by
Monica Ali (2003). This rapidly became a fixture at the top of the UK bestseller lists following
its publication, and led to its author joining the ranks of the prestigious “Granta New Young
British Novelist” list. The novel chronicles the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who is
sent to Britain at age 18 to marry Chanu, a man twice her age. It provides a rich narrative of
16 For two examples of academic works that attempt to create a fictionalised "ideal type” of their object of study
based on but not limited by the empirical reality of their underlying research, see Taussig (1996) and Hecht
(2006), respectively on the nature of the state in Latin America and on the plight of street children in Brazil. Such
works are extremely rare within the social sciences, however, and it is interesting to note that both of these
originate from anthropology, perhaps the most empirical of social science disciplines.
17 A Fine Balance was also the winner of the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was selected by the US
television personality Oprah Winfrey as her “book of the month choice", all of which likely also boosted its sales.
18 Of course, it is important to note that the power of literary fiction as a widespread and significant source of
popularised information to shape public opinion can also be appropriated to promote ideas and notion that could
be construed as "anti-developmental". The controversy surrounding Michael Crichton's (2004) recent novel State
of Fear and its message about the ambiguities of global warming is a case in point (see Crowley, 2006).
12
served in the U.P. state provincial service, and then the Indian
Administrative Service, being posted mainly around Lucknow. He could
thus draw upon a lifetime of experience and observation in those settings
that form the stage for the novel.
While this may well be the case, much of the force of the book clearly also derives from its
literary qualities as a novel. Raag Darbari won one of India’s most prestigious literary awards
- the Sahitya Akademi Award - in 1970, and is widely considered to have taken the satirical
genre to new heights within the context of Hindi-language post-independence literature. The
novel is a picaresque comedy that draws readers in through a series of inter-linked stories
that are in turn satirical, ironic, and tragic, making witty use of vernacular wordplay and
caricature, and providing rich, fine-grained descriptions of post-independence rural small
town India. It furthermore ends on an unambiguous and in many ways prophetic message
about the venality of local politics and the vice-like nature of poverty in the countryside that
did much to change dominant perceptions of rural India at the time. In particular, the
dramatic finale that suggests that migration is the only hope for the rural poor radically
challenged prevalent romantic stereotypes of the Indian countryside being idyllic,
harmonious, and timeless in a way that many academic and policy texts on rural India
pointedly failed to do during the 1950s and 1960s. As such, Raag Darbari arguably
constitutes an example of literary fiction that can be considered “better" - albeit in hindsight
- than much of the academic or policy-oriented research from this period as a result of its
nuanced understanding and detailed depiction of key development issues.
One reason for Raag Barban's successful depiction of the nature of rural poverty in India is
arguably also the fact that it was not written within the restrictive conventions of academic or
policy writing. Beyond superficial issues, such as the need for proper referencing, paying
one’s dues to predecessors, and so on, fictional writing can be said to enjoy a freedom of
fabrication that allows it to present “ideal type" exemplifications of social phenomena in a
way that empirically grounded academic literature sometimes cannot. The advantages are
especially clear in relation to Rohinton Mistry’s Booker-prize nominated novel, A Fine
Balance (1996), which is all the more germane to this discussion insofar as Mistry explicitly
writes with the intention to do more than simply entertain, prefacing his work with a quotation
from Balzac’s Le P6re Goriot that deliberately seeks to blur the boundary between “truth"
and “fiction”:
Holding this book in your hand, sinking back in your soft armchair, you will
say to yourself: perhaps it will not amuse me. And after you have read this
story of great misfortunes you will no doubt dine well, blaming the author
for your own insensitivity, accusing him of wild exaggeration and flights of
fancy. But rest assured: this tragedy is not a fiction. All is true.
A Fine Balance is set primarily at the time of the 1975-77 State of Internal Emergency in
India, and traces the fortunes of four fictional characters as they try to survive communal
tensions, rural to urban migration, downward socio-economic mobility, the state violence of
population control programs, and the fragile search for mutual support networks, productive
activity, employment and informal social services in Bombay. It is a relentlessly downbeat
11
compassion. It also places the humanitarian activities in their political
context, both in the local situation of a country at war and in the politics of
development bureaucracies and fundraising. Finally, the novel delightfully
turns the refugees into real people—good and bad, loveable and pitiful—
who actively endeavour to enrol NGO staff members and visitors to provide
the necessary assistance.
Fielding's novel is strikingly different from most of the scholarly literature on
NGOs. Reading this literature, one is usually presented with a black-andwhite picture in which managers play the lead roles, all other actors remain
silent and the organisations unfold their objectives in a participatory way.
One wonders what these tidy organisations have to do with the other
realities that reach us from developing countries, including social and
political movements, conflict and fundamentalism. And one keeps
wondering what really happens inside the organisations and how this
relates to the lives of the NGO staff, volunteers and beneficiaries.
Hilhorst goes on to ask the question of “why would Helen Fielding succeed in giving this reallife account of an NGO where development scholars have failed, apart from the obvious
reason that she brings her literary talent to this task?” The answer, she contends, is that
development research on organisations in general and on NGOs in particular has paid too
much attention to the formal organisational world and has assumed its boundaries, thereby
ignoring the stories of the people who work in and with these organisations as well as the
formal and informal relationships which link everyday practices across formal organisational
boundaries. The nuanced portrayal of the NGO world in Fielding’s novel contrasts strongly
with this lack of imagination and depth, and illustrates well the point that informs our
argument in this article, namely that fictional accounts of development can sometimes reveal
different sides to the experience of development and may sometimes even do a “better” job
of conveying the complexities of development than research-based accounts.15
Akhil Gupta (2005) similarly demonstrates the power of fiction in a recent article where he
draws on both academic and literary works in order to write about corruption in India,
including in particular, the novel Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla (1992 [1968]). According to
Gupta (2005: 20-21), this latter narrative is not only “one of the richest works of fiction about
the postcolonial Indian state" but arguably “a work whose insights into politics and the state
in rural India are without comparison". Indeed, Gupta goes on to claim that “it is hard for me
to think of another novel or ethnography that gives a more clearly etched picture of the large
villages and small tehsil towns”. At the same time, however, it can be argued that Gupta
(2005: 21) effectively treats Raag Darbari as quasi-formal ethnographic research when he
claims that its sharp portrayal of social reality derives from the fact that Shukla
15 Many other scholars and practitioners have made similar use of literature to highlight an issue, although few
explicit their logic for doing so as clearly as Hilhorst. Von Struensee (2004), for example, uses Nigerian writer
Buchi Emecheta's novel The Bride Price (1976) as a means of introducing the subject of bride price in a recent
overview paper on the domestic relations bill in Uganda. In a related manner, it is common for social scientists to
preface their work with literary citations, implicitly because they are revealing of the issue being written about
(and no doubt also because this tends to generate a certain aura of cultural sophistication).
10
Moreover, although some of the works of fiction to which we make reference have been
written by writers from the developing world, it is important to note that we are not attempting
to construct a case for literature being a “voice from the developing world”. This is an issue
that Frederic Jameson (1986) considered in a classic essay on “Third-World Literature in the
Era of Multinational Capitalism”, where he proposed that all third world texts be read as
“national allegories”. Jameson was subsequently widely accused of being patronising and
Eurocentric (see for example Ahmad, 1987), although Imre Szeman (2001: 804) has recently
suggested that “almost without exception, critics of Jameson’s essay have wilfully misread
it", thereby obscuring "a sophisticated attempt to make sense of the relationship of literature
to politics in the decolonizing world”. Although this latter issue is clearly relevant to our task
at hand, our canvas is much narrower than that of Edward Said (1993: xiii), for e; ample, who
explores the world of narrative fiction in terms of its position “in the history end world of
empire”.13 Along with Said, we very much recognise the fact that "the power to narrate, or to
block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and
imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them”, but our focus is on
literature in general as an alternative representational genre through which to understand
development processes and phenomena.
3. The usefulness of literary perspectives on development
In her recent study of non-governmental organisation (NGO) issues in the Philippines, Thea
Hilhorst (2003) begins by making a strikingly unfavourable comparison between mainstream
academic writing on NGOs and the portrayal of the world of NGOs in a recent work of
popular fiction. Hilhorst opens her monograph with a brief discussion of Helen Fielding’s
novel Cause Celeb (1994), a mainly light-hearted chronicle of the adventures of Rosie, a
disenchanted London public relations manager who becomes involved in international
humanitarian efforts to address famine in an African country.14 Hilhorst’s (2003: 1-2) point is
that, perhaps unexpectedly, Fielding’s novel presents a relatively nuanced picture of
international development work and organisational life:
In the novel, Rosie’s NGO does what organisations do: it has a mission
and clear objectives, staff with differentiated responsibilities, and it works
with a budget for planned activities. Yet the novel also brings out how this
NGO is shaped by actors in the organisation and their surrounding
networks. These people carry out activities according to their
understanding of the situation and follow the whims of their personalities,
motivated by various combinations of sacrifice, self-interest, vanity and
13 This is an issue that has been extensively taken up within the emergent field of “cultural studies”, as part of its
effort to achieve a synthesis of social science and literary studies. In particular, it aims to “dismantle the elitism of
the distinction between high and popular culture within literary studies” (Schech and Haggis, 2000: 26), which in
many ways we see as analogous to our interest in questioning the distinctions between different types of
knowledge about development. Cultural studies as a discipline is however much broader and also concerned with
the relationship between society and the production of texts, which is an issue that it is beyond the scope of this
paper to explore in detail, although obviously relevant.
'4 Changing emphasis to a completely different subject matter, Fielding later went on to write the hugely popular
and influential Bridget Jones “chick-lit" novels.
$
9
"rigorously” — addressed through technocratic means, for example through the adoption of
“tool kits", “better policies”, “best practices”, and “stronger institutions" as determined by
“solid evidence” and “rational planning”.9 Such documents inherently privilege certain forms
of information, explanation, and “evidence”,10 and in conjunction with the politically powerful
places from whence they emanate — and the imperatives that Weberian organisations have
for presenting problems and solutions in neat packages (Pritchett and Woolcock, 2004) thereby according a particular status to certain forms of knowledge, authority, and
representation.11
Obviously, as scholars-practitioners ourselves, we are acutely conscious of the constant
need to frame complex development issues in ways that resonate with broad audiences students, advocacy groups, politicians, bureaucrats - and that are plausibly “actionable” by
front-line project staff. This inevitably often means accepting a certain amount of “blueprint
‘development” that "tell[s] us at once that things happen ‘like’ the way they are described -
after all narratives relate things causally - without, however, reflecting the fact that things
happen ...so uncertainly” (Roe, 1991: 296). At the same time, however, another way of
putting this is that having a “good story” is essential if one wants to make a difference in the
world (as most people in development surely are). Seen in this way, it can plausibly be
contended that works of fiction, as original bona fide "stories”, also potentially have much to
contribute to the storehouse of knowledge on development processes, manifestations, and
responses. When one story is a more compelling means of articulating a situation than
another, then development scholars and practitioners ought to perhaps think more positively
about it, be it a novel, a poem, or a play rather than an academic monograph or policy
report.
From this perspective, it can be contended that as the scholarly and policy communities
continue to grapple in the beginning of this new millennium with ways to ameliorate their
theories and strategies of development, turning to novelists, poets, and playwrights for
inspiration and ideas could plausibly be instructive. The next sections endeavour to take
literary perspectives on development seriously, teasing out a number of themes and lessons
from selected examples in order to demonstrate to those who primarily concern themselves
with more formal - empirical, theoretical, and applied - representations of development that
alternative narratives may also be of potential interest.12 The authors we have selected are
those that, for different and sometimes idiosyncratic reasons, we feel have important things
to say, regardless of their origins, and whose work illustrates the points that we wish to
make. We do not claim to be either exhaustive or representative in our choices of literary
works, which are dictated by our own personal readings, and hope that our partial coverage
will stimulate others to propose their own short-lists of readings.
9 See also Scott (1998) for a discussion of similar processes in relation to the development of the modern state.
10 The same can be said of some academic contributions - see for example Collier and Gunning (1999).
11 Indeed, on the basis of his close engagement over many years with a large development project in Western
India, David Mosse (2004) in fact goes so far as to suggest that policy documents are largely ex post
rationalisations of development practice, with both means and ends shifting in accordance with political fortunes
and (perceived) project efficacy. At the same time, see Bebbington et al. (2004) for a response by "insiders" to
the use of public documents to divine and assess World Bank “policy" in the realm of social development.
12 In some respects there are parallels between this article and Sherman (2001), who uses literary sources to
document changing public attitudes toward the poor in turn of the nineteenth century Britain. See also Herman
(2001) on the rendering of the poor in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
8
However, literary authors such as the Nobel Prize winning Naguib Mahfouz, in his novels
Adrift on the Nile (1993(1966]) and The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (1993 [1983]), or Ahdad
Soueif in her Booker Prize nominated novel The Map of Love (1999), provide very different
analyses, respectively pointing to factors including modernization and the concomitant
spread of anomie, religious fundamentalism, and the colonial legacy as critical to explaining
Egypt’s contemporary predicament. The wider corpus of Mitchell’s work (see 1991; 2000)
strongly supports that these are key factors to understanding the country’s current
development.
Similarly, the recent and influential World Bank (2000) report Can Africa Claim the 21st
Century? - co-authored with several other development organisations, it should be noted is another example of such disjuncture. It optimistically and proactively affirms that Africa’s
future depends on “determined leadership”, “good governance", “sound policies", “improved
infrastructure", “investments in people”, “reduced conflict”, “higher economic growth”, and
“reduced aid dependence”. While all of these factors are undoubtedly eminently sensible
from an “orthodox” policy point of view, they ring like empty platitudes when held up against
the insights of fictional accounts of Africa’s developmental predicament such as Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) or J. G. Ballard’s The Day of Creation (1987), for
example. Achebe’s novel details the lasting legacy of colonialism in Nigeria, including the
conflicts generated around cultural practices, but it also traces the power struggles that
traditionally run through tribal communities, showing these to also be a source of change
and constant struggle. Ballard’s The Day of Creation actually focuses directly on
development practice insofar as the central character is a doctor - significantly named Dr.
Mallory - running a WHO clinic in an unnamed underdeveloped, drought-plagued, and
poverty-ridden West African country caught in the midst of a civil war. As the novel unfolds,
Mallory is confronted with the perversity of the processes and manifestations that he once
saw as epitomising development, ultimately drawing conclusions about the futility of the
process as conceived on Western terms.
The argument that we are trying to make here is not that academic or policy approaches to
development are necessarily wrong or flawed, nor is it that we think novelists should be put
in charge of development ministries. Rather, our point is that the policy and academic
literature of development often constructs development problems in a way that justify the
response of the particular policies they advocate (Ferguson, 1990; Escobar, 1995; Mitchell,
2002), and that the way this literature is framed therefore makes a significant difference. This
is of course an issue that can be said to go to the heart of the art of story-telling,8 and
indeed, Emery Roe (1991 & 1994) argues that to a large extent policy documents such as
those produced by the World Bank should be understood as “narratives” that frame what and
how development problems are discussed by powerful actors, thereby validating the
ubiquitous role of (and interventions by) professional "experts”, and legitimising efforts to
construe deeply complex historical and political issues as being most effectively - and most
8 Indeed, as Mark Moore (1987: 80) astutely notes, the ideas that become dominant public ones frequently do so
insofar as they “distinguish heroes from villains, and those who must act from those who need not. ...[T]o the
extent that these distinctions fit with the aspirations of the parties so identified, the ideas will become powerful. If
powerful people are made heroes and weaker ones villains, and if work is allocated to people who want it and
away from people who do not, an idea has a greater chance of becoming powerful".
7
“republic of letters” that the industrial revolution and a concomitant concentration of an
increasingly literate population into urban centres were seen to be creating (see Keen,
1999). Literature was considered politically charged within the context of Britain’s changing
social conditions, and a powerful vector for shaping of public values and morality, to the
extent that the British anarchist William Godwin (1993 [1793]: 20) wrote:
Few engines can be more powerful, and at the same time more salutary in
their tendency, than literature. Without enquiring for the present into the
cause of this phenomenon, it is sufficiently evident in fact, that the human
mind is strongly infected with prejudice and mistake. The various opinions
prevailing in different countries and among different classes of men upon
the same subject, are almost innumerable... Now the effectual way for
extirpating these prejudices and mistakes seems to be literature.
The power of literature to effectively convey complex ideas should not be surprising. Over
forty years ago, Lewis Coser published the first edition of his classic (but unfortunately now
out-of-print) Sociology through Literature, an unprecedented introduction to sociology
through an eclectic collection of literary fiction. Citing Henry James in the introduction to his
volume, Coser (1972 [1963]: xv) argued that "there is no impression of life, no manner of
seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place”. As such,
writers of fiction “have provided their readers with an immense variety of richly textured
commentaries on man’s life in society, on his involvement with his fellow-men,” to the extent
that literature can constitute a key form of social evidence and testimony. Coser (1972
[1963]: xvi) was careful however not to suggest that literature could replace "systematically
accumulated, certified knowledge". Rather, he saw them as complementing each other, but
argued that “social scientists have but too often felt it is somewhat below their dignity to
show an interest in literature”. This “self-denying ordinance” was highly problematic
according to Coser (1972 [1963]: xvi), who contended that
there is an intensity of perception in the first-rate novelist when he
describes a locale, a sequence of action, or a clash of characters which
can hardly be matched by ...sociologists. ...The creative imagination of the
literary artist often has achieved insights into social processes which have
remained unexplored in social science.
From this perspective, an argument can clearly be made that it might be useful to compare
and contrast literary views on development with the ideas and perceptions of academic
social science and the public policy world, in order to glean new insights and novel
perspectives (so to speak). Certainly, the themes emanating from “development policy"
documents - the official texts produced by multilateral development agencies, government
planning offices, and NGOs - can often be rather starkly contrasted with those of fictional
writing on development. For example, in a stimulating study of the way in which the World
Bank construes Egypt’s development predicament, Timothy Mitchell (2002) underlines how
official documents portray this as a function of demographic and geographic factors — too
many people producing too little food because of not enough arable land - and how this has
in turn given rise to a corresponding policy focus on agricultural and irrigation projects.
6
The first is that one is fiction and the other is non-fiction: the basis for telling
the story is different. However, this is relative. There are many writers who
use factual events for their novels and many social scientists who use
fictitious reality to illustrate their theses... The second is that social scientists
are obliged to be systematic, that is, to demonstrate a method, which is also
relative. Writers often have a very systematic method... The third is the
presence or lack of aesthetic expression, and this is a difference that,
following R.H Brown ... I propose to abolish.
The historian Hayden White (1973) implicitly goes even further in dismissing this distinction
in his famous study of the “historical imagination” when he contends that social science often
tends to draw its authority from its perceived aesthetic value rather than the use of putatively
“factual" data or "objective” theory. Focusing on nineteenth century European historical
accounts, he shows how these were structured along similar lines to the realist novel, with
their force and persuasion deriving principally from the deployment of similar rhetorical
strategies to those found in the latter. According to White, this was because ultimately all
interpretation is fundamentally rhetorical in nature; it is a process that occurs when there is
uncertainty as to how to describe or explain a phenomenon, and consequently figurative
rather than objective means of persuasion will inevitably be resorted to.
Seen in this way, the line between literature and the social sciences becomes a very fine
one. This is also the case when storytelling is considered historically, as one of mankind’s
oldest methods of possessing information and representing reality. Certainly, as Michel
Foucault (1984) has perceptively pointed out, those texts that we today categorise as
“literary fiction” - stories, poems, plays - were in fact once accepted as the primary media
for the expression of essential truths about human dilemmas and understandings of the
world, in the same way that in this day and age positivist scientific discourse is received as
authoritative pro forma. Indeed, fiction is arguably to a large extent frequently about the very
issues that at a basic level are the subject matter of development studies: the promises and
perils of encounters between different peoples; the tragic mix of courage, desperation,
humour, and deprivation characterising the lives of the downtrodden; and the complex
assortment of means, motives, and opportunities surrounding efforts by outsiders to "help”
them. From this perspective, one might even say — with apologies to the William
Shakespeare - that in many ways stories “are such stuff as [development studies] are made
on”.6
Furthermore, the role of literature has historically always been not only "to delight” but also
“to teach”, as was pointed out by the Roman poet Horace over two thousand years ago.7 Sir
Thomas More famously claimed that he was compelled to write his powerful political tract
Utopia (1516) as “a fiction whereby the truth, as if smeared by honey, might a little more
pleasantly slip into men’s minds” (More, 1964: 251). This prescriptive ideal was perhaps
most clearly expressed in late 18th century Britain during the debates around the so-called
6 See Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act IV, scene 1, line 155.
7 Horace’s original expression was that literature - and more specifically poetry - should be both "sweet and
useful" (see Horace, 1959: 75). Its oft-cited formulation as “to teach and to delight” is generally attributed to the
16th century soldier-poet Sir Philip Sydney in his famous Apology for Poetry (2002 [1595]).
5
Our central contention concerns the potential contribution that works of literary fiction can
make to development.4 It is important to note from the outset that our intention is not to make
any relativist epistemological claims that literary forms of representation can substitute for
academic or policy works in the study of development. Rather, we want to lay down a
challenge to practitioners and academics within the field to include fictional representations
of development issues within the scope of what they consider to be “proper” forms of
development knowledge. The article begins by making some general remarks about the
nature of knowledge, narrative authority, and representational form, highlighting in particular
the common ground that exists between fiction and non-fiction. We then explore the
contributions that a number of works of modern popular fiction touching on development
themes potentially make to our understanding of development, and juxtapose these with the
contributions of more formal academic and applied approaches. A final section sets out an
agenda for further debate, draws some preliminary conclusions and proposes a list of
relevant works of fiction that we feel may be of interest to those whom we may have
persuaded of the importance of our endeavour.
2. Knowledge, authority and narrative form
There clearly exists within development studies a hierarchy of authority which determines
what constitutes "valid" development knowledge. Although much of the sound and fury in
today’s development debates stems from what can be described as a "clash of
epistemologies” - in which different understandings of the meanings and renderings of
development come into contact with one another - in many ways there exists a much deeper
schism that affects the very nature of what is considered knowledge and what is not. This
involves decisions about the acceptable form that development “stories” must take to be
deemed serious. Even if in recent years there have been some attempts to broaden the
development knowledge base beyond traditional academic monographs and policy manuals
- including perhaps most notably the World Bank’s “Voices of the Poor” initiative,5 which has
explicitly sought to bring a story-telling methodology centre-stage within the production of
development knowledge - these remain overwhelmingly the standard representational form
for the dissemination of development knowledge within the discipline. As such, they can be
said to constitute the benchmark against which other forms of knowledge representation are
measured within development studies - broadly construed as encompassing both the
academic and practitioner worlds - and those that do not match up are generally discarded
or ignored, including in particular literary forms of representation.
To a certain extent, this devaluing of narrative forms of knowledge mirrors a fundamental
divide between literature and social science. As Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges (1992: 218)
succinctly outlines - and simultaneously undermines - the separation derives from at least
three factors:
4 In this paper we are limiting ourselves to works of literary fiction due to limitations of space, but we fully
recognise that other forms of fictional representation, such as films and plays, constitute important
communicative mediums for addressing key themes in development. In the future we hope to write a separate
paper on "development" as addressed in films (tentatively titled “The projection of development”).
5 See Narayan et al. (2000a & 2000b), and Narayan and Petesch (2002). See also the “Voices of the Poor"
website at: http://www.worldbank.orq/poverty/voices/
4
*
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.1
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power
of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
- it is, above all, to make you see. That - and no more,
and it is everything.,z
1. Introduction: development and representation
“Development” is one of the key organising concepts of the modern era. As such, ideas and
images of development are inevitably represented in a wide variety of ways, whether within
academia, the policy world, or the general public domain. To this extent, it can be contended
that all forms of development knowledge can be - and historically have been - largely
understood as a series of "stories”. This is true not only in the pragmatic sense that to have
an impact on public opinion, organisational strategy, or within academia, even the most
elaborate equations and sophisticated data analyses need to be able to be expressed in
everyday language (Denning, 2000), but also in the deeper philosophical sense that all
knowledge claims are necessarily embedded in particular subjective understandings of how
the world works, as was famously pointed out by Walter Benjamin (1989) in his classic essay
“On the Program of the Coming Philosophy”.
Benjamin not only contended that all knowledge of reality is unavoidably subjective but also
that it is inevitably mediated by the representative forms which describe it, and that different
modes of representation therefore impart different visions of the world. He was of course not
the first to highlight this issue, which can be placed within a philosophical tradition going
back in the West to the 4th century BC and Plato’s famous “Simile of the Cave”, and even
further in the East, to the 6th century BC parable of the blind men and the elephant recorded
in the Buddhist Udana. We take Benjamin (1989: 9-10) as our starting point, however,
because he saw this concern as critical for the social sciences, arguing that the key
challenge was the creation of “a concept of knowledge to which a concept of experience
corresponds”. Benjamin made it his life’s work to design a form of representation which
would capture the subjective dimension of social reality whilst simultaneously allowing an
objective knowledge of the world.3 Our purpose in this article is more modest; we seek
merely to suggest that there may be a case for widening the scope of the development
knowledge base conventionally considered to be "valid”. In doing so, we aim to open up new
ground within development studies for the further exploration of the value of different forms
of development knowledge, and to this extent we acknowledge that our paper inevitably
seeks more to ask questions than to provide answers.
1 Byron, (1973 [1819-24]: 182).
2 Conrad (1985 [1897]: 1).
3 This culminated in Benjamin’s celebrated Arcades Project, an unfinished palimpsest of assorted notes,
quotations, and aphorisms which attempted to put together a new theory of history embodied in a new literary
and philosophical historiography (see Benjamin, 1999).
Abstract
*
This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms
of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on
development and more formal academic and policy-oriented representations about development
issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative
authority, and representational form, and explore these by comparing and contrasting selected
works of recent literary fiction that touch on development issues with academic and policyrelated representations of the development process, thereby demonstrating the value of taking
literary perspectives on development seriously. Not only are certain works of fiction “better” than
academic or policy research in representing central issues relating to development, but they
also frequently reach a wider audience and are therefore more influential. Moreover, the line
between fact and fiction is a very fine one. The article also provides a list of relevant works of
fiction that we hope academics and practitioners will find both useful and enjoyable.
Key words: development knowledge, representation, narrative authority, fiction
David Lewis is Reader in Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy at the London School
of Economics.
Dennis Rodgers is Senior Research Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the
University of Manchester.
Michael Woolcock is Research Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute and Professor of
Social Science and Development Policy at the University of Manchester.
Acknowledgements
For helpful discussions and comments we are grateful to two anonymous referees, Xavier de
Souza Briggs, Paola Grenier, Scott Guggenheim, John Harriss, Craig Johnson, Naila Kabeer,
Jenny Kuper, Vijayendra Rao, Sue Redgrave, Imogen Wall, and the 2002-03 and 2003-04 LSE
Development Studies Institute MSc student cohorts. The usual disclaimers apply.
The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone, and not necessarily those of
the respective institutions with which they are affiliated.
Please address all comments and questions to dennis.rodqers@manchester.ac.uk,
d.lewis@lse.ac.uk, and michael.woolcock@manchester.ac.uk
Forthcoming in Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (February) 2008
M|
The Unlversfty of Manchester
Broofc World x
Poverty Institute
The Fiction of Development:
Literary Representation as a Source
of Authoritative Knowledge
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Volume 31.4 December 2007 697-713
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
D0l:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00754.x
The Return of the Slum:
Does Language Matter?
ALAN GILBERT
Abstract
The 'cities without slums' initiative has resuscitated an old and dangerous term from the
habitat vocabulary'. Use of the word 'slum'will recreate many of the myths about poor
people that years of careful research have discredited. The UN has employed the word
in order to publicize the seriousness of urban problems and to improve its ability to
attract funding with which to tackle the issue. But in using such an emotive word the UN
risks opening a Pandora’s box. The campaign implies that cities can actually nd
themselves of slums, an idea that is wholly unachievable. The word is also dangerous
because it confuses the physical problem ofpoor quality housing with the characteristics
of the people living there. The UN knows that earlier research has rehabilitated most
'slum dwellers’ but ignores the danger of conjuring up all of the old images. In the
process, the campaign also offers an oblique invitation to governments to lookfor instant
solutions to insoluble problems. Demagogic governments have always shown a
willingness to demolish slums despite the fact that experience has shown that policy to
be ineffective. I fear that the new campaign will encourage more to employ this foolish
policy. Words need to be employed carefully.
Hundreds of millions of urban poor in the developing and transitional world have few options
but to live in squalid, unsafe environments where they face multiple threats to their health and
security. Slums and squatter settlements lack the most basic infrastructure and services. Their
populations are marginalized and largely disenfranchised. They are exposed to disease, crime
and vulnerable to natural disasters. Slum and squatter settlements are growing at alarming
rates, projected to double in 25 years (World Bank/UNCHS, 2000. 1).
rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state
retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums (Davis, 2006. 17).
The new millennium has seen the return of the word ‘slum’ with all of its inglorious
associations. With the launch of the ‘cities without slums’ initiative in 1999, the UN
reintroduced this dangerous word into the habitat vocabulary.1 After decades when most
prudent academics and practitioners had avoided using it, the UN thrust the slum into full
focus as the target of its main shelter programme and as one element of the millennium
development goals campaign. The UN justifies its onslaught against the slum because.
‘Although figures vary depending on the definition, hundreds of millions of slum
dwellers exist world-wide, and the numbers are growing at unprecedented rates (World
Bank/UNCHS, 2000: 15).
, ,. ,
,
‘The “Cities Without Slums” initiative has been endorsed at the highest political level
internationally as a challenging vision with specific actions and concrete targets to
improve the living conditions of the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized urban
1
For the history of the campaign, see http://www.citie5aiiiance.org/actlvities-output/topics/
slum-upgrading/action-plan.html.
© 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell
Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2D0, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
698
Alan Gilbert
residents’ (World Bank/UNCHS [Habitat], 2000). The goals of that initiative were
documented more fully in the provocatively titled book The Challenge of Slums (UNHabitat, 2003a).
If the slum has still not become front page news, the anti-slum initiative has managed
to persuade a few more journalists and NGOs to address urban issues. The slum has also
been the main focus of some recent well-known books (Verna, 2003; Maier, 2005; Davis,
2006). And, in a world where ordinary, grinding poverty is always displaced in news
coverage by emergencies like that in Darfur or the Pakistan earthquake, that is no mean
achievement.2 A campaign is justified if it manages to remind liberal-minded people of
the injustices that face so many in this world. However, a real danger exists that if
journalists and others convey messages about shelter problems in too exaggerated a way,
the campaign may backfire on the supposed beneficiaries. Emphasize too heavily the
disease, crime and difficulties associated with slum life and it will refuel the kind of fears
that already encourage the rich to move to their gated communities. To judge from recent
articles from The Guardian newspaper, the media are all too keen to promote a message
of doom, despondency and fear (McLean, 2006; Rowell, 2006; Seager, 2006).
In a squeezed square mile on the south-western outskirts of Nairobi, Kibera is home to nearly
one million people — a third of the city’s population. Most of them live in one-room mud or
wattle huts or in wooden or basic stone houses, often windowless. It’s Africa’s biggest slum.
The Kenyan state provides the huge, illegal sprawl with nothing — no sanitation, no roads, no
hospitals. It is a massive ditch of mud and filth, with a brown dribble of a stream running
through it. . . Kibera won’t be an extreme for much longer . . . The UN predicts numbers of
slum-dwellers will probably double in the next 30 years, meaning the developing world slum
will become the primary habitat of mankind (McLean, 2006).
According to such reports, the world will soon be infested with slums, poverty and
disease. Rather than journalists picking up the message that self-help settlements can and
must be improved, it seems that they have picked up, and milked, the word ‘slum’. By
implication, their messages all say that every ‘slum’ is as bad as Kibera.
NGOs seem to have reacted in a similar way. The urban adviser of Care International
has recently written: ‘Every second, someone in the world moves into a slum. Over the
next 30 years, the world’s slum population will, on average, increase by 100,000 each
day. Globally, we are seeing a shift from rural areas to cities and, before the year is out,
a higher proportion of people will be living in cities than ever before’ (Rowell, 2006).
Radical writers, like Mike Davis, are also jumping on the bandwagon. Davis (2006:
201) observes that ’peri-urban poverty — a grim human world largely cut off from the
subsistence solidarities of life of the traditional city — is the radical new face of
inequality’. He warns that these ‘urban badlands’ are the new territory from which
insurgency will spring (ibid.: 202). Indeed, he seems almost to welcome that insurgency
when he states that: ‘the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of
the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism’. Verma
(2003*) too gives a radical slant to the problem when she claims that the root cause of
urban slumming in India lies not in urban poverty but in urban greed.
I am sure that each of these authors has the best interests of the poor at heart and only
intends to draw attention to their neglect. More must be done to help the poor and
inequality is a substantial part of the problem. But, because we have always had great
difficulty in distinguishing real slums from apparent slums, a generally negative
universal image can be dangerous. In particular, it may tempt politicians and planners to
make play with the honors of the urban future as embodied in the word ‘slum’.
Demagogic mayors and government ministers may claim that they will re-house the
inhabitants of Kibera and its like; more authoritarian planners may simply threaten to
2
Is it wholly unconnected that two recent Oscar winning films, Cidacie de Deus and Tsotsi, have been
based in 'slums'?
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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The return of the slum: does language matter?
699
demolish slums in order to ‘help’ the people. In the past, removing slums has rarely
helped the residents, and as often as not assistance was never the principal aim. As sucn,
anything that over-simplifies a complicated issue is dangerous, particularly when it
employs a word that lias as long and disreputable a history as the ‘slum’ (see below).
What is a slum?
Whenever action is required, it is necessary to identify the target population. So what is
Today, the noun ‘slum' is employed in popular usage to describe ‘bad’ shelter. It is
used at varying scales: anything from a house to a large settlement can be classified as a
slum providing that it is perceived to be substandard and is occupied by the poor. The
Oxford Encyclopedic Dictionary (OED) provides two definitions: ‘an overcrowded and
squalid back street, district, etc. usually in a city and inhabited by very poor People; and
a house or building unfit for human habitation’ (Hawkins and Allen, 1991: 1369).
In practice, every city in the world tends to define slums differently, even though
efforts have been made for years to establish objective measures with which to demarcate
the major problem areas. Even in Victorian cities: ‘An essential backdiop to all
nineteenth century slum campaigning was the development of the science of statistics ;
a tendency ‘epitomised by the research of Charles Booth (Prunty, 1998: 5-6).
Recently, the Cities Alliance attempted to define what they meant by a slum (World
Bank/UNCHS, 2000: 1):
Slums do not have;
• basic municipal services — water, sanitation, waste collection, storm drainage, street
lighting, paved footpaths, roads for emergency access:
• schools and clinics within easy reach, safe areas for children to play;
• places for the community to meet and socialize.
Later deliberation refined that definition:
The operational definition of a slum that has recently been recommended [by a UN Expert
Group Meeting] .. . defines a slum as an area that combines, to various extents, the following
characteristics (restricted to the physical and legal characteristics of the settlement and
excluding the more difficult social dimensions): inadequate access to safe water, inadequate
access to sanitation and other infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding,
and insecure residential status’ (italics added by this author) (UN-Habitat, 2003a. 12).
In attempting to define a slum, the UN is engaging in the modern and perfectly proper
practice of establishing ‘targets’ against which progress can be measured. This task
demands a baseline against which the future can be compared. To calculate that baseline,
the UN has chosen to employ an absolute measure of deprivation: ‘ “absolute” slum
measurements rest on defining a minimal level of physical need, thus establishing a
“slum line” below which a residence is classed as unfit for human occupation’ (Prunty,
1998:4).
,
Unfortunately, there are problems in identifying slums through absolute measures.
The first is that standards differ across the world so what is considered to be a slum by
poor people in one country may be regarded as perfectly acceptable accommodation by
much poorer people in another. What is considered to be unfit clearly varies from place
to place and from social class to social class.
The second problem is that many low-income settlements in the world are anything
but homogenous (see below). While some settlements lack every kind of service and
infrastructure, many others are partially serviced. Those settlements without water may
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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Alan Gilbert
be classified as slums but what about those settlements with provision but where some,
even many, of the inhabitants cannot afford to pay for it? Diversity is inherent in many
older shanty towns where some plots contain substantial houses with several storeys and
others flimsy shacks. Even tenure is highly variable within older self-help housing areas
because poor home owners let parts of their accommodation to tenants (Gilbert, 1993;
UN-Habitat, 2003c).
However, there is a third and much more serious problem. The word ‘slum’ is not just
an absolute but is also a relative concept. That is why Yelling (1986: 1) observes that the
word is ‘a term in the discourse of politics rather than science’. If a slum is a relative
concept, viewed differently according to social class, culture and ideology, it cannot be
defined safely in any universally acceptable way. Nor is the concept stable across time
because what we consider to be a ‘slum’ changes. In cities where the general quality of
housing gradually improves, areas that do not change become ‘slums’ because of their
relative neglect. Outside toilets used to be acceptable in western Europe, but today
houses without an inside toilet are considered to be unacceptable. This is precisely the
same complication that confronts the measurement of poverty. In the EU, if some people
become relatively richer, the index of poverty automatically classifies more people as
poor.3 To make real sense, the baseline definition of a slum, like poverty, has to be both
absolute and relative.
,
But if slums are relational and as much a figment of the mind as a physical construct,
then it is difficult for any government or international organization to eliminate them.
Indeed, as public expectations rise, and in a globalized world with ready access to
television they are almost bound to do so, slums will increase in number as and when
populations realized how absolute standards elsewhere are higher. If that is the case, why
promise to eliminate them?
Recognizing that it had a problem, the Cities Alliance sensibly chose to measure
progress on the basis of two criteria: ‘(i) the proportion of people with access to improved
sanitation; and (ii) the proportion of people with access to secure tenure’ (World Bank/
UNCHS, 2000).4 Notwithstanding the difficult measurement problems that this involves,
particularly with the nebulous concept of secure tenure (UN-Habitat, 2003c), the choice
of two simple criteria makes sense. But, if those two are the measure, why use an emotive
term like ‘slum’? Why, despite realizing the definitional problems is the slum being
considered as ‘a typology in itself to classify human settlements’ (UN-Habitat, 2003b:
14)?
Why has the term been adopted?
Increasingly, UN and multi-national development organizations have to justify their
existence, they have to be seen to be both useful and effective. They need to demonstrate
that their designated domain addresses significant humanitarian issues that require
serious and urgent action. If they cannot convince their financial masters that they have
an important job to do, and that they are able to perform the task, their funding is likely
to come under threat. The World Bank has struggled to identify its real role ever since the
absolutes of the Washington Consensus came to be questioned and the appointment and
recent difficulties of Paul Wolfowitz have hardly helped uphold the legitimacy of that
august institution (Stiglitz, 2002; The Economist, 2007).
In the late 1990s, the UNCHS also had an identity problem and major funding
difficulties. The institution has come out of that crisis by changing its name and by
Most EU countries define poor households as those whose income is less than 50% or 60% of the
median income of the country. This means that poverty increases, even if in absolute terms the
'poor' have become better off over time. The USA errs on the other side by only using an absolute
measure. For a simple explanation of the problem, see The Economist (2005).
4 The 'cities without slums' goal is now represented as target 11 of the millennium development goals.
3
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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1
The return of the slum: does language matter?
701
appointing a new director, Anna Tibaijuka, who has been very successful in modify
ing the image of the organization. The organization has embraced the millennium
development goals and taken responsibility for monitoring and implementing goal 7,
target 11. It is helped in the task by the Cities Alliance, set up by a coalition of the World
Bank, UN-Habitat, UNEP and the Asian Development Bank. The ‘cities without slums
slogan was one of the means of establishing the importance of the organization’s
Whether the initiative, along with the rest of the millennium development goals, will
be successful is another question. Some, like Davis (2006: 76), argue that this is mere
window dressing. ‘The emerging “post-Washington consensus” ’, of which this clearly
forms part, is ‘better characterised as “soft imperialism”, with the major NGOs captive
to the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots groups similarly dependent
upon the international NGOs’. The effect of this process ‘. . . as even some World Bank
researchers acknowledge, has been to bureaucraticize and deradicalize urban social
movements’. I happen to disagree with that interpretation because I have no doubt that
the officials in charge of the slums initiative want to improve housing conditions for the
urban poor and genuinely believe that they can do so. 1 can also understand the
bureaucratic reasons for their having adopted a high visibility slogan. However, I wholly
agree with Davis’s claim that: ‘Syrupy official assurances about “enablement” and “good
governance” sidestep core issues of global inequality and debt, and ultimately they are
just language games that cloak the absence of any macro-strategy for alleviating urban
poverty’ (Davis, 2006: 79). My fear is that ‘the language games’, of which cities without
slums forms part, may actually undermine the limited good that an otherwise
commendable campaign will actually achieve.
What is dangerous about the term?
What makes the word ‘slum’ dangerous is the series of negative associations that the term
conjures up, the false hopes that a campaign against slums raises and the mischief that
unscrupulous politicians, developers and planners may do with the term. Since writing
(he first draft of this article I have discovered that Gans (1990) makes a similar complaint
about the dangers inherent in using the term ‘underclass’.5 The difference is that he is
complaining about the dangers that are inherent in using a new, somewhat euphemistic,
term. I am complaining about resuscitating an old, never euphemistic, stereotype; one
that was long ago denounced as dangerous and yet has now resurfaced in the policy
arena.
The negative associations
As previous authors have pointed out the word ‘slum’ has nearly always been used
pejoratively or ideologically, often both at the same time. Yelling (1986: 1) observes that
the word ‘slum’ ‘carries a condemnation of existing conditions and, implicitly at least, a
call for action’. Harris (1979: 419) points out that: ‘The word “slum’’ is like the word
“dirt”: evocative, disapproving, and indefinable except in the context of our expectations
of what should be’. More recently, Flood (2002: 3) has recognized that:
‘Slum’ has become an unfashionable term in the West, being strictly pejorative and associated
with all forms of negative social outcomes and squalor expressed in a spatial or housing sense.
It is a term very much in the spirit of Christian reformism and later Western capitalism, which
has sought to define it as counterfactual, both conceptually and in the physical sense, to
modernist ideals of social and physical order, morality, health, spaciousness and urban quality.
5 Thanks to one of the referees for directing me to that article.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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702
Alan Gilbert
Slums were identified as containing the poorest quality housing, the most unsanitary
conditions, the poorest people: a refuge for marginal activities including crime, ‘vice’ and
substance abuse; and a likely source for many epidemics that ravaged urban areas.
i
The very origins of the word ‘slum’ are cloaked in negativity. Insofar as we know when
or where the word was first used, it seems that initially it did not apply to housing at all.6
The first written appearance of the term was apparently in 1812 when it appeared in
Vaux’s Vocabulary of the Flash Language (Davis, 2004: 12; Oxford Economic
Dictionary Online, no date: 216), when a slum was inauspiciously labelled as being
‘synonymous with “racket” or “criminal trade” ’ (Prunty, 1998: 2).7
When the slum did take physical form, it ‘was just a single room — a place for
slumber’ (Dennis, 2004: 235). But it quickly grew in size to include whole areas,
typically inner-city areas containing older housing of poor quality. The slum also
changed form over time. In the nineteenth-century English city, slums were often found
in basements and in the Victorian imagination: ‘You went down into slums, into the
abyss’ (Dennis, 2004: 236). However, even then slums could also be found in attics at the
top of houses — perhaps the origin of the commonly used epithet ‘rookeries’. Much
later, with the construction and subsequent deterioration of the post-war council estates
of the developed world, many ‘slums’ went up. And, as the context changed, and
shantytowns and self-help settlements proliferated, ‘slums’ climbed hillsides, spread into
flood plains and generally occupied any land that was cheap or could be invaded. The
only common element over time has been that ‘slums’ have always been perceived to be
undesirable places in which to live.
The civic authorities in the nineteenth century began identifying ‘slums’ because they
were dangerous to people’s health: ‘The relentless exposure of slum conditions, which
characterized the early stages of the slum debate in Dublin (1798-1850s), was concerned
mostly with infectious disease’ (Prunty, 1998: 15-16). For this reason, it became
increasingly common to call them ‘unhealthy areas’ a term that ‘was derived from the
1875 Housing Act (the Cross Act) and passed into common use after 1919’ (Garside,
1988: 24). Slums were dangerous to the people who lived there but, perhaps even more
importantly, might launch an epidemic that would endanger everyone in the city.
But slums were also identified, and stigmatized, because they were seen to be centres
ofcrime. In the ‘earliest recorded definition’ the ‘slum’ describes ‘any particular branch
of depredation practised by thieves, and a “lodging slum” [is] defined as “the practice of
hiring ready furnished lodgings and stripping them of the plate, linen and other
valuables” ’ (Prunty, 1998: 2). Is it by chance that Dickens (1846) housed Fagin and the
Artful Dodger in a slum? In most cities around the world, the association between slums,
ill-health and crime still resonates in most people’s minds.
Indeed, it is this association between slums and the supposedly evil character of those
who live there that is the most worrying aspect of our renewed use of the term. To some,
the slum has always turned people into misfits. The architect and social reformer, George
Godwin (1854: 1), long ago observed that: ‘homes are the manufactories of men — as the
home, so what it sends forth’. ‘Dirty, dilapidated, and unwholesome dwellings destroy
orderly and decent habits, degrade the character, and conduce to immorality* (ibid.: 45).
Very much later, Oscar Lewis’ studies of rental tenements argued that poor living
conditions in Mexico City, New York and San Juan helped create a subculture of poverty
(Lewis, 1959; 1966a; 1966b). In the 1980s, Alice Coleman had her 15 minutes of
Warholian fame when the Thatcher government accepted that badly designed high-rise
flats helped to produce rotten people and encourage criminality (Coleman, 1985).
6 Perhaps that is the origin of the term, a room for slumber? However, Prunty (1998: 2) notes that:
'Dictionary entries from the 1870s define "slums" as dirty, muddy back streets, and conjecture a
possible German etymology, from schlamm, mire, as in the Bavarian schlumpen, to be dirty'.
7 Hawkins and Allen (1991: 216) suggest that the word began as cant: '1. insincere pious or moral talk
2. ephemeral or fashionable catchwords 3. language peculiar to a class profession, sect, etc.; jargon’.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
© 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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The return of the slum: does language matter?
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emotion that slums generate among non-slum dwellers is fear of the people who live
there; a fear that stimulates demand for gated communities, hand guns and slum
demolition.
Rather oddly, UN-Habitat (2003a: 9), while recognizing the prevalence of the
stereotype, denies its importance. Although they accept that the ‘catch-all term “slum is
loose and deprecatory’ and ‘is banned from many of the more sensitive, politically
correct and academically rigorous lexicons’, they choose to ignore this danger. Having
defined a slum in the prologue as a place that is ‘squalid, overcrowded and wretched ,
they then claim, somewhat ingenuously, that ‘in developing countries, the term “slum ,
if it is used, mostly lacks the pejorative and divisive original connotation, and simply
refers to lower-quality or informal housing*. Tell that to the slum dwellers of India or
Pakistan, or the inhabitants of the barrios of Caracas or the informal settlements and
townships of South Africa, and see what they say. In Rio. poor people claim that an
address in a favela often means that they do not get a job (Leeds, 2007: 24). Even in
Paris, ‘discrimination is illegal, but banlieue residents routinely report that they are
turned away once a potential employer spots an Arabic name or undesirable postal code’
(Geary and Graff, 2005). As with the euphemism ‘underclass’: ‘while it seems
inoffensively technical on the surface, it hides within it all the moral opprobrium
Americans have long felt towards those poor people who have been judged to be
undeserving’ (Gans, 1990: 273).
Slums are heterogeneous
Too many observers, including the UN and proselytizing authors like Davis and Verma,
apply the term slum with broad strokes; it embraces any place that is problematic and any
group of people that lives there is automatically included. Politicians, planners and the
general public all tend to adopt the view that, if it looks like a duck, it must be a duck.
All slums are bad and everyone living in them must suffer from the debilitating
subculture that slum life produces. The term ‘slum’ is like the ‘underclass’ ‘that lumps
together a variety of highly diverse people who need different kinds of help’ (Gans, 1990:
274).
.
.
i
In practice, most ‘slums’ are anything but homogenous and contain both a mixture of
housing conditions and a wide diversity of people. That is why those academics,
architects and planners who began to investigate the reality of life in the shantytowns in
die 1950s found few Oscar Lewis type slums or slum dwellers (Abrams, 1964; Turner,
1965; 1967; Mangin, 1967; 1970; Fortes, 1972; Cornelius, 1975; Koenigsberger, 1976).
Life in these settlements was not as dismal as that described by Lewis in the central
tenements of Mexico City or San Juan and many of these areas were clearly places that
allowed people to gradually improve their lives. Turner (1969: 521) describes how
studies of cities in seven countries discovered that: ‘the peripheral settlers are almost
always of a higher socio-economic status than central city slum or “provisional
settlement” dwellers’. Based on his experience in Latin America, Mangin (1967: 65)
noted that writers about squatter settlements in Latin America ‘agree, sometimes to their
own surprise, that it is difficult to describe squatter settlements as slums. The
differentiation of squatter settlements from inner-city slums is, in fact, one of the first
breaks from the widely shared mythology about them’.
Study after study during the 1960s and 1970s confirmed the fact that what might begin
as a shantytown often developed into a serviced, consolidated, low-income suburb. The
difference, according to Mangin (1970: xxix), was not about the people. ‘The slum
dwellers are basically the same kinds of people as the squatter settlement dwellers with
regard to status characteristics. However, the slum dwellers do not view the future in the
same way the people of the squatter settlements do. They exhibit more depression and
alienation . . .’ At this time, access to land, sufficient income to buy materials and sheer
effort offered the poor a ‘decent’ home at least in the conceivable future. A terminological
break-through came when Charles Stokes differentiated between ‘slums of hope and
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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The return of the slum: does language matter?
705
‘slums of despair’. This neatly summarized the growing consensus that poor-quality
housing played a variety of roles and contained a great deal of heterogeneity. Stokes’
(1962: 190) ‘slums of “hope” disappear as migration slows down. Slums of “despair” do
not disappear. For in the slums of “despair” live the poor’. If the word slum was still used,
at least there were good slums and bad ones!
Thenceforth, most students of low-income areas in Latin America and Africa,
although not generally in Asia, strenuously avoided the term slum. They replaced it with
a gamut of terms, including informal housing, irregular settlement, spontaneous shelter
and self-help housing (Abrams, 1964; Turner, 1965; 1967; Mangin, 1967; 1970; Fortes,
1972; Cornelius, 1975; Koenigsberger, 1976). None of these terms managed to embrace
the diversity of the settlements being described or the full range of processes involved,
but each underlined an important dimension of the housing problem in poor countries:
the reality was that people were essentially producing their own housing. People
acquired land informally, sometimes illegally, and began to build, or at least design, their
own accommodation. They lived initially without services but usually managed to
improve the quality of their shelter over time and to use their home as part of a
‘household survival strategy’. Providing that they earned enough money, and the
government was vaguely competent, they were able to produce decent homes (Ward,
1976; Gilbert, 1992). Sometimes, the new terms used to describe the improving
shantytowns were far too eulogistic, as when the new military government of Peru
renamed its slums as ‘young towns’, but such a term at least had the advantage that the
young towns were unlikely to be demolished by the state (Lloyd, 1981 )!9
In the past, I have argued that it matters not what term one uses to describe lowincome settlements providing that the limitations of the term being employed are
recognized (Gilbert. 1992). At the time, I favoured the use of the adjectives
‘spontaneous’, ‘irregular’ and ‘self-help’ in relation to housing but suggested that it did
not much matter if other terms were used. However, I am certain that this argument does
not apply to the term ‘slum’ for the reasons given in this article.
Later, of course, the automatic association between the inner city of dilapidation and
the shantytown of improvement came to be questioned. In Mexico City, Eckstein (2000:
185) observed that, ‘the shantytown that I came to know over a thirty-year period
increasingly housed tenants who were poorer than the homeowners’. And, ‘as local
economic opportunities deteriorated, social problems proliferated. Drug addiction,
violence, theft, and assault all increased with the austerity policies and peso devaluation
of the 1990s’ (ibid.: 187). ‘Thus, the shantytown had come to be described more aptly as
a “slum of despair” than a “slum of hope”, the opposite of what urbanists had theorized’.
Her observations are based on too limited a sample and on a misunderstanding of the role
of tenure but her central argument is correct: what is a slum at one point in time may
improve, what was once an area of hope may deteriorate. Quite simply, urban areas
change through time; like many neighbourhoods in a city, some slums are gentrified,
some formerly ‘decent’ areas decay.10 If, as Flood (2002: 4) suggests, ‘the reality of these
unplanned settlements is quite different to the Western concept of slum, to the extent that
“slum” may not be a meaningful description’, using the term is at best misleading.
Has the heterogeneity of low-income settlement been recognized in the recent
rediscovery of slums? Yes and no. The World Bank/UNCHS (2000: 1) recognizes that:
‘Slums range from high density, squalid central city tenements to spontaneous squatter
settlements without legal recognition or rights, sprawling at the edge of cities’. But, more
worryingly, ‘slums are neglected parts of cities where housing and living conditions are
appallingly poor . .. Slums have various names ... yet share the same miserable living
conditions’.
9 Hernando de Soto (1989) wrote about the inhabitants as pioneers, the saviours of the Peruvian
economy.
10 Perlman (2004) provides evidence, about how certain areas in Rio de Janeiro have changed their
character over 30 years.
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Alan Gilbert
706
Worse still, they declare that the urban situation is deteriorating unequivocally: Tn
fact urban slum conditions are qualitatively and quantitatively worsening worldwide
(World Bank/UNCHS, 2000: 9). This is part of the danger of the word and of campaigns
generally. If you want to face up to the challenge of slums, you have to emphasize the
worsening nature of the problem. Writers like Mike Davis are equally culpable in this
regard. In the process, vast numbers of people are effectively labelled as ‘undesirables .
-■
’'
/
h.
■
.
■' • 71}
The paradox of providing solutions for an unachievable goal
.
A ”
1
■■■.
If we take it at face value, the policy goal of the UN campaign is to,reduce the number
of slum dwellers by 2020 and hopefully to have eliminated it. by seme later date But
,there is a major problem. In Victorian Britain, it istess than clear wljat pmportiop of the
urban population lived in slums but, generally, the slum was perceived to be exceptional,
the location of a minority, usually the undeserving and, not infrequently, the criminal.
'if'rj.
Normal housing was something other than a slum which meant that the anomaly could
be ‘treated’. Even though slums were relatively scarce in most developed^countries,
-i
governments have never managed to rid us of our problem despite growing affluence and
constant policy shifts. If that is reality in most developed countries, What chance is there
in much less prosperous cities?
According to the UN’s figures, slums in the cities of the South are no longer
exceptional. Now that the term has been extended to the ill-serviced, flimsy
accommodation of the periphery most urban Africans, Asians and Latin Americans live
in slums. UN-Habitat (2003a: 15) estimates that :72%^)f urban dwellers in sub-Saharan
Africa live in slums and 58% of those in Sputl) ■tekal Asia. Even Latin Americans
cannot escape this fate because, seemingly, - Wjwo-thirds .of. the population of
Mexico City live in what might be called a sluhj fflra.: xxix). Even more alarmingly,
UN-Habitat (2003a: 81) estimates that, in 209j N«9.4% of the urban population of
Ethiopia lived in slums and 98.5% of those in Afg| hwstan! In thejurban areas of virtually
all.of the 49 least developed countries of the ,wo| the majority lived .in slums.
On the basis of such figures, Davis (2006: 1< ®ims that: ‘tfcteities ofcthe future, a
rather than being made out of glass and steel a rfHWvisioned by "eBier generations of
urbanists, are instead largely constructed out o •Wide brick, straw, recycled plastic,
cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities fttMt soaring toward heaven, much of
the twenty-first century urban world squats.'1 Jlpjualor, surrounded by pollution,
excrement, and decay’. Even allowing for his rhea mf, if most people, live in slums, what
chance is there of improving life in the city? If air HI 1 or 2% of the inhabitants of Addis
Adaba or Kabul live in slums, how can the protj HI be treated, let alone solved?
Even if the initiative should prove successfur Tfflimproving living conditions, slums
will remain because as general housing standards rise, areas that fail to reach the new
o
' as slums. In the UK, rising expectations in
general standard will be newly categorized
terms of plumbing, damp courses and living space have turned many homes into slums
.rwAw once considered acceptable dwellings.
2 .
I am all for raising standards but in the
that were
housing arena this tends to mean stigmatization of any housing that does not meet the
new standards.
In the light of the enormous problem that needs to be tackled, one might expect
policymakers to come up with relatively modest and realistic goals. If the problem is so
large, then it cannot be solved; at best it can only be lessened.
To be fair to the ‘cities without slums’ initiative, the goal is not to rid the world of all
slums by 2020. However, few politicians are so reasonable and far too many are wont to
promise the electorate a happy future. Perhaps this is why the South African Housing
Minister, Lindiwe Sisulu, announced in 2004 that the government would eliminate the
housing backlog over the next 10 years (Peta, 2004). The policy ot offering small
subsidies to the poor and encouraging the mass building of small owner-occupied
dwellings would soon solve South Africa’s vast housing problem.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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if
The return of the slum: does language matter?
707
Similar kinds of utopian thinking produced Brasilia and Ciudad Guyana and a host of
lesser versions across the globe. These cities were intended to be islands of prosperity
and modernism in seas of poverty. They were meant to be perfect and to demonstrate the
future. Unfortunately, they could only achieve perfection if the poor of the country were
kept out. The results were dualistic: perfectly decent planned cities with wholly
imperfect, albeit distant, unplanned, neighbourhoods (Holston, 1989; Macdonald and
Macdonald, 1979; Peattie, 1987; Wright and Turkienicz, 1988). Experience in London,
Paris, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and virtually every other city in the world shows us that the
‘slum’ will always be with us; the ‘eternal slum’ as Wohl (1977) once called it.
Encouraging the adoption of dangerous 'solutions'
In the past, the solution to the slum problem often amounted to one word: clearance. In
hindsight, it is clear that demolition often only added to the problem. The mam
achievement of slum clearance in London and Paris in the nineteenth century was to
increase overcrowding elsewhere. It did more to improve transport than to solve the
housing problem. Baron Haussmann, after all, is remembered for his boulevards, not tor
his solution to the tauclis of Paris.11 The construction of railways and New Oxford Street
in London worsened the housing situation rather than improving it.
When, immediately after the first world war, the British government promised its
returning forces ‘houses fit for heroes’, that meant demolishing the slums and building
new homes in the suburbs. The British new town movement and, later, high-rise flats
represented the modernist epitome of this idea. The housing that existed was hopeless
and only modem architecture and planning techniques could create proper homes. While
some of these efforts did improve housing conditions, too often they brought little benefit
to people’s lives (see below).
. .
, ,
Since 1945, few governments have lacked good, modernizing ministers who
promised to remove slums and build ‘proper homes’ in their place. Unfortunately, few
of these efforts proved very successful. As Van Kempen and Musterd (1991: 83)
observe: ‘In the Western world social high-rise housing has become the symbol of the
deficiencies and failure of post-war public housing policies and management. .. Apart
from construction faults, failures and bad repairs, problems such as vacancies, rent
arrears, a high turnover rate, filthiness, vandalism, feelings of insecurity and a high
concentration of socially and economically weak families are supposed to characterize
the occupancy and living conditions of these estates’. Taylor (1973) argues that, in the
UK. much potentially decent terraced housing was reduced to rubble to produce the
kinds of new social housing that was to prove so problematic. The construction of
the grands ensembles on the edges of the large French cities seems to have proved no
more successful. The first large estates were built on the periphery of Paris in 1953 and
rapidly deteriorated. When ‘riots occurred in Lyons in 1981 Mitterand set up a
commission to deal with the more problematic estates. In the mid-1990s there were
about 50 in the tie de France with an average population of 9,000’ (Noin and White,
1997: 197-8). Despite changes in policy, the French banlieues have continued to
explode, most recently in 2005.
In poor countries, past efforts at slum improvement too often led to displacement ot
the so-called beneficiaries. Supposedly benevolent leaders knocked dbwn shanty
accommodation in Caracas, Rio de Janeiro and Santiago and re-housed the population in
purpose-built housing. The population were supposed to be happier as a result. And,
‘since the 1970s it has become commonplace for governments everywhere to justify
slum clearance as an indispensable means of fighting crime’ (Davis, 2006: 111).
11 Harraps New Standard Dictionary defines un taudi as a miserable room, dirty hole, hovel and suggest
that it can be used as in les taudis de Paris. A taud is a rain awning or tarpaulin.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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708
Alan Gilbert
In practice, most observers have always concluded that slum removal has had negative
effects (Marris, 1960; Dwyer, 1975; Perlman, 1976; Valladares, 1978; Rodrfguez and
Icaza, 1993: 68). Relocation disrupts existing commercial and social networks, lengthens
the journey to work, raises housing costs and generally disrupts people’s lives.
Fortunately, the validity of Abrams’ (1964: 126) famous jibe against slum demolition
was gradually absorbed in many cities: Tn a housing famine there is nothing that
slum clearance can accomplish that cannot be done more efficiently by an
earthquake .. . Demolition without replacement intensifies overcrowding and increases
shelter cost’. By the 1970s, the World Bank among others was pushing the dual concept
of slum upgrading and sites and services (World Bank, 1974; 1980). Neither approach
was perfect, but both represented a huge improvement on either clearance or the pretence
of building perfect homes for imperfect people (Werlin, 1999).
Unfortunately, there are still many governments anxious to demolish slums. Indeed,
Davis (2006: 99) claims that this Js part of an international conspiracy. Tn big Third
World cities, the coercive Panoptican role of “Haussman” is typically played by special
purpose development agencies; financed by offshore lenders like the World Bank and
immune to local vetoes, their mandate is to clear, build, and defend islands of cyber
modernity amidst unmet urban needs and general underdevelopment’ (Davis, 2006: 99).
Whatever the truth of that assertion, slum clearance continues and, subsequent to the
‘cities without slums’ initiative, large-scale demolition projects have been initiated in
India, Kenya and Zimbabwe (AHRC, 2003; STP, 2004; COHRE, 2005; 2007; Punwani,
2005). The Mugabe regime’s recent efforts to ‘clean up’ its cities through Operation
Murambatsvina may have led to 700,000 people ‘losing their home, their sources of
livelihood or both’ (COHRE, 2005). Let me emphasize that the Cities Alliance is wholly
against this approach and UN-Habitat is actively campaigning against it. Nevertheless,
their wise advice to upgrade settlements and avoid demolition is clearly being ignored by
some governments. I have no doubt that the slogan “cities without slums’ is partly to
blame.
Meanwhile, more humane approaches to the ‘slum’ problem elsewhere are proving
less than effective. In Colombia and South Africa, for example, many poor people are
being given subsidies to buy formal homes. However, not only is construction failing to
keep up with demand, but some of the beneficiaries have sold their new homes because
they cannot afford to pay the associated taxes and service charges (Huchzermeyer, 2003;
Gilbert, 2004). In Chile, the only Latin American country where the housing deficit has
actually been cut in recent years (Gilbert, 2001), new subsidized housing estates have
arguably turned into social housing ghettoes (Richards, 1995; Ducci, 1997). All three
governments are determined to create nations of homeowners and to house the poor in
‘proper’ homes, despite their manifest inability to eliminate poverty. Metaphorically, the
plan is to eliminate the slum, something akin to finding the Holy Grail.
Misunderstanding the central problem
The central dilemma facing housing improvement was understood many years ago. It
was expressed in the Chairman of the London County Council Housing Committee’s
contentious questions: ‘Does the slum make the slum dweller or the slum dweller the
slum? Would someone who is “filthy in one room, be clean in two” ’ (Barnes, 1926:
147)? An early test of the latter question was conducted in the late 1920s. McGonigle
and Kirby’s (1936) famous study compared the health and expenditure of a slum
population in Stockton on Tees with that of a group that had been moved to modem
housing.
The results were dramatic. Although the estate to which the families moved was carefully
planned and well-built, and the houses were fitted with a bath, kitchen range, ventilated food
store, wash boiler and all the most modern sanitary arrangements, the death rate of the families
increased by 46 per cent over what it had previously been in the slum area they left behind
(Garside, 1988: 39).
International Journal of Uiban and Regional Research 31.4
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The return of the slum: does language matter?
709
The simple explanation was that in order to pay for their new housing the families were
able to spend much less on food. Poor people need cheap accommodation. If cheap
accommodation is not available, they become homeless or they spend too much on
housing. There is a conflict between improving the physical quality of housing and
improving the housing conditions of poor people.
Arguably, social housing programmes in many developed countries solved that
problem by heavily subsidizing the poor. However, the problems currently faced by the
ageing council estates in the UK suggest that this policy has not always worked.
Similarly, the social situation in the grands ensembles of urban France show that the
marginalization of these estates is in reality more social and cultural than physical (Noin
and White, 1997: 197-8). High levels of unemployment, poor education and racial
segregation sometimes combine to create new slums.
t
In poorer environments, Turner (1976) points out, little purpose is served in
providing a poor family with a fully serviced, three-bedroom house if the family
cannot afford the rent or mortgage payment. He once compared the housing situations
of two families, one living in formal acconjpiodation, the other, a rag picker, in a shack
in the backyard of his godparent. While the living conditions of the first family were
clearly far superior to those of the second, the housing expenditure of the first was far
more than they could afford. Turner argued that given the circumstances of the two
families at the time, the flimsy shack offered more appropriate accommodation than
the three-bedroom house.
Similarly, as Harris (1979: 424) points out: ‘Squalid housing, crime, ignorance and
poverty come to be seen as a mutually reinforcing constellation of circumstances
independent of the economic relationships which cause them. And this leads to another
myth: that improvements in housing can abate other, more fundamental inequalities . As
such, ‘Projects of slum clearance, site and service schemes, and model housing are too
marginal to influence substantially either the flow of investment or the pattern of
settlement and so, for the most part, are manipulated by the forces they seek to control’
(ibid.: 440).
. .
In cities with abject poverty, housing improvements can be counterproductive insofar
as the priorities of the desperately poor almost always lie beyond shelter. Above all else,
the poor need to eat and to drink clean water. Overcrowding is clearly undesirable but
hunger is worse!
Conclusion
'
One of the aims of UN-Habitat is to draw attention to an extremely worrying and
possibly growing symptom of urban poverty. As its executive director puts it: ‘Awareness
of the magnitude of slums in the world is the key’ (UN-Habitat, 2003a: 1). Campaigns
against poor housing are to be welcomed, but such campaigns have to demonstrate that
they can really improve living conditions. If the ‘cities without slums' campaign manages
‘by 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million
slum dwellers’, we should celebrate. We should also praise the campaign insofar as it
espouses upgrading projects rather than slum clearance.
At the same time, I fear that that by using the term ‘slum’, the campaign’s main goal
becomes blurred and obscures the real steps that need to be taken to improve living
conditions. If the key problem to be addressed is to improve the quality of people’s
housing, then a campaign entitled ‘In search of better shelter’ would be much more
accurate and honest. Most importantly, it would represent a reasonable goal and would
not convey the negative images evoked by the use of the word ‘slum’. ‘Better shelter
suggests a progression: that housing problems are so complicated and deep seated that
they cannot easily be resolved, let alone eliminated. Improving shelter does not demand
the end of ‘slums’, which is unachievable, but to produce better housing conditions.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
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710
Alan Gilbert
a slogan;
poVp”Xb,.”^fafc.S
r'IU”
»■' »“
■
research has discredited. By using an
emotive word, the UN draws attention t
response that it cannot control As Gansel99(^27^ m*\bUt’
I0'"8 S°’ 11 eV°kes a
the term ‘underclass’, if the term ‘is ttirLd ini275 P
S °rt ‘n hls condemnation of
the political conditions for reStut npTfr
" S^Onym f°r the “"Serving poor,
eyesores?
agencies need m
° Create Cltles wlthout slums ^an by obliterating the
altruism and bureaucratic opportunism. After all UN
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The return of the slum: does language matter?
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plan for moving slum upgrading to scale,
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713
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Cities 5, 347-64.
Yelling, J.A. (1986) Slums and slum
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Resume
L'initiative ‘Villes sans taudis’a ressuscite un terme ancien et dangereux du vocabulaire
de I’habitat. Utiliser le mot ‘taudis’va recreer toute une mythologie sur les pauvres que
des annees de recherches consciencieuses avaient refutde. L’ONU a fait ce choix pour
souligner la gravite des problemes urbains et renforcer sa capacity a attirer desfonds
avec lesquels rdsoudre la question. Cependant, ce mot etant connote tinotionnellement,
I'ONU risque d’ouvrir une boite de Pandore. La campagne implique que les villes
peuvent reellement se debarrasser des taudis, ce qui est totalement irrealisable. Le mot
est dangereux aussi parce qu’il melange le probldme materiel de la pietre quality des
logements et les caracteristiques des populations qui y vivent. L'ONU salt que des etudes
anterieures ont rehabilite la plupart des ‘habitants de taudis’, mais elle ignore le risque
lie a I'evocation des vieIlles images. Parallelement, la compagne invite indirectement
les gouvernements a trouver des solutions immddiates a des problemes insolubles.
Les gouvernements demagogues se sont toujours montres disposes a demolir les taudis
meme si I'experience a prouve I’inefficacite de cette politique. Je crains que cette
nouvelle campagne n en encourage d’autres a appliquer cette strategic insensde. Ilfaut
employer les mots avec circonspection.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4
© 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
HP"/
The Writing of the Social Sciences
Sundar Sarukkai*
Doing sociology’, writing sociology, is to somehow engage with the subjects of the
discourse, to give voice to these subjects. It perfdrce means that our writing should be sensitive to
these voices. Literature does this admirably well in one way. Social science can still see itself as a
science but that does not mean that it can without question make its writing scientific. It does not
also not have to make its writing entirely literary. The challenge thus is to find expressions of
literary soc ial sciences, where there are some elements of the discourse of the natural sciences as
well as some from the literary discourse.
This is an introduction to the series of articles by students of a graduate level course
taught by the author on ‘The Nature and Practice of Thinking at the National Institute of
Advanced Studies, Bangalore. As part of this course, the class studied different writing styles
ranging from poetry to critical essays. The series thatfollows represents one attempt to find a
different voice to talk about some important themes in social science.
*National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus,Bangalore 560012.
Email:
[littp://www.esocialsciences.com/workingPapers/workingPapersDetails.asp?workingpaperids=54 |
There is a peculiar metaphysics that haunts the writing and the analysis of writing in the
social sciences. On the one hand writing in these disciplines follows the dictates of
representation - of social facts and processes, for example. On the other, writing itself is
participatory and co-constitutive of the content of these discourses. Thus, at one end such
writing gravitates towards the specific registers present in the writing of the natural
science discourse and at the other it is seduced by literature.
One of the important ways through which a discourse marks out its territory is
through writing styles and practices. Most often we make sense of such writing by unduly
focusing on the content of what is written. To invoke an old binary, what is focused in
such acts is the content as against the form. Form is regimentalised in various ways in
such writing. Academic writing in social sciences takes very distinctive forms. Among
other things, some of the folk complaints are that they are often difficult to read, exhibit
excessive scholarship and treat new ideas and insights with a great deal of reserve. At the
level of writing, it is often clear as to what constitutes academic writing in social
sciences. Often one can guess the journal in which an article is published by looking at
the style of writing.
However, it is clear that we need to engage more seriously with the practices of
writing in these disciplines. All the sciences, both natural and social, exhibit a deep
suspicion of writing, a suspicion that has different modes of articulation in the wider
philosophical terrain. The suspicion of writing is basically based on the fact that writing
is derivative - not necessarily of speech as Derrida would have it, but derivative of the
nature of the surrounding domain of discourse with which each of these disciplines
engage. For the natural sciences, writing is derivative to the way the world really is; thus,
scientific writing can only write the already ‘written’ articulations of nature,
i
It is not an accident, therefore, that among scientists the scientific activity is often seen
as reading the book of nature. A deeper understanding of this metaphor makes us realize
that science is as much writing the reading of this book, that is, writing the already
eSS Working Papers/Writing of Social Sciences
written. Writing in this sense is completely derivative and in fact the very responsibility
of being called a science is to regulate writing. A scientist cannot write what she wants,
she has to write only what the world exhibits to her intellect.
The appropriation of the idea of science into social science is not at the level of
methodology alone. Nor is it only of the metaphysical presuppositions hidden in the very
act of doing science. It is also in the way in which discursive strategies from natural
sciences are appropriated into the writing of the social sciences. The reason why this
appropriation has not merited the kind of attention it should have is primarily due to the
belief that scientific discourse is merely communicative and has no specific discursive
strategies special to that discourse. But by now it is accepted that scientific discourse not
only exhibits special registers but also that the discourse is essential to the production of
scientific knowledge. In other words, how science is written is essential to the
epistemology and ontology it creates.
There is one aspect of scientific writing that has had a profound influence on the
social sciences. This has to do with the use of mathematics in these disciplines. At the
expense of other discursive strategies, social science has focused excessive attention on
the use of mathematics in the natural sciences and the potential use of it in the social
sciences. The natural sciences, particularly physics and chemistry, have co-opted
mathematics in a very special way. They do not claim that the use of mathematics is part
of the discursive strategy of science. Instead, the claim is that mathematics is the
language of nature and thus the use of mathematics is validated at the level of faithful
representation of the world. It is not just that nature is an open book but it is a book
written in the language of mathematics." Since mathematics is the language of nature,
scientific texts have to perforce be written in this language so as to retain some notion of
faithfulness.
...
This particular view of nature’s relation with mathematics negates any possibility
of understanding the use of mathematics as a discursive strategy in the natural sciences.
One way to recapture this lost engagement with mathematics is to explicitly understand it
along the contours of language and its relation with scientific discourse. Once we do this
it will become clear that there is much in the use of mathematics that is part of discursive
strategies and the use is not necessarily only at the level of methodology or metaphysics.
Along with particular ways of using mathematics, science also deploys various other
discursive strategies such as the use of multisemiotic systems, rhetorical strategies,
specific kinds of registers, emphasis on nouns at the expense of verbs and adjectives
(grammatical metaphors) and so on.1"
...
r. .
One reason why science chooses these strategies of writing is because of its
attempts to distance itself from literary writing. The attempts to put a chasm between
science and other activities such as religion, literature and philosophy have influenced not
only its methodology but also the way it presents itself through its texts. Contrary to
literature, science privileges the possibility ol reading texts with one or few
interpretations. To allow for this possibility the text itself has to undergo radical changes.
While the methodological issues that distinguish science from literature are often
emphasized it is not often the case that such clear demarcations can be made. For
example, literature too engages with the real in very important ways as much as science
engages with the idea of the fictional. Science refines the idea of justification in ways
quite different from literature and the arts, although one could in principle argue that
eSS Working Papers/Writing of Social Sciences
there are various modes of justification present in the latter, such as form and aesthetics.
Science’s attempt to draw a line between philosophy and science also runs into problems
when analysed carefully. Much of modem science is a careful cultivation of the removal
of the weeds of metaphysics. This weeding out is particularly and perhaps only to be
found in its writing, for scientific practice is filled with the pitfalls of metaphysics at all
levels. Somehow writing has to carry the burden, one which allows science to distinguish
itself from fields such as literature, arts and religion.
If that be the case, then what happens when social science appropriates science not just its methodology and perhaps its metaphysics but also its writing strategies? In the
case of the social sciences, their relation with literature is much more immediate than is
the case with the natural sciences (although one could make the argument that scientific
narrative is a story of how the world is and sociology, for example, a story of particular
aspects of human societies.) It is well known that social science arose as an intermediate
point between science and literature. As Lepenies notes, from the middle of the
nineteenth century onwards literature and sociology contested with one another’, whose
‘consequences are still visible today.’ Even by the ‘end of the eighteenth century a sharp
division between the modes of production of literary and of scientific works was not yet
possible.”v
Literature and social sciences go a long way back. Literary styles of writing have
not only influenced the social sciences but also the natural sciences. For example,
Halliday points out that Newton chose a specific register in writing his work on optics?
This marks a specific shift away from certain literary styles of writing, a shift that has
been very influential in the writing of science that followed. In the social sciences, this
tension between these disciplines and literature persisted until the nineteenth century.
This should not be too surprising since social sciences found a disciplinary identity
following Comte in the nineteenth century. One of the primary reasons for this constant
tension between literature and social sciences lies in the fact that the objects of discourse
in both these disciplines overlap. Literature writes about society and in doing so
constantly challenges the claims of sociology. Even today, some of the most important
ideas about societies reach people through the medium of literature rather than of
sociology or anthropology. While methodology and rigour do indeed mark a difference
between fiction and sociology it is also the case that literature — both in its fictional and
non-fictional form - many times intrudes into the domain carved out by disciplines such
as sociology, history, anthropology and culture studies, to cite a few examples.
The conscious attempt by social sciences to mimic the discursive strategies of
natural sciences meant that the style of writing was used to create a demarcation criterion
to distinguish the social sciences from literature. But such uses of writing are not
‘innocent’ nor can it be believed that they do not have important consequences. For, in
choosing writing styles to carry the burden of demarcation, to establish the boundaries of
exclusion, these disciplines invest enormous power in the activity of writing, a power
which they would rather not grant them consciously. A dominant belief about language
and writing that has informed such writing rests on the view that language is derivative.
Derrida’s argument that writing has always been viewed as secondary to speech arises
from his reading of some of the most important thinkers of the western tradition who
betrayed such a belief about writing, primarily with respect to speech. Writing wsts-thus
seen to be twice removed, a representation (of speech) which itself is a representation of
eSS Working Papers/Wriling of Social Sciences
ideas/thought. Being thus removed, writing was viewed with a great degree of suspicion,
a suspicion which Derrida well recovers under the term ‘metaphysics of presence’.
The sciences, both natural and social, join hands in negating the power of writing
and the ways by which writing co-constitutes their epistemology and ontology. By using
writing as entirely derivative of either speech or intellect or representing a reality of
nature or society they are only doing disservice to the ways by which writing is used and
can be used more effectively. This suspicion of writing has its seeds in the suspicion of
language itself. The inherent tension between language and reality arises from the simple
observation that both of them seem to be distinctly two different kinds of entities. Reality
of the world or society has to do with some notion of concrete reality. Whereas language,
in spite of some theories that posit reality to language, is dominantly seen to be about
reality and in itself does not constitute the real in the way objects do. And if reality and
its faithful description becomes the concern for the sciences, then language has to be
constantly questioned and regulated. This is a fair enough strategy if language indeed is
the way it is commonly thought to be. However, there are enough reasons to question this
naive view of language.
Ironically, I believe that the natural sciences, in spite of their suspicion towards
natural languages, have actually engaged with language in much more complex ways as
compared to other disciplines. The emphasis on multisemiotic systems is one such
manifestation. Whereas, social sciences, in their mainstream version, having appropriated
the metaphysics of writing from the natural sciences, are still stuck with problematic
conceptions of language. Ironically, they have not found ways to engage with language
like the natural sciences have. Not only did the social sciences first appropriate styles of
writing but later on they also appropriated the use of mathematics without worrying about
why such linguistic turns were adopted in the natural sciences in the first place. For
example, would the social scientists accept a variation of the statement that nature is
written in the language of mathematics to say that society is written in the language of
mathematics?
Thus, social science has lost out significantly in these appropriations. The natural
sciences moved to a richer engagement with language suitable for their needs. What
social sciences should do is to introspect on similar lines to discover the appropriate
engagement with language that they need to have. Neither the academic style nor the
blind use of mathematics is going to do the job. The first engagement that the social
sciences have to do with language is to go back to the origins. Going back to the origins
is to reconsider the intrinsic relation between literature and the social sciences.
How do we recapture the literary in the social sciences? One way to do this is to
be very conscious of the mechanics of writing. This also means to resist the usual modes
of communication, those that have been validated as academic writing. However
important this writing is, the point that we need to remember here is that there has to be
self-conscious awareness on why the social sciences need to be written in that manner
and what such writing does to the content of the disciplines.
The engagement with the literary within the sciences is not new. One particular
engagement is the writing of popular science. But the challenge posed to the academic
community is whether it is possible to have serious, rigorous analysis in written styles
that seem a little less constructed and constricted. After all, one could argue that much of
what is written about in the social science, in contrast to the natural sciences, engages
eSS Working Papers/Writing of Social Sciences
with human lives and such lives are not to be written about entirely as objects of the
world such as the sun and the moon. Doing sociology, writing sociology, is to somehow
engage with the subjects of the discourse, to give voice to these subjects. It perforce
means that our writing should be sensitive to these voices. Literature does this admirably
well in one way. Social science can still see itself as a science but that does not mean that
it can without question make its writing scientific. It does not also not have to make its
writing entirely literary. The challenge thus is to find expressions of literary social
sciences, where there are some elements of the discourse of the natural sciences as well
as some from the literary discourse.
The following series of articles is one attempt to find a different voice to talk
about some important themes in social science. They were pieces submitted as part of an
assignment for a graduate level course which I taught on ‘The Nature and Practice of
Thinking’ at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. As part of this
course, we studied different writing styles ranging from poetry to critical essays. The
literary style in which these particular pieces are written are inspired from the New
Yorker ‘style’. As part of the course, we studied articles from the New Yorker to see what
makes their style seem somehow distinct from other writings on similar topics. There are,
of course, no clear rules which informs us that the New Yorker wants its pieces written in
particular styles but as careful readers we can see the patterns that emerge in such close
reading.
Based on this exercise, I asked the PhD students to write about a theme of their
work in this style or in a style that is somehow inspired by it. The following four pieces
were chosen finally for this section in the esocialsciences. Each of them deals with an
interesting theme ranging from tribal art and the current fascination with it in the
international art market, the impact of IT service industry traced through the story of an
individual going for an interview, the impact of rain in a desert - not necessarily all that
welcome, and a dilemma posed by one disciple of Kant to him about morality and the
difficulty in relating individual decision to larger philosophical theories on morality.
These pieces have been edited and reworked more than once in order to conform to some
common stylistic standard. We hope that such writing will be taken up with enthusiasm
by other students as well as professionals. It is social science as a discipline which will be
enriched by being self-conscious about writing and being open to experiments in writing
styles to communicate/express/create new ideas in these disciplines.
1 For more on this, see Sarukkai, S. Translating the World: Science and Language. Lanham: University
Press of America, 2002.
" Scientists such as Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Feynman and others have often voiced this view.
See Translating the World: Science and Language, op cit.
IV See W. Lepenies. Between Literature and Science: The Rise ofSociology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
v Halliday, M. A. K. “On the language of physical science.” In Registers of Written English, ed. M.
Ghadessy. London: Pinter Publishers, 1988.
eSS Working Papers/Writing of Social Sciences
The Economist August 15th 2009
illO
68
and a can of beer. Often she continued to
lurk, roiling the mud to conceal herself and
basking in her own scaled beauty, as carp
will. On hot days she would rise to the sur
face, glowing and tantalising, with a lily
leaf shading her like a parasol. She played
hard-to-get, or the One That Got Away,
nudging the line before drifting down to
wards the dark serene. But then, just for the
hell of it, she would take the bait.
The first hookings hurt like hell, the
whole weight of her body tearing her ton
gue like a razor blade. But over the years
she got used to it, and her leathery mouth
would seize the bait as a prize. Hauled to
the limelight, she was admirably un
phased. This was, after all, the homage
beauty was owed. She would submit to
the scales and then pose for the photogra
pher, unmoving, holding her breath. She
had her picture taken with Tony, owner of
her lake, who confessed to the Wall Street
Journal that he had “quite a rapport” with
her; with Ray, who caught her at two in the
morning, disturbing her beauty sleep; with
Matt, of the shy smile and the woolly hat;
with bearded Kyle, for whom she looked
especially dark and pouting; and with
Steve, who ungallantly told Peterborough
Today that she felt like “a sack of potatoes”
and was “available to everyone”. She was
not, but at least 50 others held her, or
gripped her, for a moment or so. Uncom
plainingly, she nestled in their arms before
she was lowered to her element again.
These men had a knowledgeable air
Benson, England’s best-loved fish, died on July 29th, aged about 25
perfect
as
if
they
had
been
painted
about
them. They might have been a secret
.
TJ ETERBOROUGH, in the English Mid- were asp----------- society, meeting at odd hours in hidden
on.
Some
wag
had
named
her
after
a
small
Jt lands, is a red-brick town, best known
nooks around the lake. Each had his spot
as the midway point on the line between black hole in her dorsal fin which looked, for anoracked meditation. When they
to
him,
like
a
cigarette
burn.
It
was
as
beau
King’s Cross and York. But from the bottom
spoke, it was of wagglers and clips, spods
of Kingfisher Lake, just outside it, urban tiful and distinctive as a mole on an 18th- and backbiters, size 14s and number 8 elas
century
belle.
Her
lips
were
full,
sultry
or
toil seems far away. There, all is most de—~ —
lightful silt and slime. A push of your prob- sulking, her expression unblinking, she tic. Dates and weights were bandied
seldom
reeds
held fond
jni> nose sends up puffs and clouds of fine "
,J— smiled/Yet
v“’ the "*
e'k hp,ri
fnnd about, an arcane code. For a while. Benson
imbibed the philosophy of a gaudier and
memories
of
her
friend
Hedges,
her
comj through the water. A riff of bubbles -------------. more complex sphere, heard the tinny mu
ioes,
silvery,
towards
the
surface.
The
panion
in
slinky
swimming
until
she,
iu>es
towaras me surrace. me pcuuuu m auimj
— --- —» or sic of their radios andstaredinto the dazzle
green reeds quiver, and sunlight ripples he, was carried away in 1998 by the waters
of the day. There
•
* depths
’ ■’ where
’-------------- -was
- — much that she herself
ofNene.
the River Nene.
down
almost
to the
youthe
areRiver
Abandoned, she ate more. She de- mighthave imparted^of^ejnysUjyj^f relurking, plump and still.
fleeted and inverted things. But her anglers
Such was mostly the life, and such was voured everything. Worms, plankton,
the^addresT "of Benson, England’s most crayfish, lily roots, disappeared downier needed to get home to the football and
capacious throat. Shej was a one- the r tea.
famous fish. Her actual place of birth, as a toothed,
!
* motoring
- through
«
« the foodfish
Hoover,
wriggling, transparent fry prey to every
packed
sludge
and
through
rich
layers of Thefatalnut
frog, pike and heron, was never known. x
offered Greed probably undid her in the end. She
________
”
■
’
j
was
But at ten, when she was stocked in King- sedimentary smells. But she
was said to have taken a bait of uncooked
fisher, she was already a bruiser. And there, daintier and more exotic fare. Cubes of tiger
nuts, which swelled inside her until
cheese,
scraps
of
luncheon
meat,
bread
among the willow-shaded banks, she
she floated upwards. Telltale empty paper
grew. And grew. At her peak weight, in crusts, Peperami, dog biscuits and tutti- bags were found on the bank of the river.
2006, she was 641b 2oz (29kg), and was al frutti balls all came down invitingly Or she may have been pregnant, with
most circular, like a puffed-up plaice. Big through the water. She sampled most of 300,000 eggs causing complications, or
ger ncerb7t7hest7ulmounte7toa^
carp have been seen in Thailand and in ‘^Of course, she was not fool enough to stressed
stressed after
after so
so much catching and releasFrance; but she still amounted to a lot of gepfish
think they came from heaven. Carp are ing, those constant brushes with exun
filteInfish.
her glory days she reminded some of cunning, a very fox of the river, as Izaak tionJ3n theline
Marilyn Monroe, others of Raquel Welch.
She was lither than either as she cruised
through the water-weed, a lazy twist of Bert, or Mike, or Stan, spending an idle like Wisdom drawn up from thedeep, as
gold. Her gleaming scales, said one fan, Sunday away from the wife with a brolly golden, and as quiet. ■
Benson
It.
1
•
-1- -J
W
'
. v ..w. . —
------------------
■
i
The Offshored World
Sahana Udupa*
There has been a clear change in the cultural milieu of the IT city Bangalore in the last
few years. And while this may not be only due to the call centres that have sprouted
providing high-paying jobs to thousands ofyoung people, they are certainly a significant
influence.
*School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Science, Bangalore. Email:
sahana udupal@vahoo.co.in
*
It is one of those cool mornings in the IT city of Bangalore. On the sprawling Palace
Grounds, located in the heart of the city, more than 2000 young men and women have
gathered. With colourful files clutched safely in their palms, the young men and women
have formed long queues in front of make-shift cardboard tents. They call the tents
‘pavilions’. On this day, there are two large pavilions separated by a carpet-laden
pathway. The right pavilion displays a bold placard saying, “IT”. The left pavilion is
named “ITES”. The teeming adolescents outside these pavilions are buying tickets to
gain entry into the pavilions. The entry fee is an affordable 30 Indian rupees.
The Palace Grounds is the permanent venue for the prestigious IT dotcom festival
that showcases and flaunts Bangalore’s global IT success. However, this event is
different from IT dotcom. Titled “
‘Career Expo’, it is an event that aims to attract, locate and recruit deserving
graduates from the surrounding colleges for thousands of vacancies waiting to be filled
up both in Information Technology and Information Technology Enabled Services
industries. “It is a job fair,” declares an organizer.
Abbas, a sturdy man in his late 20s, is standing in one of the serpentine queues,
waiting for his turn to buy the entry ticket. With a leather bag held firmly in his hands,
Abbas looks especially business-like today. His clean-shaven cheeks sport a smile once
in a while. His eyes speak of some eagerness. Every move he makes in the 7-inch circle
of his existence in the rushing queue, declares this enthusiasm. He is sure of getting a job
today. After all, there are so many jobs in the offing. He does not understand why people
around him look so anxious. Patting the back of a little chap in front of him who fumbles
with the currency notes at the counter, Abbas exclaims, “Long live Uncle Sam, the
provider of all our jobs!”
Though it is still ten in the morning, Snehalatha finds it hard to sleep. Her pick-up vehicle
is going to arrive at noon. She can certainly afford to sleep for another hour. She knows
she has to sleep for another hour. For, she is not sure how long her working day/night
would be. Her shift begins at two in the afternoon and stretches well into the wee hours of
the next day. The traffic on the narrow lane sliding along the compound wall of her little
house is maddening. Her house is located in Thyagarajnagar, a lower-middle class
neighbourhood barely five miles from the central business district. The shanty houses
perched on the sides of the narrow lane almost fall on the bitumen coated tarred roads.
Cement sheets are drawn across the roofs of some houses, while most others — the
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Social Sciences
February 2007
wealthier ones - have thick concrete canopies. Snehalatha’s house is one of the wealthier
ones.
The two-bedroom house uses every inch of the space allotted by the civic
authority. There is barely any room between the main door and the compound wall. The
floor inside is red, the walls are faint yellow. Snehalatha’s room is on the left of the
drawing room, overlooking the lane. She hates to sleep in this room. It is bright and
noisy. The sun disdainfully enters her room as early as 7 in the morning. “How unfair,”
Sneha grumbles. “Only if sun wakes up after I do! I cannot sleep if it is too sunny. I draw
the blinds and plug every hole that gets the sun into my bed. But the sun is notorious.
Maybe I am asking for too much, sun cannot wait till 12 anyways!”
She cannot sleep in the other bedroom either. Though it is darker, her little sister
and mother sleep in that room. Her father sleeps in the living room. They are all up and
ready to go to work. Sneha’s father does some menial jobs in a nearby factory. Her
mother is a schoolteacher. Her sister is still a college student. The family income had till
recently been relying heavily on her mother. For all practical purposes, she was the
matriarch of the family.
The family dynamics changed two years ago, when Sneha picked up a job in a
call centre. Her income overshot everyone else’s. The tens gave way to thousands. The
pay packet exceeded the limits of their very imagination. It became hard to disobey
Sneha, leave alone ignoring her wishes.
Abbas knows the benefits of a call centre job. It will bring him wades of currency notes
to splurge with, loads of cigars to smoke away, and the hunky looking teens to brush his
body and spirit. He only has to strike the right deal with the right company. “I know what
I want,” he says assuredly.
There is a sense of urgency around Abbas. People are hurriedly buying the tickets,
rushing into the transient tents of different IT and ITES companies, and making enquiries
feverishly. The representatives of the companies are zipping away the forms, beckoning
the bright bachelors. “Its going out of control,” gasps a woman. Her lipstick is fading
with exhaustion; sweat trickling down her greasy chin. The loose T-shirt, displaying the
name of the company she works for, is sticking to her sweaty bosom. Some bright
bachelors cannot help breeze their eyes through it. “Am I qualified, I have a bachelors in
arts,” screeches a tiny woman. “What’s the kind of work? Should I take calls?” asks a
bespectacled boy.
Their voices are hardly audible in the cacophony of myriad sounds leaking out of
the surrounding cubicles. The sounds are loud invitations to the gathered youth - the
loudest of all could be the winner. As though to mask the crunching competition between
them, companies have put up game shows with a lure of expensive prizes to attract
aspiring candidates towards them. America Online has begun a quiz contest. One of their
representatives shouts the questions in the mike and guarantees the winners a profitable
journey with AOL. A rival company has an elegant mirror hung on the walls of its stall
with writing above it saying, “The most wanted candidate”. The stalls, painted in bright
colours, proudly display the company logos. There are attractions galore. Each stall is
unique in its own right. Each has its agenda clearly set out. Each needs the best of all
candidates.
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Sd&ial Sciences
February 2007
Abbas has weighed his options carefully. He is inching towards ‘Divergys’, a
Bangalore based call centre mostly serving clients in the US and the UK. Abbas knows
nothing about their clients or about their official paraphernalia. “I have a gut feeling that
this is the right company,” he murmurs. A heavyset woman with a face round and clear,
and hair reaching only her shoulders, hands out a long book to Abbas. “Write your name
and address,” she orders mechanically. There are several candidates writing their names
carefully on the long book. Abbas strikes conversation with one of the lankier chaps and
boasts about his bright prospects. The lanky chap doesn’t look happy. “I was rejected by
ICICI One Source,” he says dejectedly. “They said I have a strong MTI.”
Mother Tongue Influence - or MTI as is commonly referred to in voice-based
BPO industries - is an irritating obstacle to most Indians. Their English accent bears a
‘pungent odour’ of their native languages. There are 27 official languages in India with
more than 135 dialects. English is mostly taught as a second language. Even when the
medium of instruction is English, most students catch the MTI virus unknowingly. In
other industries, perhaps, this is not a grave defect. In voice-based BPO industry, it
certainly is. Indian call centre workers should be able to effectively converse with
American callers. Their accent, diction, pace and intonation should resemble, if not
completely match, their American clients. Call centre companies are undoubtedly worried
about MTI. The available pool of candidates shrinks further with the ubiquitous pest of
MTI. As the available pool is limited, companies do not look for a complete MTI-free
English. They are content with curable accents. Companies design and deploy elaborate
training programs to do away with MTI, some have employed neurologists to tackle the
‘MTI menace’. “People in India unconsciously translate everything from their genetic
language to mother tongue to English. This creates a neurological block that creates
problems in his work in the call centre. This may be in terms of how he talks, how he
deals with the customer. I know of a Malayalam speaker (a South Indian language). He
thinks in his genetic language. The muscle control for each language is different, the
movements that control speech pattern, from the lungs to the tongue and mouth are
determined by your genetic language,” explains Dr.Topaz, consultant neurologist and
psychiatrist at America Online’s Bangalore call centre. “Language ability is genetically
influenced,” he asserts. At AOL, he remedies this deficiency by ‘restoring’ neural
connectivity to make the muscles (for speech) respond to the brain.
Abbas too is concerned about his MTI. He is tensed about what he perceives to be
recognizable MTI in his speech. He is well trained in Arabic, but does not want to recall
it now. “I don’t want to learn too much Arabic. Because my English accent gets affected.
I will be kicked out of call centres if I allow it to happen,” he says anxiously. To his
shock, inside the stall of Divergys, many candidates were being sent back on the grounds
of irrecoverable MTI. He would not want to miss the precious opportunity of getting into
a multinational company, especially after waiting for well over 45 minutes amidst
swarming rush of people, bearing their breath and sweat. He says he has his fingers
crossed.
It is an easy sail for Abbas in the first three rounds of filtering. In the first round, a
Divergys representative - with an air of careful indifference about her - asks people with
less than 15 years of formal education to leave the tent. About five young men and
women walk out immediately. This condition is non-negotiable. Abbas has no problems
with this. In fact his problem is of a different kind. “I think I am overqualified for a call
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Si^ial Sciences
February 2007
centre job. I have an MBA. I am not displaying my MBA certificate. They may think I
am overqualified and send me away. I will show certificates only up to my undergraduate
degree,” he reveals. Abbas knows the rule of the game. He has approached at least 3
companies before deciding to come to the job fair. “I am now a veteran job hunter!” he
brags.
The second round turns out to be equally plain sailing. The lady wants to know
why the bright young men and women gathered in the tent want to join a call centre. The
bespectacled, school-boyish guy next to Abbas rehearses his lines before the lady arrives
before him. As soon as she comes, he blurts, “I want to join a call centre because it is a
good stop-gap arrangement.” The lady is not amused. In fact she looks annoyed.
Call centre companies in India spend huge sums of money to train the new
recruits and finally assimilate them into the process mode. “It is an immense
responsibility. The company takes care of the employees from recruitment to retirement.
From cradle to grave,” slates Sriharsha Achar, Director of Human Resources Department
at AOL Bangalore. On an average, companies spend nearly $2000 on every employee for
hiring, induction and training. If an employee stays with the company for 270 days, all
the money spent on training and induction is recovered. If thq stay is shorter than 9
months, the company fails to achieve ROI - return on investment. “The industry is
‘facing a lot of flux’. Il is a challenge for every company to increase the longevity of
employees in the organization,” explains Achar. Attrition in some call centres has
reached 100 percent. It is sometimes called revolving-door-attrition.
The bespectacled guy next to Abbas certainly didn’t stand a chance. Call centres
do not need people who would see it as just a stopgap arrangement. Although most of the
candidates who approach them do indeed think of it as a temporary arrangement, not
many would be as tactless as to declare it before the hiring authority. Abbas prides about
his knowledge on the industry. He should never disclose his true intentions. When the
lady approached Abbas, he is ready with a correct response. Not surprisingly, he is
cleared for the next round.
By now the tent looks half empty. Most of them have either given a wrong reply to the
lady’s probing questions or have had a degree in engineering. Engineering degree holders
are often turned away, as the call centres suspect them to not stay beyond a month or two.
Abbas neither has an engineering degree - for all practical purposes he is only an
undergraduate — nor is he tactless. He is qualified to read a paragraph before the company
representatives in the third round of filtering. This round will crudely assess the
pronunciation potential of job aspirants - whether they can be moulded to ‘neutralized
accent’ at all. Despite his anxieties, Abbas clears the round.
Abbas, along with 10 others, is now the hunted few. They are made to stand at the
comer of the stall, while a new batch of about 40 people rush into the Divergys tent to get
filtered in. The hunted few should now be ferried to Divergys head quarters in South
Bangalore, the hotbed of all IT activities. They should undergo more rounds of filtering,
although most of them are clueless about what it would entail. They are quickly whisked
away in a luxurious jeep, lest the chosen few get tempted to take interviews with other
companies in the job fair.
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Social Sciences
February 2007
The distance between Palace Grounds and Divergys head quarters is hardly 9 miles. But
it takes not less than one hour in car even during the off-peak hours. The exploding
vehicular count has lent the narrow, circular roads of the city almost incompetent.
Bangalore has abruptly burgeoned into a global IT city. “Bangalore is bursting at its
seams,” warn a number of local newspapers.
It is the fifth largest city in India and the fastest growing city in Asia. Its
population has increased by 61% in the last decade. With 6.5 million people, Bangalore is
buckling under the weight of its fledging population. The number of motor vehicles
plying on the roads of Bangalore has increased from 0.2 million to 2.4 million in the last
two decades There are 1.5 million two wheelers and 0.3 million cars. These figures do
not include the floating vehicle population. About 88% of Bangalore’s vehicles are
personally owned. Most ‘Bangaloreans’, especially the white-collar crowd, sees public
transport system as largely unreliable. Every working day, around 900 new vehicles get
registered in the city.
The road length of 4200 km in Bangalore and its immediate suburbs has proven to
be
be grossly inadequate for the exploding vehicular numbers. Ihdian Roads Congress
recognizes that the width of most of the roads in Bangalore is ineffective to accommodate
such a large number of vehicles. Despite the hardship, people from all over the country
continue to migrate to Bangalore seeking jobs mostly in IT and ITES industries.
“Bangalore has seen a revolution,” announces Kiran Karnik at a well-attended public
program on the campus of the city-based Indian Institute of Science. New factories of
knowledge industry have come up all over India. These are high tech industries. The
change is visible.”
. T
According to NASSCOM, apex body for IT industries in India, the software
services industry in India has grown rapidly from small beginnings in the 1980’s to
generate total earnings of 13.5 billion dollars in 2004-05. The industry was growing at an
annual rate of 50% during the 1990s, and since 1999-2000 the growth rate has been
around 28% per annum. Riding on the software industry’s success, IT enabled services
entered India more recently and has become the new high growth industry. It has seen
50% growth rate in the recent years, generating export revenues of 4.6 billion dollars in
2004-05 and employment for about 300,000 people.
While the domestic market for IT services and ITES is also expanding, IT-11 ES
remains primarily an export-oriented industry, with export earnings accounting for about
64% of the total IT sector earnings of 28.4 billion dollars. In 2001, software services
exports constituted 14 percent of India’s total export earnings, and by 2005 gross
revenues from IT services accounted for 3.3 percent of the gross domestic product.
According to NASSCOM-McKinsey report, India now accounts for 65% of the global
market for offshore IT services and 46% of global business process offshoring.
Bangalore is the greatest beneficiary of IT revolution. It can even be regarded as
the cradle of India’s tryst with global capitalism. There are roughly 1200 IT companies
operating out of Bangalore. According to state owned Software Technologies Park of
India, IT and ITES companies in Bangalore have directly employed more than 250,000
people.
eSS forking Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Serial Sciences
February 2007
Bangalore's USS 47.2 billion economy makes it a major economic centre in India.
Indeed, Bangalore is India's fourth largest and fastest growing market. Bangalore's per
capita income of USS 6,460 is the highest for any Indian city. As of 2001 Bangalore's
share of USS 3.7 billion in foreign direct investment was the third highest for an Indian
city.
The key to IT success is its round-the-clock servicing. “We are a 24/7 industry.
When the world sleeps, India wakes up,” describes Achar. India is midnight’s own child.
“Sleep,” yawns Snehalatha. “I have forgotten what it means to sleep peacefully, she
complains to a colleague. Before she could have her ‘full sleep till 12, Sneha had
received a call on her cell phone asking her to leave immediately. Fresh candidates are
coming in by the dozen; they need to be interviewed quickly. Tucking her formal shirt
inside smooth silk trousers, she walks past the reception hall. There are an unusually
large number of candidates in the lounge today. Sneha’s company, like most other ITES
companies in Bangalore, throw open walk-in interviews all round the week. People can
walk in on any working day, get themselves interviewed and get recruited on the same
day. The demand for manpower has extinguished pre-interview formalities. One of
Sneha’s many responsibilities is to interview and conduct tests for such candidates. It s
going to be a long day,” she laments.
The high ceiling of the reception lounge resembles a star hotel. The gleaming
floor reflects the images of people and plank, almost perfectly. While entering the gate,
Abbas had noticed the carefully manicured lawns of Divergys. They had for once made
Abbas forget the tedious drive from Palace Grounds. The glowing campus had pushed
back the horrors of pot-holed roads and smoky skies. Abbas cannot help but admire the
opulence of the interiors. The clean cut furniture flaunts statues at the corners, the glass
table in the middle provides all the newspapers that you can think of, the coffee machine
is free for all, paper napkins are no longer a luxury. He cannot keep his eyes off the sheer
beauty of the front office. There are only three hurdles between him and the luxury of
Divergys.
The common test has questions from low-end math, English grammar and English
comprehension. They are also asked to write a 100 worded essay on “Is Science a boon
or a curse?” The final round has taped calls of American clients. Abbas is expected to
listen to these calls carefully, and tick the right responses on the monitors of plush
computer systems. This is not as easy as he expected it to be. He strains his ears to
comprehend the accent of American callers. Much before listening to these taped calls, he
is asked to identify himself with one of the five ethnic groups - White/Caucasian,
Black/African, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American. He does not know half of them he knows white but what is Caucasian? He has just a faint idea about Hispanic — some
exotic tribe?!. Well, he knows he is an Asian. But till now he had believed it to be only a
continent. Now he knows it is also an ethnic group.
He finds some questions quite tricky. “What would you do if the customer uses
offensive language?” Of the four options - disconnect, transfer the call to the manager,
and wait for him to cool down, paraphrase and empathize - something in his gut hints
that ‘empathizing’ is politically correct. Empathy means a lot of goodness after all. He
ticks it and proceeds. In the end, he gets his first lessons on customer satisfaction.
eSS forking Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Social Sciences
February 2007
“Attempt to resolve customer issues as effectively as possible, try to retain customers and
ensure their satisfaction, provide customers with the most accurate and relevant
information available, attempt to sell products and services that meet specific needs of the
customer.” He reads them half-heartedly.
It is only 30 minutes before he receives the results. He has passed the test! But he
has to wait for another 40 minutes to meet the HR representatives and take two more
rounds of final interview. The deal will be clinched only in these rounds. He has to
showcase his certificates, sell his skills and bargain hard for a right salary. All these can
happen only after seven in the evening. The weighty watch carelessly drooping down
from his hairy wrist is showing six pm. At the reception lounge, there are still more than
40 people. Some are yet to take the tests; some are waiting for the HR guys to take them
into closeted rooms for final rounds of negotiation. There is a sudden rush of people
coming out from inside - most of them are adolescents in their glitzy western outfits.
High heeled and low collared. Trousers hugging the hips tightly. Hair-do vaunting the
latest trend. Men have their shirts unbuttoned deep down the chest. Heavyset pendants
brazenly dangle on some of them. They chew gum and smile generously. There is a
peculiar sway when they walk.
Abbas is thrilled at seeing them. He does not want to read too much in their tired
faces. He deliberately overlooks the strains on their exhausted bodies. He is happy to
notice the hip-hop outfits and the gum that speaks of irreverence. A guy next to him looks
at him smilingly. “Are you joining Divergys?,” he asks. “There are all kinds of people
here. There are people from army, medicine and all spheres of life. You will enjoy. The
only problem is night shifts.” Abbas is listening. “Divergys is the best. People from other
call centres come here. Here growth is very fast. You can easily move up the ladder. If
you like call centres, you enjoy this work.” Abbas is more excited.
He sees girls in traditional Indian outfit waiting meekly in the reception lounge
for their turn. “Look at that girl. She is so sober. Let her join a call centre and work for
some time. She will explode!! She Will begin to sport snazzy clothes and long earrings.
They enter like Gandhis and come out like Hitlers!” Abbas believes call centres are a big
bash. They are loud and bold.
Sociologists in Bangalore studying call centres notice a clear change in the cultural
milieu of the city. Although this is not confined only to call centres, the change is more
visible in these sites than elsewhere. “There is a general impression that because call
centre workers are talking to Americans all the time, they tend to adopt that culture. Call
centre workers are said to drink, smoke, take drugs, date and even have numerous sexual
affairs. This category of service workers may be able to pursue the new consumerist
lifestyle of the urban youth to a greater extent than most others in their age group, due to
their higher incomes,” says a recent sociological study on IT and ITES industries
conducted by National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore. “One finds many call
centre agents sporting the emblems of the new global youth culture such as piercings,
tattoos and collared hair,” states Dr Carol Upadhya, the principal researcher of the
project.
Local newspapers run regular stories on call centre lifestyles, including lurid
details such as office toilets getting clogged by condoms. Some companies have now
officially banned drugs and sexual activities, and have begun to enforce it strictly.
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Styial Sciences
February 2007
•»
Conference rooms are locked up in the night, common aisles and work stations have
hidden cameras. “The emergence of a westernized youth subculture within BPO
companies has earned the industry a rather negative reputation among many middle class
Indians,” Dr Upadhya points out.
Many parents are offended by the sheer sight of hep call centres. Recounting his
experience of seeing the call centre where his son is employed, Narasimha Murthy
exclaims, “The building is good, the facilities given to employees are nice. But I never
felt it was India. I could not see India there. 10 percent, maybe 25 percent is Indian, 75
percent is American. People were moving around frantically. The way ladies were
behaving...The party mood out there was not similar to festival mood in India. What
dance, what jumping, what cigarette smoking Abbabba\ Many countries attacked
Indian culture several times in the past. But our culture didn’t change. But if the entire
generation undergoes a cultural change, what will happen to our culture? Their way of
life is more towards foreign culture. The music they listen to is western. If this goes on,
will not our culture get washed away?”
This is exactly the problem of Snehalatha’s mother. In traditional Hindu families, girls
get married in their early 20s. When the girl’s age slips past 25, parents begin to get
anxious. Sneha is now 29 and well past the marriageable age. “Who will want to marry a
call centre girl? What should the husband do if his wife goes away to work in the night?
I don’t understand why Sneha should continue working in call centres. What is she
achieving by working? Age waits for none. Why doesn’t she understand? No husband
will tolerate his wife leaving home in the middle of the night. There are so many
proposals for Sneha. But she is adamant about her stupid call centre job. Of course she
earns money, but what good is money if you cannot have a decent married life?” Sneha’s
mother loses temper more frequently these days. Sneha is the eldest of three daughters.
Her second daughter, though younger to Sneha, is married and ‘settled’. But, it is hard to
disobey Sneha. She earns well and supports the family.
Her mother’s ruffled hair sweeps past Sneha’s mind for a second. But it is not the
time to worry about her marital status. She has a new candidate coming. She has to check
if the guy really sticks to the job, whether he is worth the trouble of expensive training.
Abbas knocks at the door and enters the room humbly. The lady on the chair is
young, not a particularly pleasing figure, dark skinned and too thin for his taste. Her hair
is chemically straightened, an easy guess! Abbas doesn’t want any of these impressions
to escape into his face. He smiles carefully and sits on the chair she points towards.
Sneha wants to finish the interview soon. She has at least 15 more candidates to
interview. The guy on the opposite chair is bulky but handsome, and his name, as she
reads it on the certificate, is Abbas.
“Quickly run through your background and tell me why you want to be in a call centre,”
says Sneha. “I have my degree in commerce. I was in Dubai till recently. I have shifted to
Bangalore because my father is unwell. I should look after him. I need to earn well. Call
centres are the perfect place for me to work,” Abbas recites his rehearsed lines.
“Working in the night is a very different experience. You may have to start your work in
the mid night and go on till early morning. Are you okay with it?” Sneha asks.
“Okay.”
“Are you sure? How long do you think you can work on night shifts?”
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Serial Sciences
February 2007
“At least two years.”
“Why call centres?”
, T j
. .1,
ttc
“I like talking. If I can talk to Arabs and convince them, why can t I do it to these Ub
OI ”
“You seem to be beguiled by the call centres. But what do you think are the challenges?
“Night shifts are the biggest challenge. Bur I know I will manage. I am confidant ot
getting promoted to higher positions. Night shifts will reduce when you move up the
ladder!”
“So you expect growth?”
t4Yes I do
•
“Your thinking seems to be deep and profound. But do you know what kind of a job we
do?”
“I don’t know much about what you do.”
“As a customer care representative, you take customer calls and attend to their pro ems
relating to Microsoft products. You don’t solve the problem. Though the solution to their
problem is very simple, you will never say that. You will be tempted to give out the
solution. It will be very obvious to you. But you should never give the solution ngh
away. Instead you have to transfer the call to the concerned technical division.”
“Hmm”
,
.
, , .
“Apart from the HR pay package, there will be lots of awards. They are not in cash, but
in kind. We have Microsoft products and many goods to win. We have contests every
month. So, there are lots of awards to win. Should sound good to you.. .hey! 1”
“Isn’t accent a problem?”
.
“You need not have a twang. You need not have to drool. Your accent is fine. But we
will tweak it a bit during the training. Of course, despite all the efforts we can never
speak like an American. But as you can notice, I pronounce some words as they do. It is
all about saying words in a way they can understand. Thanks to the British Raj, we are
able to speak Oxford English. But believe me, you are going to lose all that once you are
here! You will take over American accent!”
Large call centres in India are known for their expensive awards. Most companies have a
‘Rewards and Recognition’ department. This department designs and runs various
contests and incentive systems. One large company has spent 200,000 dollars on rewards
alone. There are various awards given out - ‘best coach’, ‘best leader , best manager ,
‘consultant of the year’. Some have attractive titles - ‘Roaring Tiger’ and so on. Colour
television sets, DVD players, caps, T-shirts, cell phones, washing machines and
numerous other consumer goods are handed out to workers who take maximum calls or
have made maximum sales in a month. One company sends its top 2 percent of
performers on a Mediterranean cruise. Some companies even have a CFO - Chief Fun
Officer.
.
,
.
,
“As Maslow recognizes a ‘hierarchy of needs’, in ‘reality’, people are driven by
different motives at different points of time. The primary drives for any employee would
be respect, opportunity, development and money,” explains Achar. The rewards and
recognition scheme is geared to meet these needs.
Sociologists in Bangalore view them differently. Deliberately constructed fun
atmosphere and rewards are strategies to divert the attention of workers from the
eSS forking Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Styial Sciences
February 2007
monotony of work and arrest high attrition levels. “In order to defleet attention away
from the^ monotony of work, the extremely rigid and structured techniques of d
control and the stress caused by working on night shifts, and also as a retention strategy,
BPO comp^ie^J offe“ comfortable, ‘fiin’ and even ‘hip’ working environments,
contends Dr.Upadhya. “To break the monotony of work, theret areevents snehast dressing
davs when everyone has to come wearing a certain colour or type of dress, iv y
k
both Indian and foreign are celebrated with elaborate decorations, rituals an
™“es 6ne ni^t when we we^ Observing work on the floor at a call centre, h^happened
to be Halloween and someone dressed as the Grim Reaper came through the floors
entertain the workers.”
These efforts are designed to obfuscate the ordeal of incessant call taking, a
round-the-clock monitoring and nerve wrecking pressure to sell company s goods to
callers Critical organizational researchers point out that these companies emp_oy
nanoptical modes of control. There are automated systems of complex tracking toois tha
continually monitor the flow of calls, the time taken on each call and effectivenessi of t
cafl in terms of delivering the message of the company. Managers and team leaders
constantly keep an eye on the workers working below them. Apart from quantita ive
measures quality of work performed is tracked and evaluated. These assessments are fed
into the performance appraisal process. Remote
Xr^e
call of an agent without his/her knowledge and evaluating it There are separate
departments to perform remote monitoring. Competition is triggered between workers by
variouTtechnologies. They are made to surpass each other to win attractive prizes. Call
centre floor is a hot furnace.
Abbas could not have wished for a better interview. All went perfectly well.^‘‘These
buggers don’t like confident people like us. They need submissive
types, he
whispers. A management consultant’s advice turned out to be particularly handy - HR
departments will encourage us to seek people who have a strong sense of purpose and
career. Be careful. Often stamina and low ambition might be ^more appropna e
characteristics than attributes that might indicate a potential high-flyer.
Everything is working the way he had hoped to. He is now comfortable with his
accent, diction and intonation. After all there are people far inf^0\'°
thick mother tongue influence. “If MTIs can munch sandwiches in the cal centre
canteen why cannot I? The well-weller-wellest person has also passed the test. 1 canno
bXve ifl I peeped into his monitor during the test. This guy had written weller and
wellest for the comparative and superlative for well!”
cnphalAtha
But he has no reason to complain. The job offer letter, duly signed by Snehala ha
and other authorities, is in his hand. There are still so many people waiting to pass the
hurdles that he so successfully overcame. Should he not encourage them? The jot. s^very
good for you. You will enjoy yourself. You can be what you are and enjoy life in a call
centre. They are all light hearted people. It is very entertaining. It s not very serious.
India currently has a large number of Abbases. They are smart, perseverant, determined
and ready to take on the world. Not just the English accent but their ^ selves are
trainable As NASSCOM notes: “India has the largest English-speaking talent pool in the
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-Literary Stffal Sciences
February 2007
world - over 440,000 engineering degree and diploma holders, approximately 2.3 million
other (arts, commerce and science) graduates and 300 000 post-graduates> are added eac
year.” The industry is also gearing up for possible future shortage of sk lied workers^
Higher education is being increasingly tailored to suit the needs of IT and ITES
industries. The recent NASSCOM-McKinsey Report paints a giowmg, pietoe of future
India The offshore IT-BPO segment has the capability to generate 60 billion US dollars
revenue in the next five years. This would translate into a GDP growth of one percent.
2.3 million direct employment will be generated. 6.5 million workers will indirec ly
benefit
of jobs remaining to leave the shores of North America and
Europe. “Big western companies are convinced that to remain competitive in an era o
globalization, they need to adopt outsourcing model. But their countries are ob^°^y
worried. A senior member of Dutch government was voicing his concern. He was
wondered what would happen to small countries like the Netherlands - that has no natura
resources, that is essentially a trading country - if all the work goes to other coun
.
They are genuinely concerned. Even we don’t have an answer. During1 mdustaal
revolution, they could see that the service sector was emerging. Hence they didn t mind
blue-collar jobs leaving for other countries. But now they don’t see ^ythmg c°mi"g(
They ask us what is going to happen to them. There is nanotech and biotech. But there is
no large industry yet,” says Kiran Karnik contemplatively.
But the world is bound to benefit from outsourcing. Karnik articulates it so well
“A typical urban, educated person will not work on farms. If no job, frustration builds up.
They may get into drugs and crime. If they are on the border areas, they could be dragged
into militancy or terrorism. That is the segment to which the industry is giving jobs. IT
and ITES revolution has wide sociological implications. There is a hope. As long as you
create hope among people, trouble is contained.
As one expert exclaimed, “the offshored world is indeed a safer place as it gives
jobs to all the potential terrorists.”
eSS Working Papers/Knowledge Studies-LUerary S^ial Sciences
February 2007
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4
Co^ya,‘d‘j. b^ConwavmemO,y °f
Pam“S'
Parriot‘
Contents
NCTE Editorial Board: Donald R. Gallo, Richard Lloyd-Jones, Raymond J
Rodrigues, Dorothy S. Strickland, Brooke Workman, Charles Suhor, ex officio
Michael Spooner, ex officio
,J '
Foreword
Vii
Introduction
ix
Staff Editor: Robert A. Heister
Preface
xv
Cover Design: Michael J. Getz
Interior Design: Tom Kovacs for TGK Design
NCTE Stock Number 50144-3020
by ihe H atiOrac Coun? °f Teachers of En8llsh- AU rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
fniS
PIliCy °f ^CTE in itS j°urnals and other publications to provide a
rum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching
of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point
of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board
of Directors, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy
where such endorsement is clearly specified.
E y'
1 Reading/Writing Derrida
1
2 Deconstruction and the English Profession
19
3 Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
31
Appendix
49
Notes
51
Glossary
55
Bibliography
57
Author
65
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crowley, Sharon, 1943A teacher's introduction to deconstruction / Sharon <Crowley.
p.
cm. — (NCTE teacher's introduction series)
Bibliography: p.
ISBN 0-8141-5014-4
1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching.
2. Deconstruction. I. Title
PE1404.C76 1989
808'.042'07—dcl9
89-2887
CIP
iv
v
3 Deconstructing Writing
Pedagogy
S3
1 ■
1 ;
3
1 ■
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1
ri
Deconstruction, and its concern with metaphysics, minds, and the
history of Western philosophy may seem so esoteric as to be far
removed from the needs of the classroom teacher of English. I don't
think that this is the case, however. Aside from its intrinsic interest,
deconstruction harbors a number of important implications for the
teaching of English. For one thing, it presents some interesting models
for reading and studying literary texts (and student texts as well),
models which might be profitably emulated in reading or writing
pedagogy. For another, deconstructive insights about teaching, lan
guage, and writing offer up a critique on which we can hang much
of the pedagogical practice that has been adopted by writing teachers
in recent years.
However, a deconstructive reading of English teaching carries with
it a good many negative implications, insofar as it calls into question
some of the basic assumptions that have always taken for granted in
such teaching? For example, a deconstructive analysis undermines the
notion that the composing process begins with an originating author;
this notion characterizes both traditional and process pedagogies of
composition. Deconstruction also rejects the traditional characterization
of writing as a repetition of the same (as is now the case with
instruction in expository writing, which is supposed to re-present
picture, imitate, copy—some piece of a student's knowledge). Such an
analysis also challenges the notion that informs and permeates tradi
tional pedagogy: that language is a transparent representation of the
world and/or of the minds which populate it.
Reassuringly enough, a deconstructive reading of writing pedagogy
underscores the appropriateness of much of the lore connected with
process pedagogy. It also demonstrates, however, that some alterations
remain to be considered, if we take deconstructive notions about
language seriously. But challenges like these can strengthen a tradition
31
32
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
that survives them. As Vincent Leitch has remarked with regard to
Derrida's own engagement with pedagogical issues, to threaten a
system of beliefs is also to "foster inquiry and transformation" (1985,18).
Sovereignty and Authority
As I tried to establish earlier in this essay, post-structural thought
raises serious objections to the metaphysical fiction that would place
a sovereign, self-aware consciousness at the center of any composing
act. I don't think it is unfair to say that traditional thinking about
writing has been author-centered, and that, as a consequence, writing
pedagogy has always focused on authors—specifically on their inten
tions and psychology. Apparently, the view that the writing process
begins and ends with an individual author is a historical phenomenon
whose ubiquity in modem thought has to do with attitudes toward
discourse that were developed during the seventeenth century.2 This
attitude still prevails in our thinking, although post-structuralist his
torians have begun to question its staying power.
In our own time, the author-centeredness of writing pedagogy has
given rise to a school of research into composing that studies the
mental habits of composers. These researchers are trying to devise a
model of the composing process that is supposed to reflect the
composing process used by all writers. They draw on cognitive psy
chology for their rationale and techniques, assuming that this discipline
which studies "the human mind" can provide us a key to understanding
the nature of writing.
But the assumption that authorial minds are solely responsible for
the production of written texts is also held by composition theorists
who are not explicitly tied to cognitivist models. In many cases, the
author-centeredness of their theories of composition derives from thenunwitting subscription to the metaphysics of presence. For example,
C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon append the following footnote to
the opening chapter of their Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of
Writing:
Composing is a richer concept than "writing" and wherever we
use the term we mean to designate the forming/shaping activities
of mind, not merely the learned behaviors associated with writing
in the narrowest sense—using a pen or pencil, making the letters
of written discourse, using the technical conventions of the written
language, and so on. The distinction is crucially important because
"composing" is a natural human endowment while "writing" is
learned. Yet writing means next to nothing if divorced from the
larger concept of "composing." (1984, 19-20)
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
33
To a reader who is alert to the deconstructive directions taken by
language, this comment is reminiscent of the traditional canard that
"thinking" (here called "composing") precedes writing. Not only that,
thinking is better than writing, since the former takes place in an
author's mind, while writing takes place in language. "Composing" is
"natural" for Knoblauch and Brannon, but writing is not; writing is
artificial, foreign, monstrous, almost meaningless, an unnatural act.
Writing is not self-sufficient on this model; rather it is a technology
that depends for its value on some other process which is more
essentially human, more present to itself.
The post-structural critique of the notion of the sovereign self poses
a number of difficulties for a research program, or a pedagogy, centered
on the psychology of authors. As Derrida points out in the Granimatology, psychology can only survive by positing a "naturalist opposition"
between "internal" and "external" experience. The difficulty is that,,
on a psychological model, writing is, stubbornly, an "exteriority"; we
will never be able to account for writing by looking for some "interiority" that exists above or beyond or in back of it. Even if students
of the composing process find a research technique that permits them
to establish a model of the writing process which describes, in the
most minute physiological or psychological detail, what happens in
the minds or brains of people who write, we will nevertheless have
learned nothing about the uses to which writers put language, which
by definition is never private. And if psychologists or psycholinguists
succeed in finding or describing some mechanism that accounts for
the production of language, they will not have made much progress
toward grasping the nature of writing, the uses of which depend on
its availability to the community that is served and defined by it.
Further, since writing is made up of language, it both precedes and
succeeds individual writers. Thus a deconstructive attitude toward
writing pedagogy will focus its attention away from individual authors
and toward the language currently in use in the community served
by the pedagogy.
Because of both its implicit critique of the sovereign self and its
emphasis on the absence of readers from the composing act, decon
structive attitudes toward language allow us to redefine many of the
crucial terms with which we work every day—terms like "reader" and
"writer." In a review of Derrida's The Post Card (1984), Gayatri Spivak
argues that the "scene of writing" (what composition theorists call the
"composing process") requires absence as its necessary condition. That
is, the scene of writing denies the sovereign authorial presence so
often invoked by traditional pedagogy. Spivak notes that "when a
34
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
man writes, he is in a structure that needs his absence as its necessary
condition (writing is defined as that which can necessarily be read in
the writer's absence)" (1984, 19). That is, when (if) a writer writes,
he does so because the desired audience is not immediately present.
Its "presence," if you will, is fictional; it "exists" only insofar as the
writer imaginatively embodies it, as some construct of future reader(s).
What is even more curious, the scene of writing thus mandates the
writer's pluralization; for the duration of composing, writer becomes
audience, a move that must be made in order for there to be a motive
for writing at all. Spivak argues that writers resist this pluralization of
themselves, and that readers conspire with them by assuming that the
discourse has been produced by a writing "self": as she puts it,
when a person reads, the scene of writing is usually ignored and
the argument is taken as the product of a self with a proper name.
Writers and readers are thus accomplices in the ignoring of the
scene of writing. (20)
This misperception of the act of writing is enhanced by the installment
of writing between the covers of papers, books, and anthologies, whose
white margins allow readers to think the writing "contained" therein
is complete, and more, that it represents the completed thought of the
person whose name is attached to them. When readers read, then,
they are seduced by textual artifacts into believing that the text was
composed by an integrated "self," who possessed a unified "intention,"
and who carried out that intention with more or less success. In other
words, they assume that the written discourse somehow re-presents
the "thoughts" or "intentions" of its "writer."
But the Derridean critique of the inability of selves to "re-present"
themselves in language demonstrates that all of this is yet another
metaphysical construct. As Jasper Neel explains,
most Western writers assume that writing serves as a vehicle to
carry thought. But this assumption remains forever haunted by
the problem that thinking (at least in the Western sense of thinking)
cannot appear outside writing. Something at the core of thinking
seems to be missing. Writing adds what is missing but in doing
so reveals the incompleteness of the thing that needs a supplement
to be itself
This process of supplementation endangers thought
because writing, rather than merely serving as an empty vehicle
waiting to transport and then discharge thought whole, adds itself
to and then substitutes itself for thought. (1988, 162)
What readers read is writing, not thought.
And yet the fiction of authorial sovereignty is lent enormous force
by the power relationship that is inherent in all writing, when seen
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
35
from the writer's point of view? The solitude that often accompanies
the act of writing seduces writers into believing that they are engaged
in individual acts of creation; it is all too easy to forget, while writing,
that one's language belongs to a community of speakers and writers,
that one has begun writing in order to reach (absent) readers, and
that one's "innovative ideas" have long textual histories behind them,
histories which contain many many voices. Think, for example, of the
voices that speak throughout this writing: Derrida's, of course, but
also Jasper Neel's, Aristotle's, Gayatri Spivak's, Meyer Abrams's,
Barbara Johnson's, and on and on.
Because of the illusion of authorial sovereignty, it is difficult for
writers to acknowledge the inevitable immersion of their own voices
in the flow of differance. Two groups are excepted from this gener
alization. The first consists of experienced writers, who have learned
throughout many trials the difficulty of getting readers to "see" what
was "meant." Over time these writers have learned to assume the
point of view of potential readers, whose voices are always being
heard during the writing process (in the back of the head, so to speak).
Such writers produce "readerly" prose, and can carry on an imagined
dialogue with potential readers as they compose. In other words,
experienced writers know how to submit themselves to the flow of
the community's language. The second group consists of inexperienced
writers, who find their own voices simply drowned out by those of
teachers and other sources of discursive authority. In a sense, then,
inexperienced writers are more in touch with the flow of differance
than are writers who accept the fiction of authorial sovereignty.
Assuming a deconstructive perspective, then, I must argue that to
center a writing pedagogy on authors, rather than on readers and the
common language of the community, is to insert an attitude into the
composing act that misunderstands its focus. 1 would argue further
that traditional composition pedagogy begins from the notion of
authorship, not only because of its immersion in the metaphysics of
presence, but also because the teachers who design such courses are
writers whose work commands a good deal of authority, while their
students are only readers, at least within the confines of the writing
classroom.
Ironically enough, teachers do most of the writing in composition
classes—they write the syllabus, the assignments, and the daily lesson
plans; they re-write the textbook in the sense that they interpret it for
their students; and finally, they write (revise, edit, grade) their students'
papers. Students, on the other hand, spend most of their time reading:
they read the teacher, to determine what he "wants"; they read the
36
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
textbooks or anthologies he has assigned to find out what he wants
them to know; they read his assignments to determine what he wants
them to do. When they "write" in response to his assignments, they
tell him what they think he wants to hear and write according to the
rules he wants to see realized in their papers. Almost never do they
envision themselves as having something to teach their teachers.
As teachers, it is all too easy for us to be seduced into acting as the
only writers of/in a writing course, to refuse students the opportunity
to wrest that role from us. And it is even easier for students to accept
the role of perpetual reader, inasmuch as they have been invited to
do just this throughout most of their school lives. And yet to do so is
to ignore the movement of writing, of differance, that always postpones
the achievement of final authority for discourse. Deconstruction as
sumes the complicitly of writers and readers in all acts of composing.
That is, readers of any discourse become its writers as they re-construct
a "meaning" for it.
If writing teachers find , this argument compelling, there are some
strategies available to them. They can reject or redefine some of the
traditional strategies that implicitly reinforce their power as writers of
the composition course. One of these is the notion of intention. As
William Covino remarks, if we accept deconstructive notions about
writing,
all writing takes place without finality because finality is located
in some sort of definition or purpose.... We may suspect that
our insistence as teachers upon “writing with a purpose" deserves
questioning insofar as it subordinates "strategy without finality"
to “the self-assured certitude of consciousness." (1981, 2)
At the very least, any pedagogy which insists that students' papers
reflect "the self-assured certitude of consciousness" must contradict
the daily experience of writing teachers. A deconstructive pedagogy,
on the other hand, would redirect the notion of intention or purpose
away from examination of a text and onto its suitability to the rhetorical
situation for which it was designed. Perhaps it would even reject the
notion of intention altogether and substitute the task of incorporating
the projected needs of audiences into the writing process.
A deconstructive analysis begins by assuming that writing is com
munal, that, as Michael Ryan puts it, "writing can belong to anyone;
it puts an end to the ownership or self-identical property that speech
signaled" (1982, 29). The failure of writing to signal its ownership by
anyone is, of course, exactly why Plato's Socrates condemned it:
Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may
be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
37
those who understand it, but equally of those who have no
business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people,
and not address the wrong. (275e)
It may be nusguided as well as uncharitable of me to charge Plato
with hierarchizing the reading public here, but it seems unmistakable
that he wanted to reserve the use of writing for those who understood
its power. Apparently he detested or feared the democratic tendency
of writing, its insistence on making itself available to any who can
read.
The public nature of writing, its refusal to be possessed by either
writer or reader, works itself out in several interesting ways. First of
all, it supports the notion recently advanced by some composition
theorists that all writing is collaborative. Research into the production
of writing in the marketplace has established that most of this sort of
work is the product of many hands.4 It is also the case, however, that
much writing for which authors take individual credit is, in fact,
collaborative. By way of illustration, I repeat a story told by Tilly
Warnock, a teacher of writing:
One cold July night several years ago at Vedauwoo, during the
Wyoming Conference on Freshman and Sophomore English, sev
eral people were talking beside the fire when one man began
explaining how exhausted he was from revising his textbook. We
asked how he writes. He described his writing process in detail
but seemed particularly pleased with the stage when he passes
his draft to his wife, who is not in English, so that she can detect
the b.s. in his work. Because I was delighted by his account, I
asked if he included such collaboration as a common stage for
writers in his textbook. He drew himself to full height, a large
shadow against the flames and silhouettes of the mysteriously
shaped mountains, and replied indignantly, "Every word I write
is my own." The conversation ended. (1985, 305)
Such husband-wife collaborations are no doubt numerous; many are
acknowledged, however, only in prefaces or dedications that thank
spouses for their "unfailing patience and dedication to the manuscript."
One also wonders about the role of Milton's daughters in the com
position of Paradise Lost, the women who "recorded" the poem while
the blind poet dictated. Other, silent collaborators are editors, only a
few of whom, like Maxwell Perkins (who fashioned Thomas Wolfe's
chaotic manuscripts into readable novels), are ever credited for the
writing they do on a text. From a Derridean point of view, editorship
of a work-in-progress, or any reading of it, counts as part of its writing.
This is equally true for the writing classroom. Thus the students who
read their colleagues' works-in-progress and comment on them are as
38
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
much a part of their composition as is the "original” author; this is
true of teacherly readings as well.
Indeed, even from a single "originary" writer's point of view, the
instigation of writing simply cannot be isolated from its contexts, which
are myriad. They include not only the writer, her sense of her present
state and her memory of her past; they include her attitude toward
the present assignment, her teacher, her class, the other students in
it, toward schooling in general and her schooling in particular, her
past experiences with writing and with writing classes and assignments.
They also include her physical state at the time of writing, and the
tools she uses; and perhaps less obviously they include her role in,
and attitude toward, the communities of which she is a part—her
family, her friends, her neighborhood, ghetto or barrio, her town, city,
or reservation. Nor, because of the play of differance, are any of these
contexts static—they are interrelated and constantly shifting their
relationships with one another.
But if all writing is collaborative and contextual in its composition,
its reception is multiple, public, as well. This implies that classroom
writing, like all writing, is, theoretically at least, available to anyone
' who can read. This theoretical availability can be realized in practice
when students are encouraged to immerse their classroom writing into
the flow of whatever public discourse is going on around them—in
their institutions, workplaces, or communities. In fact, the dissemination
of classroom writing into the discourse of the school or larger com
munity may be one solution to the difficulty that haunts much student
writing—its lack of motivation. A deconstructive pedagogy would
engage students with issues that concern them directly, socially, and
politically, and would direct the resulting discourses into the com
munities where such things matter: city or tribal council meetings,
neighborhood groups, sorority meetings, school board meetings, land
lords' associations, planning authorities, parents' groups, and the like.
Supplementation and Method
As my readers will have surmised by now, the deconstructive notion
of supplementarity problematizes several canards that we use in our
teaching. When we tell students to "say what they think" or to "write
what they mean," we ignore the differing, supplemental facets of
writing. More profoundly, differance and supplementarity problematize
our easy separation of thought from language, content from form,
meaning from expression, as well as the priority we assign to the first
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
39
term in each opposition. However, deconstructive thought does not
authorize a simple reversal of such priorities. To privilege form over
content, for example, as much instruction based on current-traditional
rhetoric does when it centers on "the paragraph" or "the thesis
statement," is simply to be trapped within logocentrism once again.5
More pertinently to our work as teachers, it is to misunderstand the
nature of writing, which consists of signifiers, of signs representing
signs representing signs, to infinity.
In Dissemination, Derrida has some provocative things to say about
traditional notions about composing—called "method" by its seven
teenth-century progenitors.6 Rene Descartes, for example, proposed
that composition could move in two directions. Analytic method—the
method of inquiry—moved from effect to cause or from the specific
to the general in such a way that an account of an analytic inquiry
would exactly represent the way in which its results were discovered.
Synthetic method—the method of presentation—moved from cause
to effect or from general to specific; since conclusions had already
been derived by means of analysis, the writer who worked with
synthetic method could present them first. Throughout the methodical
tradition, synthetic method was characterized as less valuable, and
secondary to, analysis, since it was less original. Or, to use a favorite
Derridean metaphor, the work of synthesis, gathering up and distrib
uting what had previously been thought, was parasitic on, and reductive
of, some more primary work. (Inddently, synthetic method was en
shrined in traditional composition instruction as the five-paragraph
essay, which moves from the general to the specific and which repeats
for the reader some investigation that has always already taken place
through other means.)
Derrida's comments on method come about in the context of his
meditation on the puzzle of "the preface"—that part of the text which
announces itself as coming before the text, "pre-speaking it," and yet
which is ordinarily written after the text is finished. The preface claims
to embody or summarize, or at least to introduce, what is contained
in the rest of the work. This irruption of the preface into the composing
process, and its dissemination into the "work itself," interests Derrida
partly because it provides graphic testimony to the failure of compo
sition ever to proceed in the orderly fashion dictated by method. The
preface graphically signals that fact that "the text is no longer the
snug airtight inside of an interiority or an identity-to-itself.. . but
rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing"
(Dis, 36). Once again, texts move, open and close, come and go. They
refuse to submit themselves to the stabilizing dichotomy of method.
40
A Teacher's Introduci
o Deconstruction
which would insist that texts are first thought, and that then they are
written.
The traditional assumption that thinking precedes writing is derived
directly from method, as this was delineated in the eighteenth-century
rhetoric and logic texts that spawned traditional writing pedagogy.
Recently, traditional composition textbooks have altered the language
in which they couch their linear model of composing; the stage which
nineteenth-century text writers called "thought" has been converted
to "prewriting," and the older two-stage model ("thought" and "pres
entation") now has three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting.
But this shift in nomenclature does not constitute a fundamental
alteration in traditional notions about writing. "Prewriting techniques,"
or "heuristics," no matter how intricate, nevertheless presume that
writers first engage in some activity that is not necessarily linguistic
before they begin to write.
On a deconstructive model of the writing process, of course, begin
nings, endings, middles and muddles are not quite so clearly demar
cated. I wonder, for example, exactly when I began the "prewriting"
for this book. Did it begin with my first reading of the Grammatology
in 1978? Or with the composition of my first essay about deconstruction
(in 1979)? And had I finished with prewriting when I entered the first
lines of this essay into my computer? Not necessarily, since these lines
came from a paper I had delivered at a meeting long before the
composition of this essay was suggested to me. I was still rereading
Derrida when I entered those hand-me-down lines, hoping they would
break the spell of "his" voice over "mine." And, in contrast to the
neat linear process dictated by method, I wrote what is now the second
chapter first. Although that's not quite right because I found that I
had to write parts of what is now the first chapter before I could
finish the second. And so on.
And where does rewriting begin and end? As I write these words,
the manuscript has already been reviewed and accepted for publication.
That is, these words were not in the draft that its reviewers approved.
They are here now because I've been asked to give more examples,
in a revised version of the manuscript, of how deconstructive insights
affect our thinking about writing pedagogy. And if the editors don't
approve them when they do their rewriting of the manuscript, these
words will be edited out and no other readers will ever read them.
Certainly the reviewer who suggested such changes took part in the
revision process. Other revisions will occur, of course, when readers
rewrite the text after it is published, in reviews and, most likely, in
fers addressed to me.
*5
I
Deconstructing Writing Pt. ygy
41
Genre Alert!
Traditional composition pedagogy is often organized along generic
lines. Its textbooks devote chapters to the "expository essay," the "essay
of comparison and contrast," the "persuasive essay," and the like.
These and other conventional generic distinctions imply that certain
formulaic constraints, embedded within a text, display the mode of
thought or the kind of intention held by the writer. But the decon
structive critique of the nature of textuality disrupts a good deal of
the traditional pedagogical thought that would channel the flow of
the writing process into discreet generic categories, or would divide
writing instruction itself into units, sections, or parts, "assignments,"
"themes," and "papers."
On the deconstructive account (and in process pedagogy as well)
writing is conceived as continuous and dynamic. For pragmatic reasons,
readers and writers entertain the illusion that the flow of writing is
halted by its being stapled or paper-clipped and placed inside a plastic
folder purchased from the bookstore. But this illusion of closure is
only a convenient fiction. In keeping with its general suspicion of the
imposition of limits on the movement of writing, then, the deconstruc
tive critique of textuality also problematizes traditional use of generic
categories.
Traditional composition teachers borrowed their list of generic
categories from an eighteenth-century rhetorical theory that centralized
the notion of authors' intentions. In this theory, genres such as
"exposition" were thought to be discriminable from others such as
"persuasion" or "expression" by means of the enshrinement within
them of their authors' "aims." According to George Campbell, whose
Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) is an important progenitor of this tradition,
such aims include enlightening the understanding, pleasing the imag
ination, moving the passions, or influencing the will. The text writers
who borrowed Campbell's classifiction of "aims" soon began to as
sociate each of them with a discriminate genre of discourse. That is,
expository discourse appealed to the understanding, while narration
and description appealed to the imagination, poetry inflamed the
passions, and persuasive discourse influenced the will. Thus the
metaphysical rhetorical theory that was spawned by Campbell's work
supposed that the structure of a completed text could somehow
graphically re-present its author's intention.
But, as we have seen, the notion of intention is a metaphysical
fiction (this may be true of the notion of genre as well).7 While generic
distinctions are useful to readers, since they may (or may not) announce
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
a text s lineage (the texts claimed as progenitors), they apparently do
not entirely constrain the writing process as it occurs. When professional
writers write, they ordinarily do not begin with generic constraints in
mind. Often they do not know what sort of piece will result from
their work; sometimes they are unsure even whether it will become
prose or poetry.
And when an experienced writer is asked to write within a prescribed
genre, such as a book review, she does not necessarily consult a
conventional format that is prescribed for such pieces, although she
may wish to do so in order to insure that her readers get all the kinds
of commentary that they have learned to expect from such pieces of
writing. During composition, however, she also considers her responses
to the work in question, as well as the probable response of the
at v"0! 1
reVieW- and the context (j°urnal or periodical) in
which the review is to appear. If she is acquainted with the author,
as often happens, she also considers that person's probable response
to her review, and so on. She struggles to balance all of these constraints
Within the wnting process, availing herself of whatever linguistic
resources become apparent to her while she writes.
Thus, to insist that students begin the writing process within the
conventions prescribed for them by mandated genres, such as expo
sition, is to Simplify the nature of the writing process as professionals
use n. H also denies the locatedness in place and time that characterizes
rhetoncal situations, insofar as students are encouraged to think of
the genenc classifications as more or less universally useful responses
to any wnting task. Further, it forecloses the possibUity, at least within
the scene of the classroom, that whatever the student is working on
at the moment may turn itself into a poem, a letter home, a script, or
an essay whose format does not appear in a textbook classification
lo put this m deconstructive terms, genre-based pedagogy places
restnctive boundaries on the movement of differance.
A deconstructive analytic also severely problematizes the status of
some of the genres that are nearest and dearest to traditional pedagogy.
For example, it compromises the traditional assumption that some
writing (or all of it during early stages of composing) is "personal" or
expressive." Rather, all writing is done in order to be read eventually
even when it takes the form of notes or freewriting. The absence of
an other, an audience, is precisely what motivates writing in the first
Place/ even when that other is some imagined future version of one's
self, as in the case of notes jotted down for future reference. Too,
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
43
this "future self" will be different from the "present self" because of
its necessary immersion within the flow of differance.
If a deconstructive attitude problematizes the notion of the "personal
essay" it poses nearly insuperable difficulties for the notion of "ex
pository writing." Most of us who teach writing in American educational
institutions work with courses or programs that utilize the term
"expository writing." Exposition is a relatively new genre within the
rhetorical tradition, having been invented in the late eighteenth century
as an efficient generic means of conveying the results of scientific
investigation to interested others. The "exposition" entailed in the term
does not refer, of course, to writers' exposing their "thoughts," or
"selves," as they are supposed to do in personal essays. No, it is some
"subject" that is to be exposed (or, in a strange metaphoric opposition,
"covered") by expository discourse. In the words of one of its early
twentieth-century proponents, expository discourse amounts to a "suc
cinct and orderly setting-forth of some piece of knowledge" (Baldwin
1902, 40). And according to the authors of a popular late-nineteenthcentury textbook, a writer who undertakes the composition of expos
itory discourse must "understand the subject under discussion better
than his readers do." In exposition, "the writer's aim is to make others
see the meaning of some idea as clearly as he himself sees it" (Scott
and Denney 1909, 302).
Alexander Bain, who provided a powerful rationale for exposition
during the middle of the nineteenth century, gave a more inclusive
definition: for him, exposition was "the mode of handling applicable
to knowledge or information in the form of what is called the Sciences,"
which, he was confident, were "each laid out on the plan of exhausting,
in the most systematic array, all the information, respecting one
department of nature" (1866, 147). Expository writing was to imitate
this exhaustivity. Each expository essay was to lay before its readers,
complete and entire, the writer's understanding of a given "subject."
If one accepts Derridean notions about writing, of course, "expository
writing" is not thinkable. From a deconstructive point of view, writing
does not "expose" much of anything, except perhaps itself. Nor can
it "cover" (either in the sense of cloaking or exhausting) some subject
that exists outside it. Derrida questions the ability of writing to represent
anything outside itself, as well as the notion that some transcendental
signifier can be found—mind, idea, soul, subject, knowledge, essence—
which could authorize that representation. What precedes the act of
writing is more writing; all that follows upon it is more writing (or
44
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
reading). What writing does is extend itself, chain itself, into a series
of signifiers whose proliferation can only be halted during the writing
process by an act of will or sheer exhaustion.
Bain's project of systematizing and completing knowledge is the
very one that Derrida sets out to attack. Derrida reads the necessity
for logocentric cultures to think of knowledge as enclosed or encap
sulated within essays, or books as a grasp for totality, for closure,
finally, for control; every writer wants to "have the last word." Again
I quote Derrida (which in itself is sometimes an illuminating exercise
in the inability of writing to expose anything):
Good writing has therefore always been comprehended.... within
a totality, and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the
book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this
totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality
constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions
and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. (OG, 18)
In other words (Richard Rorty's), Derrida wants to demolish the notion
of
the book'—the notion of a piece of writing as aimed at accurate
treatment of a subject, conveying a message which (in more for
tunate circumstances) might have been conveyed by ostensive defi
nition or by injecting knowledge straight into the brain. (1978, 146)
This goes equally well for the notions of "papers" and "themes," of
course, which, on Derrida's model, cannot be construed as "containers"
for some bit of "knowledge."
Expository writing, in its desire for transparency, completeness, and
closure, participates in the Western metaphysical tradition in an almost
ideal way; perhaps it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that
exposition is the genre, par excellence, which secures the metaphysics
of presence within the center of academic discourse. Vincent Leitch
has remarked that the structure of any logocentric system "insures
balance, coherence, and organization, all deployed around a controlled
point," which is as nice a description of the five-hundred-word theme
as will be found anywhere outside the textbook tradition (1983, 36).
If Derrida's insights are worth entertaining, we writing teachers must
consider an alternate possibility: to insist that our students compose
balanced, coherent, and organized pieces of discourse is to hide a
deception, a deception which radically misunderstands the nature of
writing.
If traditional classes in "expository writing" play a bad joke on all
of us, students are the most obvious butt of the joke. The tasks set
I
iI
I
I
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
45
for students in such a course are simply not possible to accomplish.
First of all, assignments in exposition, if taken seriously, place students
in the position of imitating writers who have devoted their careers to
becoming expert in some field of inquiry. Such assignments, at the
very least, trivialize the difficult process of acquiring scientific knowl
edge. But even more seriously, such assignments ask young people to
learn to manage the terms and conventions of the discourse which
surrounds a "subject" in a very short time and without assistance.
Serious students try to work their way out of this dilemma by retreating
to the library in order to read up on abortion, the war between Iraq
and Iran, or whatnot. In Derridean terms, they try to enter into the
chain of signification that surrounds, and amounts to, discourse about
their subjects.
Students have another alternative, of course. They may attempt to
fulfill an expository assignment by producing what Jasper Neel calls
"anti-wnting," where they "generate infinite numbers of texts that
proclaim themselves as correct syntax, patterns of arrangement, and
categories such as exposition" (1988, 149). Neel argues that students
have learned that
they can avoid writing altogether by providing shells with no
interior: spelling, punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, structure,
and coherence that are nothing but spelling, punctuation, sen
tences, paragraphs, structure and coherence. (165)
Faced by the enormity of trying to represent some "subject" in writing,
then, some students adopt a strategy of display. As Neel observes^
classes in expository writing "hardly ever generate any writing."
Instead, students' texts simply announce that their authors are ob
serving the syntactic and organizational rules they have been taught
to follow. Anti-writing is a cynical version of the traditional Western
attitude toward writing: it is the outside of an outside, writing thor
oughly technologized, pure ritual.
Deconstructive Pedagogy as a Positive Science
The performance of this "reading" of traditional pedagogy may be as
far as deconstruction will take us. I am not sure that a deconstructive
pedagogy can be realized—the term is itself an oxymoron. Nevertheless,
I can guess about some things a deconstructive pedagogy might be up
to if it were thought of as a set of strategies for teaching.
First of all, it would reject the traditional model of authority that
obtains in most American classrooms, where the teacher is both
46
A Teacher's Introduction io Deconstruction
receptacle and translator of received knowledge.8 At the very least, a
deconstructive pedagogy would adopt the positions that knowledge is
a highly contextualized activity which is constructed within groups,
communities, or societies; that knowledge itself is a volatile construct
subject to alteration when contexts for knowing are altered; and that
so-called "received" knowledge is just that—received. That is, the
knowledge which is preferred and privileged at any given moment is
so, simply because influential members of the concerned community
have subscribed to it. A teacher who was convinced of the force of
these assumptions would, no doubt, try to construct a classroom scene
where they were daily allowed to come into play.
For another thing, a deconstructive pedagogy would reinforce the
notion, as composition specialists would have it, that writing is a
process. But it would interpret this slogan more profoundly to mean
that the process that is writing is differentiation and not repetition of
the same. The writing process differs to some extent with every situation
or task; which also implies that no universally useful model or tactics
for generating writing will ever be found. (At the very least, if such
models exist, they exist in language, not minds, and are thus language
specific.) This does not mean that the writing process cannot be
generalized about, of course. It simply means that writers must always
take into account the constraints of the rhetorical situation in which
they find themselves.
That writing is a process of differentiation also means that a syUabus
for a writing class would always be in revision, would always be
available for alteration as class members' writing changed the focus
of the class. A syllabus for a semester- or year-long writing course
that respects deconstructive attitudes toward writing would assume its
relevance to all other writing being done, and formerly done, by
teacher and students. No writing would be exempt from reading,
rewnting, in such a class—papers for other classes, childhood poetry,
the teacher s own work-in-progress. Nor would writing events that
occur in connection with such classes be perceived as unrelated to one
another. An "assignment" is writing by a teacher that calls for writing
by students, which in turn calls for more writing by the teacher and
so on and on. Freewritings, journals, essays, papers, are all part of a
differentiating process that they only seem to halt by being put down
on paper. They are all susceptible to revision, to incorporation into
other texts, whether those other texts are written by the same or
another or several writers at once. It may (should?) be that no "pieces"
of writing are ever completed in such a class. The feeling that a writer
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
47
can “finish" a piece of writing may simply disguise her exhaustion,
her inability to go on, her lack of resources like time or money.
In other words, a deconstructive pedagogy would devise ways to
engage students as active readers—that is, re-writers—of the teachers'
writing—her course. It would encourage students to revise assignments
and syllabi, to reject an assigned text and choose new ones. Such
procedures would acknowledge the movement of differance, of writing,
as it is worked out in the relation between the writers and readers of
a text called "composition class." The changing relations that develop
between teacher and students—and among students—as the writing
class evolves, would mimic the changing relations that occur between
words and sentences in a discourse as it is revised. Any readings that
were undertaken in connection with such a class, literary or not, would
also be seen as texts to be rewritten, to be incorporated into students'
writing processes.
Further, a deconstructive pedagogy would treat the writing process
exactly as it occurs always and everywhere: it would be as fully
contextualized within the classroom as without. In composition class,
English teachers are the ultimate audience for writing, much as are
bosses, editors, and teachers of "content-area" classes. The traditional
notion that composition prepares students for writing in the "real
world" pretends that classroom writing is "practice" for some future
real writing." In other words, traditional assumptions always defer
"real" writing, and this explains why so much student writing is
unmotivated.
In a writing class governed by deconstructive attitudes, on the other
hand, teachers would sensitize their students to the institutional realities
in which they write, and they would treat the institutional situation
as a "real-world" one where students are expected to leam a special
brand of writing—academic discourse. And, since knowledge itself is
always in flux, and since preferred knowledge is always inscribed by
a culture in its institutions, students and teachers would examine the
institutional ideology that governs their work: why "academic dis
course" is preferred in school to whatever discourse(s) the students
bring to school with them; why students might want to leam it (or
not); why teachers are invested with institutional authority; why they
are expected to give grades; how this constraint both interferes with,
and encourages, the writing process.
In short, to adopt deconstructive attitudes toward writing and its
teaching will not be an easy matter for either students or teachers, all
of whom are accustomed to working within the constraints placed on
48
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
them by institutions and a culture that subscribes to the metaphysics
of presence. Perhaps the best to be hoped for is that a deconstructive
critique demonstrates the necessity of continued interrogation of the
strategies used to teach reading and writing. 1 can only hope that this
essay has stimulated a few of its readers to engage in such a critique.
Appendix
How to Read Derrida
In her ''Translator's Introduction" to Dissemination, Barbara Johnson
identifies some of Derrida's rhetorical strategies in "Plato's Pharmacy"
as follows: translation of a single word (wherein the Greek pharmakon
is played with as both "poison" and "remedy"); anagrammatical texture
(play with the etymology of a term); lateral association (which utilizes
other contexts in which a given word is used across Plato's canon).
Likewise, Derrida has also inscribed a set of themes of his own in this
work: webs, textiles, textures, pens and surfaces, fathers and sons,
sorcerers, magicians, and healers, and so on.
His realization that language is opaque, rather than transparent,
explains why Derrida s works are so difficult. He uses incessant and
extended punning, ellipsis, and self-reference to call attention to
language, its cheats and maneuverings. He often speaks in tongues.
Sometimes it is hard to tell whether one is reading Derrida, or whether
he has put on Rousseau's—or Aristotle's, or Freud's—voice in order
to speak through, around, and inside of that voice. In Gias (1974), his
commentary on Hegel and Jean Genet is presented in two columns
set side by side, so that they comment not only on their "subjects,"
but also on each other. They illustrate as well the illusion of "the
book"—the illusion that books are stable containers of information
whose margins and endpapers mark the last word, the end of all that
can be said.
In short, it is best to approach Derrida's texts just as though they
were literary texts. Readers should be alert to the appearance and
reappearance of a favorite set of motifs, to Derrida's writing under
the cover of some other writer's voice, to elliptical or unusual syntax,
to coined terms or phrases, to play with the conventions of printing'
and to bilingual punning.
I suggest that beginning readers of Derrida read together in groups
of three or four. Read his work in short stretches, and then meet to
discuss it. Since deconstruction is a strategy of reading, the real
usefulness of reading together is established during the reading group's
49
JAN BREMAN
myths of the
global safety net
5
_j_ v
I
I
a
. h.concern for *e mass of the population living in
thought, however, analyses only the effects of th^ rricU
•
a whole, masking its differential impact across social classeVff onT3
s ?cot dirbution'and not iust -cro-cff^;-^ x
w“ld
,h"
k„„ depfe .f ,he
To the extent that a major segment of the globalized workforce R ine
porated into the production process it is as informal labour characterized
ZT ”LAfrica
“ ,land
’e over 80 per“ cent
L”'”in''»"»■
Sub-Saharan
India- an Tndi^ P
S“8ET1 fi8™
ta
XStTSX
ginal social moorings, the majority remain stuck in the vast shantv
towns ringing city outskirts across the global South.
NEW LEFT REVIEW 59
SEPT OCT 2009
I
3^
"J
2
NLR 59
Recently, however, the life of street hawkers in Cairo, tortilla vendors of
Mexico City, rickshaw drivers in Calcutta or scrap mongers of Jakarta has
been cast in a much rosier light. The informal sector, according to the
Wall Street Journal, is ‘one of the last safe havens in a darkening financial
climate’ and ‘a critical safety net as the economic crisis spreads'.2 Thanks
to these jobs, former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson is quoted as
saying, ‘the situation in desperately poor countries isn't as bad as you’d
think’. On this view, an admirable spirit of self-reliance enables people
to survive in the underground circuits of the economy, unencumbered
by the tax and benefit systems of the ‘formal sector’. These streetwise
operators are able to get by without expensive social provisions or unem
ployment benefit. World Bank economist W. F. Maloney assures the wsj
that the informal sector ‘will absorb a lot of people and offer them a
source of income’ over the next year.
The wsj draws its examples from Ahmedabad, the former mill city in
Gujarat where I conducted fieldwork in the 1990s. Here, in the Manek
Chowk market—‘a row of derelict stalls’, where ‘vendors peddle every
thing from beans to brass pots as monkeys scramble overhead’—Surajben
Babubhai Patni sells tomatoes, corn and nuts from a makeshift shelter:
'She makes as much as 250 rupees a day, or about $5, but it’s enough to
feed her household of nine, including her son, who recently lost his job
as a diamond polisher.’ Enough: really? Five dollars for nine people is
less than half the amount the World Bank sets as the benchmark above
extreme poverty: one dollar per capita per day. Landless households in
villages to the south of Ahmedabad have to make do with even less than
that—on the days they manage to find work?
Earlier this year I returned to the former mill districts ofthe city to see how
the economic crisis was affecting people there. By 2000, these former
working-class neighbourhoods had already degenerated into pauperized
quarters. But the situation has deteriorated markedly even since then.
Take the condition of the garbage pickers—all of them women, since
this is not considered to be man’s work. They are now paid half what
* 'Decent Work and the Informal Economy’, International Labour Organization,
Geneva 2002; Report on the Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the
Unorganised Sector, National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised
Sector, Government of India, New Delhi 2008.
1 Patrick Barta, ‘Global Economics: The Rise of the Underground’, Wall Street
Journal, 14 March 2009.
3 fireman, The Poverty Regime in Village India, Delhi 2007.
BREMAN.’ Myths
3
Table i: Prices paid to Ahmedabad waste collectors
Items
Price in
Rs/kilo
April 2008
Price in
Rs/kilo
Jan 200c)
Percentage
decrease
Waste steel
6
3
50
Steel sheets
10
5
50
Plastic bags
8
5
37.5
Newspaper
8
4
50
Hard plastic
15
7
53
Soft plastic
10
4
60
Dry bones
4
2
50
Waste hair
1,000
300
67
Source: We the Self-Employed, sewa, No. 18,15 May 2009.
egm their work at 3 am instead of at 5 am, bringing along their children
to provide more hands. The Self-Employed Women's Association
winch started to organize informal-sector workers in the city and has
now expanded its activities across India and even beyond-reports that
incomes have declined, days of work decreased, prices have fallen and
1 ehhoods disappeared’/ Their recent newsletter presents statistics tes
tifying to the crash in prices for the ‘goods’ collected on the dumps.
A sewa activist based in Ahmedabad
reports on the anguish she met
when visiting local members. C
One of these, Ranjanben Ashokbhai
Parmar, started to cry: 'Who sent this
—> recession! Why did they send it?’
cMdren^T’
bad’ her husband is s‘ck’
has 5
hildren, she stays in a rented house, she has to spend on the treatment of
enSSS
sh
eamer in 016 falnily’how can she meet her
vJlPhTh Kh f°eS t°1.CoUect scraP she takes along her Utile daughter,
whkh he h a"4
a‘ °me and makeS W°0den ice-cream spoons from
which he can earn not more than Rs. io/- a day.
’ We the Self-Employed, sewa, No. i8, 15 May 2009.
A'-..
K
r
4
MLR 59
in the industrial city of Surat, 120 miles south of Ahmedabad, half the
informal labour force of the diamond workshops was laid off overnig t
at the end of 2008, with the collapse of worldwide demand for jewels.
Some 200,000 diamond cutters and polishers found themselves jo ,
Ls while the rest had to contend with drastic reductions in hours and
JeX. A-v. «f >»«.s
aismissrf
a monthly income of little more than $i4o-were reputed belong
to the most skilled and highest paid ranks of the informal
These bitter experiences of the recession-struck informal economy
Gujarat can be repeated for region after region across India, Africa an
mJch of Latin America. Confronted with such misery it is Wos^e
to concur with the World Bank and Wo!! Street Journal s optimism about
the sector’s absorptive powers. As for their praise for the self-rehance
of those struggling to get by in these conditions: living in a t; ate of
constant emergency saps the energy to cope and erodes thest e
To suggest that these workers constitute a vibrant n
to endure.
class of self-employed entrepreneurs, ready to fight their way yPwar ’
f as Xding i portraying children from the M of Mumbai
as slumdog millionaires.
Rural rope's end
The second option currently being touted by the Western media as a
lushion for hard times’ is a return to the countryside. As an Asian
DevelopmentBankofficialinThailandrecentlyinformedthelntemationfl!
Sd Tribune, ’returning to one’s traditional village m the coumr d
is a sort of “social safety net”’. The complacent assumption is that large
numbers of rural migrants made redundant in the cities can retreat
their families’ farms and be absorbed in agricultural work, untd they are
recalled to their urban jobs by the next uptick of the economy. The
evokes a paradisial rural hinterland in northeast Thailand. Even in
dry season,
king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, has long encouraged such self-sufficiency.
Ab-don ciries for
International Herald Tribune. 28 February 2009.
vulages’
breman:
Myths
5
Similar views were published at the time of the Asian financial crisis in
1997. Then, World Bank consultants assumed that agriculture could act
as a catchment reservoir for labour made redundant in other sectors,
based on the notion that the army of migrants moving back and forth
between the country and urban-growth poles had never ceased their
primary occupation. The myth persisted that Southeast Asian countries
were still essentially peasant societies. These tillers of the land might go
to the city to earn extra wages for cash expenditure, but if they lost their
jobs they were expected to reintegrate into the peasant economy with no
difficulty. This was far from the case, as I wrote then.6
Returning to West Java this summer, I listened to the latest stories of
men and women who had come back to the village, having lost their
informal-sector jobs elsewhere, and find no work here, either. Of course
not: they were driven out of the village economy in the first place because
of lack of land or other forms of capital. There is no family farm to fall
back on. The departure of the landless and the land-poor was a flight,
part of a coping strategy. Now that the members of this rural proletariat
have become redundant in Jakarta or Bangkok, or as contract workers in
Taiwan or Korea for that matter, they are back to square one, due to an
acute and sustained lack of demand for their labour power in their place
of origin. A comparable drama is taking place in China. Out of the 120
to i5ot million migrants who made the trek from the rural interior to the
rapidly growing coastal cities during the last twenty-five years, official
sources report that about 10 to 15 million are now unemployed. For these
victims of the new economy, there is no alternative but to go back ‘home’
to a deeply impoverished countryside.
The Asian village economy is not capable of accommodating all those
who possess no means of production; nor has the urban informal sec
tor the elasticity to absorb all those eager to drift into it. According to
policymakers’ notions of cross-sectoral mobility, the informal economy
should swallow up the labour surplus pushed out of higher-paid jobs,
enabling the displaced workforce to stick it out through income-sharing
arrangements until the economic tide turned again. I have never found
any evidence that such a horizontal drift has taken place. Street ven
dors do not turn into becak riders, domestic servants or construction
6 See Breman and Gunawan Wiradi, Good Times and Bad Times in Rural Java: Socio
economic Dynamics in Two Villages towards the end of the Twentieth Century, Leiden
2002.
r;
■»
6
nlr 59
workers overnight. The labour market of the informal sector economy
is highly fragmented; those who are laid off in their branch of activity
have no alternative but to go back ‘home’, because staying on in the city
without earnings is next to impossible. But returning to their place of
origin is not a straightforward option, given the lack of space in the rural
economy. Nevertheless, my informants do not simply lay the blame for
their predicament on the economic meltdown. From the perspective of
the world’s underclasses, what looks like a conjunctural crisis is actually
a structural one, the absence of regular and decent employment. The
massive army of reserve labour at the bottom of the informal economy
is entrapped in a permanent state of crisis which will not be lifted when
the Dow Jones Index goes up again.
New economic order
The transformation that took place in 19th-century Western Europe, as
land-poor and landless peasants migrated to the towns, is now being
repeated on a truly global scale. But the restructuring that would create
an industrial-urban order, of the sort which vastly improved the lot of the
former peasants of the Northern hemisphere, has not materialized. The
ex-peasants of the South have failed to find secure jobs and housing on
their arrival in the cities. Struggling to gain a foothold there, they have
becotne mired for successive generations in the deprivation of the shan
ties, a vast reserve army of informal labour.
In the 1960s and 70s, Western policymakers viewed the informal sec
tor as a waiting room, or temporary transit zone: newcomers could find
their feet there and learn the ways of the urban labour market. Once
savvy to these, they would increasingly be able to qualify for higher
wages and more respectable working conditions. In fact the trend went
in the opposite direction, due in large part to the onslaught of marketdriven policies, the retreat of the state in the domain of employment
and the decisive weakening of organized labour. The small fraction that
made their way to the formal sector was now accused of being a labour
aristocracy, selfishly laying claim to privileges of protection and secu
rity. At the same time, the informal sector began to be heralded by the
World Bank and other transnational agencies as a motor of economic
growth. Flexibilization became the order of the day—in other words,
dismantling of job security and a crackdown on collective bargaining.
The process of informalization that has taken shape over the last twenty
V
breman:
Myths
7
years saw, among other things, the end of the large-scale textile industry
in South Asia. In Ahmedabad itself, more than 150,000 mill workers
were laid off at a stroke. This did not mean the end of textile produc
tion in the city. Cloth is now produced in power-loom workshops by
operators who work 12-hour days, instead of 8, and at less than half
the wages they received in the mill; garment manufacture has become
home-based work, in which the whole family is engaged day and night.
The textile workers’ union has all but disappeared. Sliding down the
labour hierarchy has plunged these households into a permanent state
of crisis, both economic and social.
It is not only that the cost of labour at the bottom of the world econ
omy has been scaled down to the lowest possible level; fragmentation
also keeps the under-employed masses internally compartmentalized.
These people are competitors in a labour market in which the supply
side is now structurally larger than the—constantly fluctuating—
demand for labour power. They react to this disequilibrium by trying to
strengthen their ties along lines of family, region, tribe, caste, religion,
or other primordial identities which preclude collective bargaining on
the basis of work status and occupation. Their vulnerability is exacer
bated by their enforced rootlessness: they are pushed off the land, but
then pushed back onto it again, roaming around in an endless search
for wprk and shelter.
The emergence of the early welfare state in the Western hemisphere
at the end of the nineteenth century has been attributed to the bour
geoisie’s fear that the policy of excluding the lower ranks of society
could end in the collapse of the established order.7 The propertied part
of mankind today does not seem to be frightened by the presence of
a much more voluminous classe dcmgereuse. Their appropriation of
ever-more wealth is the other side of the trend towards informaliza
tion, which has resulted in the growing imbalance between capital
and labour. There are no signs of change of direction in this economic
course. Promises of poverty reduction by global leaders are mere lip
service, or photo-opportunities. During his campaign, Obama would
once in a while air his appreciation for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Since
his election the idea of a broad-based social welfare scheme has been
7 Abram de Swaan, In Care, ofthe State; Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe
and the USA in the Modem Era, Cambridge and New York 1988.
8
NLR 59
shelved without further ado. The global crisis is being tackled by a mas
sive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. The logic suggests a return
to nineteenth-century beliefs in the principle and practice of natural
inequality. On this view, it is not poverty that needs to be eradicated.
The problem is the poor people themselves, who lack the ability to pull
themselves up out of their misery. Handicapped by all kinds of defects,
they constitute a useless residue and an unnecessary burden. How to
get rid of this ballast?
ri
* I
Human evolution
Why music?
Dec 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Biologists are addressing one of humanity's strangest attributes,
its all-singing, all-dancing culture
"IF MUSIC be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it." And if not?
Well, what exactly is it for? The production and consumption of music is a
big part of the economy. The first use to which commercial recording, in
the form of Edison's phonographs, was to bring music to the living rooms
and picnic tables of those who could not afford to pay live musicians.
Today, people are so surrounded by other people's music that they take it
for granted, but as little as 100 years ago singsongs at home, the choir in
the church and fiddlers in the pub were all that most people heard.
Other appetites, too, have been sated even to excess by modern
business. Food far beyond the simple needs of stomachs, and sex (or at
least images of it) far beyond the needs of reproduction, bombard the
modern man and woman, and are eagerly consumed. But these excesses
are built on obvious appetites. What appetite drives the proliferation of
music to the point where the average American teenager spends IVz-ZVz
hours a day—an eighth of his waking life—listening to it?
Well, that fact—that he, or she, is a teenager—supports one hypothesis
about the function of music. Around 40% of the lyrics of popular songs
speak of romance, sexual relationships and sexual behaviour. The
Shakespearean theory, that music is at least one of the foods of love, has
a strong claim to be true. The more mellifluous the singer, the more
dexterous the harpist, the more mates he attracts.
A second idea that is widely touted is that music binds groups of people
together. The resulting solidarity, its supporters suggest, might have
helped bands of early humans to thrive at the expense of those that were
less musical.
Both of these ideas argue that musical ability evolved specifically—that it
is, if you like, a virtual organ as precisely crafted to its purpose as the
heart or the spleen. The third hypothesis, however, is that music is a
cross between an accident and an invention. It is an accident because it is
the consequence of abilities that evolved for other purposes. And it is an
invention because, having thus come into existence, people have bent it
to their will and made something they like from it.
She loves you
Shakespeare's famous quote was, of course, based on commonplace
observation. Singing, done well, is certainly sexy. But is its sexiness the
reason it exists? Charles Darwin thought so. Twelve years after he
published "On the Origin of Species", which described the idea of natural
selection, a second book hit the presses. "The Descent of Man and
Selection in Relation to Sex" suggested that the need to find a mate being
the pressing requirement that it is, a lot of the features of any given
animal have come about not to aid its survival, but to aid its courtship.
The most famous example is the tail of the peacock. But Darwin
suggested human features, too, might be sexually selected in this way—
and one of those he lit on was music.
In this case, unlike that of natural selection, Darwin's thinking did not set
the world alight. But his ideas were revived recently by Geoffrey Miller, an
evolutionary biologist who works at the University of New Mexico. Dr
Miller starts with the observations that music is a human universal, that it
is costly in terms of time and energy to produce, and that it is, at least in
some sense, under genetic control. About 4% of the population has
"amusia" of one sort or another, and at least some types of amusia are
known to be heritable. Universality, costliness and genetic control all
suggest that music has a clear function in survival or reproduction, and Dr
Miller plumps for reproduction.
One reason for believing this is that musical productivity—at least among
the recording artists who have exploited the phonograph and its
successors over the past hundred years or so—seems to match the course
of an individual's reproductive life. In particular, Dr Miller studied jazz
musicians. He found that their output rises rapidly after puberty, reaches
its peak during young-adulthood, and then declines with age and the
demands of parenthood.
As is often the case with this sort of observation, it sounds unremarkable;
obvious, even. But uniquely human activities associated with survival
cooking, say—do not show this pattern. People continue to cook at about
the same rate from the moment that they have mastered the art until the
moment they die or are too decrepit to continue. Moreover, the anecdotal
evidence linking music to sexual success is strong. Dr Miller often cites
the example of Jimi Hendrix, who had sex with hundreds of groupies
during his brief life and, though he was legally unmarried, maintained two
long-term liaisons. The words of Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led
Zeppelin, are also pertinent: "I was always on my way to love. Always.
Whatever road I took, the car was heading for one of the greatest sexual
encounters I've ever had."
Anecdotal evidence
linking music to
sexual success is
strong
Another reason to believe the food-of-love hypothesis is that music fulfils
the main criterion of a sexually selected feature: it is an honest signal of
underlying fitness. Just as unfit peacocks cannot grow splendid tails, so
unfit people cannot sing well, dance well (for singing and dancing go
together, as it were, like a horse and carriage) or play music well. All of
these activities require physical fitness and dexterity. Composing music
requires creativity and mental agility. Put all of these things together and
you have a desirable mate.
Improve your singing...
A third reason to believe it is that music, or something very like it, has
evolved in other species, and seems to be sexually selected in those
species, too. Just as the parallel evolution of mouse-like forms in
marsupial and placental mammals speaks of similar ways of life, so the
parallel evolution of song in birds, whales and gibbons, as well as
humans, speaks of a similar underlying function. And females of these
animals can be fussy listeners. It is known from several species of birds,
for example, that females prefer more complex songs from their suitors,
putting males under pressure to evolve the neurological apparatus to
create and sing them.
And yet, and yet. Though Dr Miller's arguments are convincing, they do
not feel like the whole story. A man does not have to be gay to enjoy the
music of an all-male orchestra, even if he particularly appreciates the
soprano who comes on to sing the solos. A woman, meanwhile, can enjoy
the soprano even while appreciating the orchestra on more than one
level. Something else besides sex seems to be going on.
The second hypothesis for music's emergence is that it had a role not just
in helping humans assess their mates, but also in binding bands of people
together in the evolutionary past. Certainly, it sometimes plays that role
today. It may be unfashionable in Britain to stand for the national
anthem, but two minutes watching the Last Night of the Proms, an annual
music festival, on television will serve to dispel any doubts about the
ability of certain sorts of music to instil collective purpose in a group of
individuals. In this case the cost in time and energy is assumed to be
repaid in some way by the advantages of being part of a successful
group.
The problem with this hypothesis is that it relies on people not cheating
and taking the benefits without paying the costs. One way out of that
dilemma is to invoke a phenomenon known to biologists as group
selection. Biologically, this is a radical idea. It requires the benefits of
solidarity to be so great that groups lacking them are often extinguished
en bloc. Though theoretically possible, this is likely to be rare in practice.
However, some researchers have suggested that the invention of
weapons such as spears and bows and arrows made intertribal warfare
among early humans so lethal that group selection did take over. It has
been invoked, for example, to explain the contradictory manifestations of
morality displayed in battle: tenderness towards one's own side;
ruthlessness towards the enemy. In this context the martial appeal of
some sorts of music might make sense.
Robin Dunbar of Oxford University does not go quite that far, but unlike
Dr Miller he thinks that the origins of music need to be sought in social
benefits of group living rather than the sexual benefits of seduction. He
does not deny that music has gone on to be sexually selected (indeed,
one of his students, Konstantinos Kaskatis, has shown that Dr Miller's
observation about jazz musicians also applies to 19th-century classical
composers and contemporary pop singers). But he does not think it
started that way.
...and your grooming
Much of Dr Dunbar's career has been devoted to trying to explain the
development of sociality in primates. He believes that one of the things
that binds groups of monkeys and apes together is grooming. On the face
of it, grooming another animal is functional. It keeps the pelt clean and
removes parasites. But it is an investment in someone else's well-being,
not your own. Moreover, animals often seem to groom each other for far
longer than is strictly necessary to keep their fur pristine. That time
could, in principle, be used for something else. Social grooming, rather
like sexual selection, is therefore a costly (and thus honest) signal. In this
case though, that signal is of commitment to the group rather than
reproductive prowess.
Dr Dunbar thinks language evolved to fill the role of grooming as human
tribes grew too large for everyone to be able to groom everyone else.
This is a controversial hypothesis, but it is certainly plausible. The
evidence suggests, however, that the need for such "remote grooming"
would arise when a group exceeds about 80 individuals, whereas human
language really got going when group sizes had risen to around 140. His
latest idea is that the gap was bridged by music, which may thus be seen
as a precursor to language.
The costliness of music—and of the dancing associated with it—is not in
doubt, so the idea has some hnerit. Moreover, the idea that language
evolved from wordless singing is an old one. And, crucially, both singing
and dancing tend to be group activities. That does not preclude their
being sexual. Indeed, showing off to the opposite sex in groups is a
strategy used by many animals (it is known as lekking). But it may also
have the function of using up real physiological resources in a
demonstration of group solidarity.
Like cheesecake,
music sates an
appetite that nature
cannot
By side-stepping the genocidal explanations that underlie the classical
theory of group selection. Dr Dunbar thinks he has come up with an
explanation that accounts for music's socially binding qualities without
stretching the limits of evolutionary theory. Whether it will pass the
mathematical scrutiny which showed that classical group selection needs
genocide remains to be seen. But if music is functional, it may be that
sexual selection and social selection have actually given each other a
helping hand.
The third hypothesis, though, is that music is not functional, and also that
Dr Dunbar has got things backwards. Music did not lead to language,
language led to music in what has turned out to be a glorious accident—
what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, by analogy with the
functionless spaces between the arches of cathedrals that artists then fill
with paintings. This is what Steven Pinker, a language theorist at
Harvard, thinks. He once described music as auditory cheesecake and
suggested that if it vanished from the species little else would change.
Dr Pinkers point is that, like real cheesecake, music sates an appetite
that nature cannot. Human appetites for food evolved at a time when the
sugar and fat which are the main ingredients of cheesecake were scarce.
In the past, no one would ever have found enough of either of these
energy-rich foods to become obese, so a strong desire to eat them
evolved, together with little limit beyond a full stomach to stop people
eating too much. So it is with music. A brain devoted to turning sound
into meaning is tickled by an oversupply of tone, melody and rhythm.
Singing is auditory masturbation to satisfy this craving. Playing musical
instruments is auditory pornography. Both sate an appetite that is there
beyond its strict biological need.
Of course, it is a little more complicated than that. People do not have to
be taught to like cheesecake or sexy pictures (which, in a telling use of
the language, are sometimes also referred to as "cheesecake"). They do,
however, have to be taught music in a way that they do not have to be
taught language.
Words and music
Aniruddh Patel, of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, compares
music to writing, another widespread cultural phenomenon connected
with language. True language—-the spoken languages used by most
people and the gestural languages used by the deaf—does not have to be
taught in special classes. The whole of a baby's world is its classroom. It
is true that parents make a special effort to talk to their children, but this
is as instinctive as a young child's ability (lost in his early teens) to absorb
the stuff and work out its rules without ever being told them explicitly.
Learning to write, by contrast, is a long-winded struggle that many fail to
master even if given the opportunity. Dyslexia, in other words, is
common. Moreover, reading and writing must actively be taught, usually
by specialists, and evidence for a youthful critical period when this is
easier than otherwise is lacking. Both, however, transform an individual's
perception of the world, and for this reason Dr Patel refers to them as
"transformative technologies".
In difficulty of learning, music lies somewhere in between speaking and
writing. Most people have some musical ability, but it varies far more
than their ability to speak. Dr Patel sees this as evidence to support his
idea that music is not an adaptation in the way that language is, but is,
instead, a transformative technology. However, that observation also
supports the idea that sexual selection is involved, since the whole point
is that not everyone will be equally able to perform, or even to learn how
to do so.
Do they know it's Christmas?
What all of these hypotheses have in common is the ability of music to
manipulate the emotions, and this is the most mysterious part of all. That
some sounds lead to sadness and others to joy is the nub of all three
hypotheses. The singing lover is not merely demonstrating his prowess;
he also seeks to change his beloved's emotions. Partly, that is done by
the song's words, but pure melody can also tug at the heart-strings. The
chords of martial music stir different sentiments. A recital of the
Monteverdi Vespers or a Vivaldi concerto in St Mark's cathedral in Venice,
the building that inspired Gould to think of the non-role of spandrels,
generates emotion pure and simple, disconnected from human striving.
This is an area that is only beginning to be investigated. Among the
pioneers are Patrik Juslin, of Uppsala University, and Daniel Vastfjall, of
Gothenburg University, both in Sweden. They believe they have identified
six ways that music affects emotion, from triggering reflexes in the brain
I
stem to triggering visual images in the cerebral cortex.
Such a multiplicity of effects suggests music may be an emergent
property of the brain, cobbled together from bits of pre-existing
machinery and then, as it were, fine-tuned. So, ironically, everyone may
be right—or, at least partly right. Dr Pinker may be right that music was
originally an accident and Dr Patel may be right that it transforms
people's perceptions of the world without necessarily being a proper
biological phenomenon. But Dr Miller and Dr Dunbar may be right that
even if it originally was an accident, it has subsequently been exploited by
evolution and made functional.
Part of that accident may be the fact that many natural sounds evoke
emotion for perfectly good reasons (fear at the howl of a wolf, pleasure at
the sound of gently running water, irritation and mother-love at the
crying of a child). Sexually selected features commonly rely on such pre
existing perceptual biases. It is probably no coincidence, for instance, that
peacocks' tails have eyespots; animal brains are good at recognising eyes
because eyes are found only on other animals. It is pure speculation, but
music may be built on emotions originally evolved to respond to
important natural sounds, but which have blossomed a hundred-fold.
The truth, of course, is that nobody yet knows why people respond to
music. But, when the carol singers come calling, whether the emotion
they induce is joy or pain, you may rest assured that science is trying to
work out why.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group.
All rights reserved.
•
1
»AVI» LOCKE
science as
Wi^itmg^
Yale
Unruerrity
Prea
New Haven
and
London
CONTENTS
Copyright © 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without writ
ten permission from the publishers.
Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Janson Text type by Brevis Press,
Bethany, Connecticut. Printed in the United States of America by
BookCrafters, Chelsea, Michigan.
Library of Congress Cataloging-m-Publiartion Data
Locke, David M. (David Millard), 1929Science as writing / David Locke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-300-05452-1
1. Scientific literature. 2. Communication in science. 3. Technical
writing. I. Title.
0225.5x63 1992
808'.0665-dc20
92-7824
Preface
vii
ONE Introduction: Science and Literature
1
TWO The Problematics of Representation
23
THREE Writing without Expression
FOOR The Rhetoric of Science
87
FIVE The Art of Artless Prose
116
SIX The Putative Purity of Science
SEVEN Writing as Reality
EIGHT Reading Science
Notes
211
Index
233
OP
Rev.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
57
1
167
200
133
preface
Spisss
tury. Much to the chagrin of those dedicated obstinately to the
preservanon o "standards,” literary scholars have turned riteir aten on om the classical to the vernacular literatures, from the
anaents to the moderns, even the postmodems. The literatures of
die thrrd world have for some time been in vogue, and a generation
minist critics has chaUenged the patriarchal monopoly of the
canon. There are many now who no longer feel constrained not
to examine even the popular, the ephemeral.
wilr^ fr°T
vperspective of literarV studies, and also
wrthrn the drscrplmes themselves, the various bodies of profes
sional, functional discourse have come increasingly under scrutiny
anguage, not as the mere conveyors of ideas. For philosophy,
anguage has always been a fit subject for study, and philosophers
long ago learned not to exempt their own discourse from their
analyses. Now they have redoubled their attention. History, as is
well known, is undergoing its own convulsive reconsideration of
its methods, including the problem of writing. Paramount, here,
of course, is concern over the charatter of historical narrative, but
the matter of style, too, plays its part; one thinks at once of histonan Peter Gay’s 1974 Styk in Histor,. The human sciences- to
vii
viii
Preface
borrow the European term—find their discourses coming increasingly un
der examination. Indeed, Donald.McCloskey’s 1985 Rhetoric of Economics
is one of the first in a projected series, Rhetoric of the Human Sciences.
In such a climate, it is hardly surprising that the languages of the hard
sciences should come finally to lose-or at least to find questioned — their
privileged position as pure functional notation, as mere shorthand records
of observations made and experiments performed. That such questioning,
such challenging, is currently underway, is the raison d’etre for this book,
and it is intended to make its own contribution to the argument
If, as it seems, no body of discourse is especially privileged—is able to
operate simply as a vehicle for the untrammeled expression of its ideas'—
any text which makes that argument suffers from the debilitating paradox
that it employs language it assumes operates precisely as it argues language
cannot operate. Short of silence, or self-conscious reference to this di
lemma with every statement made, there seems little choice but to proceed,
as this work does, knowing that the argument is problematized by its very
existence as discourse, but knowing also that, like all argument, however
problematized, it is worth making if it wins assent. Discourse, imperfect
though it may be, proceeds if human activity is to proceed.
To present the argument, I have selected material from a variety of
sources, choosing scientific writings from various disciplines, times, and
places, including some of those classic scientific texts that have entered the
realm of key cultural documents, variously designated as “great” books.
The argument can be made—has been made—that such texts, like Dar
win’s Origin of Species, in surviving to become classics no longer are read
strictly as scientific documents but rather have acquired a special status as
literature, a status that supposedly sets them apart from the ordinary, func
tional works of science. We will return to this point, but let me say here
that I do not believe that any special qualities of such texts can be divorced
from the essential features that permitted them to function effectively in
their own time and place. Although it is true that readings vary with read
ers — that every age, as they say, reads Shakespeare in its own way— that is
not .to say that new readings give old texts qualities they did not always
possess in posse. The musicianship in Bach’s church music does not spring
into being only when those works are played in the modem concert hall;
that musicianship is what made them successful, functional works in their
original environment. Similarly with scientific works: the text of the Origin
we read with so much appreciation today is not entirely different from the
text perused with such avidity by Darwin’s contemporaries. Nonetheless,
ix
I have tried to include a variety of illustrative materials because my argu
ment is a general one, which applies whenever and by whomever scientific
texts are read. I do not contend that every scientific document is read the
same way, nor that any one scientific document is read the same way by
every reader, but I do assert that every scientific text must be read, that it
is writing, not some privileged verbal shorthand that conveys a pure and
unvarnished scientific truth.
There is an increasing number of scientists for whom this argument will
not be news; there are historians and philosophers ofscience who have been
making essentially the same point for some time; and a number of literary
scholars are now bringing to bear on scientific texts precisely the kind of
scrutiny that is called for here. It is not to these persons that this volume
is addressed, though I hope they will welcome a general statement of the
basic assumptions on which, in many cases, their own work is based.
Rather, it is directed toward those who are not yet convinced - that body
of scientists who continue to believe that their language does not much
matter, that it is merely the empty vessel into which the content of their
scientific thought is poured; and those literary persons who see scientific
texts as something eke, something apart from the texts they examine, those
patterns ofsigns, those intricate interpenetrating laceworks of codes, which
they, and we, characterize as literary works.
I should like to acknowledge here my debts to those who have made the
preparation of this text possible. A sabbatical year from the University of
Florida permitted me to complete the first draft of the manuscript A num
ber of colleagues, namely Alistair Duckworth, John Leavey, Jack Periette,
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, and my old friend John R. Nabholtz have thought
fully commented on individual chapters of an earlier version of the text I
am extremely grateful to Melvyn New for plowing through that longer and
considerably more cumbersome manuscript in its entirety and giving me
his trenchant and helpfill criticism. I also am much indebted to my new
friend Roald Hoffmann for his helpful advice, as I am to several anonymous
reviewers of the manuscript. I am especially grateful to George Levine for
his detailed and helpful critique. David Loewus ofAngewandte Cbemie pro
vided numerous editorial suggestions, and my colleague John Van Hook
abundant bibliographic assistance. And I thank Marie Nelson and Muriel
Burks for coping with several equally untidy versions of the manuscript
and wedging them into those tiny disks. That I have managed to err in
I
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Science
and Literature
I
I -
t
>
N DECEMBER 1817, AT A DINNER THAT THE HOST, PAINTER BENJAMIN
Robert Haydon, has characterized as “immortal,” Charles Lamb
bibulously chided his host for including the visage of Sir Isaac
Newton in his Jerusalem. John Keats promptly joined Lamb in
declaring that Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rain
bow by reducing it to the prismatic colours.” The tipsy company
then drank “Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics,” af
firming once again the great gulf between poetry and science.’
Science and poetry. Which two human endeavors can be more
unlike? The one, cold, precise, factual; the other, warm, im
pressionistic, imaginative. And their practitioners: the poetimpassioned, frenzied, inspired; the scientist—aloof, calculating,
deliberate. Or so the stereotypes go. And, though like all stereo
types they do not represent the truth, like all stereotypes they seem
to carry more than a touch of the truth with them.
For three decades it has been fashionable to deny, or at least,
to decry, C. P. Snow’s division of the learned world into two
camps, two “cultures,” science and the humanities.2 That the de
nial still seems necessary is because the thesis still appears to most
of us so patently, so obviously, true, and its consequences — for
anyone concerned about the humanness of our existence — so pro
foundly troublesome. It is unthinkable that our best intellectual
efforts should be so forever split. Unthinkable; but inevitable?
f
1
i rcjuic
I
spite of die assistance and the corrections of these individuals I trust will
not be held against them.
Finally, I must note that like many others writing in a field that is sud
denly deluged with newly published material, I have had to indude only
citations to new works that ideally would have found their way more integrally into my discussion.
SCIENCE AS WRITINC
i
!
I
2
Introduction
I
Scimce and Literature
Swd’ay)
Poetry: “If the labours ofMentf sdence^ouM “ reC°nClle Scie“d
revolution .... the Poet will be at kh^ M
any niaterial
midst of the objects of science itself.”’
Carry"1B Sensatlon into ^e
down the years as EmX-d
SUCh nOtab,e Pra«rtioners
I
L
T
i™ « n« » c^de, hi,,, .
,»«
-of growing significance, this book will
1
’S™ "'d »» *>
the scientist and the ™ “s’ of th
PaP- of
-b!e that is, so uX one^“T
not to be compared. Such a judgment shm.IdL T “ *7 ?S*mply
the matter. But often in fact within th
jy’ °^C Inlgbt tbinlc. end
poetry (imaginative Iherature generallXTcX^X^
and
■o b.giX S .Md”™ ng I,■*” " bm'T
purpose being to deZ^ I r
°f s°>nce, the
ula^es fcSet0 lay
P-cas the opposite ext erne mist mt d'7SS,OnS’Scienti^ '^age is taken
3
“ (many °f them *he lite”ry the°riStS and Practicing critics
Scientific language tends toward such a system ofsigns as mathematics ■
or symbolic logic. Its .deal is such a universal language as the charMermca univmalis which Leibniz had begun to plan as early as the
'
ate seventeenth century. Compared to scientific language; literary : '
language will appear in some ways deficient. It abounds in ambigui,
»«; It is, like every other historical language, full of homonyms, ar- ’
b'trary or .national categories such as grammatical gender, it is
permeated with historical accidents, memories, and associations. In a
word, n is highly connotative.” Moreover, literary language is far
from merely referential. It has its expressive side; it conveys the tone 1
and attitude of the speaker or writer. And it does not merely state and 1
express what it says; it also wants to influence the attitude of the
reader, persuade him, and ultimately change him. There is a fiirther
important distinction between literary and scientific language: in the
former the sign itself, the sound symbolism of the word, is stressed.
All kinds of techniques have been invented to draw attention to it
such as metre, alliteration, and patterns of sound.’
The essential distinction between the two uses of language is still being
drawn m some circles today. Thus, in an essay entitled “Literature and
Science, published in 1982 in the Modem Language Association’s Intirnlafom of Literature, George Slusser and George Guffey begin by differ
entiating the two modes of discourse on the basis that one, the literary is
pnmanly perceptual (that is, interesting to perceive), whereas the other
the saenkfic, is largely conceptual (that is, valuable for the message it con
veys). Noris this an isolated instance. In an article entitled “Art and Sdrhem D0 Th'y Need„To
Leo Steinberg’s answer to his own
to b : ”
n°’ SUggeSdne that the
are dimply too different
to be yoked. And m presenting “The Rhetorical Case against a Theory
o Literature and Sdence,” Mark Kippennan argues that the two bodiZ
of discourse not only cannot be ’recondled’ but also that they must not
be _ He adds, “While both literature and sdence may ... use metaphor
and share s.milar linguistic structures, the rhetorical directions of the two
activities are not only different, they are opposed.”10
And, just as the traditional literary scholar seems intent on marking off
the literary domain from the writings of sdence, so the traditional scientist
4
Introduction
Science and
appears not reluctant to return the compliment. From its beginnings, mod
ern science has sought to achieve a mode of discourse conspicuously free
of literary affectations. Although Thomas Sprat was not in any sense of the
term himself a scientist, his often-cited remarks from the History ofthe Royal
Society surely reflect the intention, if not quite the practice, of his confreres
in that august body. After heatedly (and at some length) denouncing the
superfluity of talking” that has “overwhelm’d most other Arts and Prtfesstons” Sprat goes on to praise the custom of the Royal Society:
They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution, the
only Remedy, that can be found for this extravagance: and that has
been, a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digres
sions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity,
and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal
number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close,
naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; dear senses; a
native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness,
as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen,
and Merchants, before that, X>f Wits, or Scholars."
Today’s college or university student of science (or technology) is likely
to take a course labeled “technical writing” intended not, as the name
might suggest, to train students for employment as technical writers but
rather to prepare them for the writing they will do as part of their profes
sional activities. Significantly, textbooks for such courses often begin by
drawing the same kinds of distinctions between scientific and literary writ
ing that traditional textbooks of literature draw. Thus, a typical textbook
differentiates literature and sderitific writing in terms that are reminiscent
of those of Wellek and Warren:
This important distinction [between the subjective and the objective]
corresponds to the difference between literature and technical writ
ing. Literature is an interpretive record of human progress and is
based on imaginative and emotional experiences rather than the fac
tual record of human achievements. Technical writing, however, is
not history. (History is a record of our past; it subjectively interprets
and offers value judgments about the past) Literature is concerned
mainly with our thoughts, feelings, and reactions to experiences. Its
purpose is to give us insight. Technical writing concerns itself solely
with factual information; its language does not appeal to the emotions
nor to the imagination, but to the intellect. Its words are exact and
vature
5
precise, and its primary purpose is to inform. Its information is the
activity and progress of science and technology."
Although the Whiggish attitude of this passage toward scientific prog
ress and its blanket attribution of subjectivity to historical writing may not
meet with universal approbation, it probably reflects the attitude toward
their language of traditionalist scientists of our day, as well as those of
Thomas Sprat’s. Roland Barthes has perhaps best described this view of
the scientist’s attitude toward his or'her writing:
As far as science is concerned language is simply an instrument, which
it profits it to make as transparent and neutral as possible: it is subordinate to the matter of science (workings, hypotheses, results)
which, so it is said, exists outside language and precedes it. On the
one hand and first there is the content of the scientific message, which
is everything; on the other hand and next, the verbal form responsible
for expressing that content, which is nothing."
Yet, this by now familiar view of science versus literature, which one
sees in both literary and scientific circles, has, as already noted, its strong
counterview, science and literature, akin in aims and methods. This coun
terview- this countertradition - is being increasingly enunciated, and it is
the thesis of this book that the counter-tradition deserves the attention of
scientist and humanist alike, as well as of all who are simply interested in
the makings of our culture.
3
In the literary critical world, the countertradition, like the tradi
tion, has its venerable side. The Renaissance literary critic, for example,
responding to the “new science,” was likely to note something of the am
biguous kinship of literature and science. Thus, Sir Philip Sidney likens
(and differentiates) poetry and science. The poet, Sidney says, “yields to
the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher [scientist]
bestows but a wordish description.”14
With many contemporary critics the tendency to liken literature to sci
ence, or at least to downplay their differences, is even more marked. Not
that such critics would speak for the scientific objectivity of literature, but
rather that they would proceed from a judgment necessitated in some areas
of science-most notably quantum mechanics-that the ultimate objec
tivity of certain classes of scientific observation cannot be maintained. As
6
Introduction
Science and Literature
f
Wayne Booth says, “Now that the scientists have given up the claim that
they are seeking one single formulation of a firmly constituted reality, un
affected by the limitations and interests of the observer, perhaps we (in
literature] should once again pack up our bags and follow after.”1’
Indeed, it is part of the countertraditional argument that historically the
discourses of literature and science were not conceptually severed until rel
atively modern times- “no earlier than the mid-eighteenth century,” Ste
phen Weminger asserts.” “The bifurcation,” G. S. Rousseau says, “is a
figment of our post-Kantian imagination.”1’
Thus, witiiin literary studies, early and late, a countertradition seeks to
1 en, not differentiate, saence and literature. Turning now to science, we
i,
StOry 1Srmuch the same: here> too. 3 countertradition minimizes
the differences of saence and literature, to as great a degree perhaps as the
tradition maximizes them.
To begin with, some branches of science have themselves become in
creasingly self-conscious of their own use of language.'8 Thus, as noted in
quantum physics it has become firmly established that the findings are not
independent of the system that yields them, including the apparatus of the
science and the conceptualizations of the scientist. Here, even the “facts ”
those ultimate bits of “truth” the scientific method grinds out like sausage’s
become only quasifacts (queasy facts?) David Bohm, a theoretical physicist.’
speaks of the field: “Here, it is important to note that facts are not to be
considered as if they were independently existent objects that we might
find or pick up in the laboratory.... In a certain sense, we ‘make’ the fact
That is to say, beginning with immediate perception of an actual situation
we develop the fact by giving it further order, form and structure with the
a.d of our theoretical concepts.”'’ Thus, quantum physicists have been
kCC L become seIf-conscious about their own formulations, to believe
that what they think determines in some measure what they perceive (AU I
would add to this view is that it is the language of their formulations that
helps determine the shape of their pictures of the world.)
Much of the peculiarity of quantum mechanics stems from the fact that
the machinations of the experimenters inevitably disturb the system with
Which they are experimenting. Similarly, in the social sciences there is a
long tradition of uneasiness over the impact of the scientist-observer on
the society under observation. Classically, in their discourse, social sciennsts have sought to minimize this effect by adopting an objective, imper
sonal tone and expliatly noting only in certain stylized ways the incidental
e ects of their impacts on their informants. Now, however, some ethnog-
1
raphers at least, troubled by the artificiality of this procedure and above all
by its failure to deal with the complex realities of the interaction between
the observer and the observed, are rethinking the nature of their texts and
are experimenting with alternate modes of presentation. As a case in point,
the recent Writing Culture: Tie Portia and Politia ofEthnography presents
a group of symposium papers dealing with ethnography essentially 2s writ
ing. Collectively, the contributors to Writing Culture assert that ethno
graphic discourse, and presumably much of the discourse of social science,
is not the bare, unselfconscious record of observed social circumstance the
standard view of scientific discourse would claim it to be. As James Clifford,
one of the editors of the collection, observes of the contributors- “Their
focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the cdnstrutted, ar
tificial nature of cultural accounts.””
Both social science and quantum mechanics, however, may seem to be
exceptional cases. Everyone knows that the world of the quantum is most
peculiar (in terms of our everyday experience) and that the methodology
of social saence is soft compared to that of the hard sciences, like physics
and chemistry. It is perhaps not surprising then that their respective bodies
of discourse should themselves seem peculiar, unscientific. But even among
the “regular” sciences there exists, alongside the positivist view of the sci
entific document as the factual record of things done, another, rather more
sophisticated view, which recognizes the scientific report as, if not the
equivalent of a literary work, at least something of a construct, a contrivance.
Here, for example, is the advice of chemist-writers Louis and Mary
z
Fieser to a neophyte chemist on how to compose a scientific paper:
V
Proper organization of a paper is of key importance, but no simple
formula exists for achieving a forceful scheme of presentation. How
ever, one approach which is to be avoided is narration of the whole
chronology of work on a problem. The fiiU story of a research may
include an initial wrong guess, a false clue, a misinterpretation of di
rections, a fortuitous circumstance; such details possibly may have en
tertainment value in a talk on the research, but they are probably out
of place in a formal paper. A paper should present, as directly as pos
sible, the objective of the work, the results, and the conclusions; the
chance happenings along the way are of little consequence in the per
manent record.... Any simplification that can be achieved will cer
tainly increase clarity and lighten the burden of the reader.2’
Nor is this practice of manipulation of the material in scientific papers
8
Introduction
something new that twentieth-century science has introduced. Newton, in
the Opticks, confesses that the experiments he presents have been, at best,
selected to make his points: “In the Description of these Experiments, I
have set down such Circumstances, by which either the Phaenomenon
might be render’d more conspicuous, or a Novice might more easily try
them, or by which I did try them only.”22 This seems to imply that some
of the experiments described never were performed precisely as reported;
certainly it says that considerable selection has occurred in what is pre
sented.
Both Newton and the Fiesers justify their decisions on the ground of
clarity and simplicity. But some scientists are now willing to admit that this
kind of artful presentation has a rhetorical effect, if not a consciously rhe
torical purpose. Thus, one recent Nobel laureate, Sir Peter Medawar, re
marks, “In retrospect we tend to forget the errors [committed in scientific
research], so that ‘The Scientific Method’ appears very much more pow
erful than it really is, particularly when it is presented to the public in the
terminology of breakthroughs, and to fellow scientists with the studied hy
pocrisy expected of a contribution to a learned journal” (emphasis added).2’
It is this “studied hypocrisy,” this selecting, shaping, organizing, and ar
ranging of the material to produce an effect—even an effect of clarity and
directnes.s of presentation, if not of “power” and infallibility—that certain
scientists have come to recognize as signaling the nature of the scientific
document.
The scientific paper, in this judgment, is not a simple tale of what was
done in the laboratory, not a direct presentation of research carried out,
but a crafted, shaped object, formulated within rules and conventions, some
spoken (or written on the backs of scientific journals) and some tacitly
understood. Or, as another recent Nobel laureate, Roald Hoffmann, puts
it: “What is written in a scientific periodical is not a true and faithful rep- .
resentation (if such a thing were possible) of what transpired. It is not a
laboratory notebook, and one knows that that notebook in turn is only a
partially reliable guide to what took place. It is a more or less... carefully
constructed man- or woman-made rert.”24
Thus, even within the body of science there are signs of a different, non“standard” view of the texts of science, a view becoming increasingly wide
spread as those inside and outside science turn their attention to the dis
course of science itself. Indeed, as historians, philosophers, and sociologists
direct ever-doser scrutiny at the entire enterprise of science, they are
bringing the discourse of science under new, more critical examination.
Science and Lt^.alure
9
For some time, historians have eschewed the old-style history of
science, with its Whiggish retrojection of the present, “perfect” state of
science into the past and its hailing of the “discoverers” and “pioneers”
who first enunciated and defended present views. What new-style histo
rians of science seek to do'is better understand the science of the past in
its own terms, rather than judge it by how well it anticipates modem
science.
Historians are coming, also, to focus on the discourse of science as sig
nificant, itself of interest Thus, in his 1975 study, The Chemists and the
Word: The Didactic Origins ofChemistry, Owen Hannaway examines the cen
tral role played by competing views of the “role of language in the expli
cation of nature” in the emergence of chemistry as a discipline in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.25 Similar attention to scientific lan
guage as a determinant of scientific content is given by Frederic L. Holmes,
who demonstrates how Lavoisier’s early notebook formulations of his ideas
actually influenced the development of his research program.26
Philosophically, the edifice of positivist science has been under attack
since the 1930s, when Karl Popper effectively challenged the notion that
scientific hypotheses are proved, or verified, by the work that scientists do.
Arguing that scientific statements can be only disproved, never proved,
Popper makes falsification, not verification, the work of science. The best
scientific statement has not been proved, it has simply been repeatedly
tested and never falsified.
However it is viewed, the methodology of science has traditionally been
sharply differentiated from that of the humanities: on the one hand, sci
entific discovery, on the other, hermeneutic inquiry. But now certain phi
losophers—in rather different ways, for example, Paul Ricoeur and
Stephen Toulmin27 — are bringing scientific methodology under the rubric
of “hermeneutics,” a label that, in spite of its current usage as referring
broadly to the activity of deriving the meaning inherent in texts, still carries
some connotation of its initial reference to biblical exegesis. It is, of course,
the problematizing of the old scientific method, supposedly consisting of
hypothesis and proof, that allows that method to reappear as a hermeneutic
schema characterized by notions of guesswork and validation, or nonin
validation. As Toulmin says, “Once we recognize that the natural sciences
too are in the business of construing reality, we shall be better able to pre
serve the central insights of the hermeneutic method, without succumbing
10
Introduction
Science and Literature
11
to the misleading implications of its rhetorical misuse.’”’ In such a view
die marked differentiating feature the traditional view would insist them
to De?0
kus presents the beginning of a detailed humanistic analysis of scientific
discourse m a paper provocatively titled “Why Is There No Hermeneutics
of Natural Sciences? Some Preliminary Theses.”29
If saentific “truths” are always “framework dependent,” as claimed by
the movement mitiated by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, then the
framework or paradigm, is the enabling structure that determines what
the scientific facts can be taken to mean, and indeed how they can be de
termined. Between competing paradigms there is ho commensurability;
without some overarching paradigm to give a context for comparisoT
5
1
I
events construed within each paradigm must make their own kind of sense
In the most extreme version of framework-dependence, no one framework
can be preferred over another, and the movement of science from one par
adigm to another represents merely change, not progress.
i
srn ed
tem,S;that m°Vement fr°m P’* to P’radig"> « contrued as a series of saentific revolutions, dramatic shifts in scientific
bought and practice as scientists switch their allegiance. In this view, the
long, steady march of science, with the past as a series of ever-doser
approximations to the present, is simply an illusion. The periodic paradig
matic revolutions, the wrenching frameshifts, become inapparent, how
I
i-
ever, as saence surveys its past, simply because the past is always seen from,
and rewntten within, the prevailing paradigm. The “past” is the past the
para igm needs in order to account for its own present
The Kuhnian conception of saentific revolutions has been extremely
popular with hterary critics because its picture of periodic scientific change'
so much resembles the conventional view of literary change: broad literary
periods each governed by a single, conventional sensibility and bordered
by abrupt changes of convention - the Augustan Age, say, terminated by
the !LOmandC efb.el,,On- Such comParability suggests at once a kinship in
o modes of discourse, one hardly possible under the traditional view
of slow and steady scientific progress. To be sure, as every student of lit
erature knows, the more closely one examines the literary periods, the more
the distinctions between them blur and the more artificial the boundaries
seem. But so too has the post-Kuhniin history of science found the original
nouon of abrupt revolutionary paradigm shift something of an overrimphfication. In any case, however, the historical periodicities of the two
bodies of discourse emerge as not totally dissimilar and certainly not
i
I
I
.
Science, in addition, is now seen from certain perspectives as a
collective affair. Rather than proceeding by the accumulation of singular
discoveries of basic truths by isolated individuals, science is, in this view
an ongoing series of negotiations among groups of scientists variously com
peting and cooperating, seeking to arrive at views that will be acceptable
to as much of the community as possible. As physicist (and philosopher)
John Ziman says, 'Tht goal ofscience is a consensus ofrational opinion over the ..
ividest possible field
Detemumng the ways in which such consensus views are arrived at is a
goal of the new sociology of science. The traditional sociology of science
begun m die 1930s by Robert Merton and his school, concerned itself with
the organizational behavior of scientists and the impact of external social
stwttures on the saentific enterprise.” The Mertonians deliberately ex
cluded from their purview the substantive content of science- that is, they
studied how scientists work together and how they are influenced by so
ciety at large but not how these factors affect their accumulation of sci
entific knowledge." It is precisely to this area that the newer sociologists
of science-led by David Bloor, Barry Bames, and others-have turned.”
1 hus, these new sociologists argue that scientific “knowledge” is knowl
edge not because it correctly relates the true state of the natural world but
because it has been accepted as knowledge by the working body of scientists involved The causes of scientific knowledge, then, are to be sought in the
social relations by which saentists achieve consensus rather than in the
physical constraints of the external world. In achieving consensus scientists
perforce accept some beliefc as true and reject others as false, and it may
well be, the new sociologists hold, that the reasons they do so are them
selves largely social. Perhaps for strategic reasons - it being less challeng
ing to traditional views of what constitutes scientific knowledge - the new
sonologists early on sought to examine the social causes that compel hold
ers of false” or “marginal" beliefc to maintain them. Thus there were
sociological studies of such phenomena as ESP, ufos, acupuncture, and so
on. But the strong programme” of the new sociology, as laid out by
Bloor, is spnmetrical: it looks not only for the social causes of scientific
beliefs but for the same kinds of causes for “true” and “false” beliefc.”
I
12
Science and
Introduction
Indeed, a number of ethnographic studies of laboratory practice have
now appeared, testifying to the growing interest in examining the social
engagements of scientists as they go about their work of constituting sci
entific knowledge?6 Thus, in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of
Scientific Facts, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar present an “anthropo
logical” investigation of a neuro-endocrinology laboratory, which seeks to
demonstrate how conditional and qualified observational statements—
statements whose phraseology circumscribes their origin—eventually,
through social processes, become taken as statements of unqualified sd- .
endfic fret?7 Laboratory Life is a real-time invesdgadon, but the new so
ciological approach is applied to historical subjects as well. For example,
Leviathan and the Air-Pump, by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, ex
amines the controversy between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over
Boyle’s air-pump experiments and their interpretation?8 The study situates
the dispute in the context of Restoration society and presents social and
political reasons for the respective positions.
The paradigm-relativist and constructivist views of scientific knowledge
on which the new sociology is based are not, needless to say, universally
accepted. They run, for example, quite contrary to the instinctive thinking
of most working scientists. And a number of philosophers of science hold,
if not with the old positivism, at least with a new philosophical realism.
Such philosophers—Richard Boyd, for example”—argue that scientific
truths can be after all true (without quotation marks) and true of the real
world (again, without qualification). Interestingly enough, the realist po
sition has been used to “defend” literary criticism itself from the uncer
tainty and deconstruction introduced by the poststructuralists.40 Although
the realist position accords well with the operational thinking of most sci
entists, it has not won over the constructivists, who continue to insist that
scientific knowledge is made, not discovered.41
The paradigm-relativist and constructivist positions cast scientific dis
course in the countertraditional mold. Paradigm-relativism holds that the
discourse within a paradigm is essentially autonomous and the choice be
tween competing paradigms is a matter not of logic, but of rhetoric—
though historians and philosophers may avoid the latter term. Thus, since
considerations of scientific fact do not permit choices between paradigms,
shifts in paradigmatic allegiance come about only when the discourse of
one paradigm becomes more convincing to scientists than the discourse of
another. Similarly when scientific facts are constructed, the constructivist
holds, it is because the relevant scientists have found the discursive state-
rature
13
ments sufficiently convincing to be accorded the status of fact. In this view,
the discourse does not record preexisting frets; rather, the discourse de
termines what become the facts.
If, then, scientific discourse is an organ of persuasion, like literature, and
is an instrument for the construction of fact, as literature is of fiction, is
there not a kinship between the two bodies of discourse? Presumably. As
Latour and Woolgar say in a final footnote to Laboratory Ufey “Our dis
cussion is a first tentative step towards making clear the link between sci
ence and literature.”42 To a degree, Latour and Woolgar and the other
new sociologists are joined, perhaps somewhat anticipated, in their “first
tentative step” by certain literary critics, a number of historians of science,
and some scientists themselves, all of whom speak not to the differences
of science and literature but to their similarities.
And this leads us to the final question this chapter will address and the
central topic of this book: what, precisely, are the similarities and the dif
ferences in the discourses of literature and science?
I
i
i
*;
•
In the traditional comparisons of literary and scientific language
cited earlier, there are not only assertions that the two bodies of discourse
differ but indications as to how they differ. Thus, implicit in the discussion
of Wellek and Warren, for instance, is what was for some time a standard
formulation of the suitable perspectives from which one might view a lit
erary text. That is to say that any literary argument could be—and at var
ious times all literary arguments have been—validly based on one or more
of these relationships of the text: (1) with the world it seeks to represent,
(2) with the author whose views and feelings it aims to express, (3) with the
reader whose acceptance it tries to win, and (4) with its own inner being,
whose form it will embody *’ Equally implicit in this traditional argument
is the view that the scientific language, unlike the literary, is of significance
only with respect to its subject matter. Its purpose is merely to convey that
subject matter as clearly and simply as possible, and it is to be judged solely
by how well it does so. Any trace of the author is considered accidental;
any influence on readers, other than influence on their knowledge, is
thought irrelevant; any self-awareness of the text, as text, is unthinkable.
Recent literary theory deemphasizes several of the classic perspectives
and adds several new ones. Thus, it is argued that the literary work may
function (some would say, must function) in an extrahterary milieu, namely
14
Introduction
Science and Literature
15
m the political, social, and economic realm; it is, in this view, the milieu
noXg
°r’
‘ WriteS the textanother contemseX7 ’-XT
thC
“ mUkip,e
ofcodes,
serves - .f I may so supply sum up a complex series of arguments - a conotuung ^"cuonjlius, the codes of the text “write” thfZthor (and not
i
I the reverse); the codes create the reader (and not the reverse); indeed the
codes construct the world the text purports to describe.
One might well anticipate that, since traditional literary criticism views
as “me "I ™nOUS X ’M' maintainingits “"gnlar view of ffie scientific text
off
rep7sentaufonal"ewer literary critical modes too mark
dete^in rary
the sdentific-extend neither social
determinism nor textual constructivity to the discourse of science And
urely there are those who would hold such traditional views. To anticipate
our argument however, these contemporary critical modes are generally
ore congenial to the countertraditionalists and play an important role in
the countertraditional argument that literary and scientific tarts resemble
each other more than they differ.
resemoie
7
i
i
1 •
Traditional scientists are likely to agree with their literary critical
oth"“XT k at
<?1SC°UT “represenB” and th« « bears nole of the
other hallmarks variously ascribed to literature. As Barthes has suggested
they reguferiy cons.der their writings as separate and distinct from ffiefr
real, scientific work-making observations of and performing experiments
Wit the real world and, on the basis of those observations and experiments
drawing inferences about the nature of that world. That the tX kinds of
ctivity are conceived to be separate and distinct can easily be seen How
■s one to interpret Darwin’s often-cited remark, “A naturalist’s life
would be a appy one if he had only to observe, and never to write”?44 A
recent techmeal writing text is explicit on the same point: “Actually they
[scientists or engineers] are handed two very different problems when they
are given a technical assignment and then asked to report on it. First, they
must do the assigned techmeal work, make the study, gather the ffifo/
mheX””'16"™"6 What “ meanS’ Ne”’theX mUSt reP°rt °n
work
Scientists traditionally perceive the relation between what they do and
What they write as “representation” or “mirroring,” thereby agreeing with
die literary critical characterization of their discourse. It is not difficult to
find precise usage that supports this assertion. Thus one text on the writing
Of engineering reports makes the following comment, presumably as
applicable to scientific as to engineering discourse: “In any report of ene7jeT«gAdejVe 0Pment the Wr'ting nfltCtS
work itself” Emphasis
added). And an instructional volume for those writing papers for any
professional journal says, “Organization in scientific writing is frequently
a reflection of a specific scientific method” (emphasis added).”
Do scientists in the traditional camp, however, share the literary critical
view that their work is devoid of those other qualities (expressivity, evocativity, and so on) variously assigned to the literary text? To begin with
such scientists surely do not believe that their writing is, like the poets’’
expressive Of all the shibboleths that science promotes about its own en
terprise, the most pervasive is this: that science is objective and impersonal.
Indeed we are repeatedly told, it is only through its objectivity, its im
personality, that science arrives at its ultimate truths. There is also a con
sensus among scientists that the objectivity of science must be duly
reflected in the corollary objectivity of its discourse. As the Fiesers say in
their Style Guidefor Chemists: “We do not want our personality to emerge
m our writing and divert attention from the story we are trying to tell
Good writing, for us, is writing that is readable, clear, and interesting. We
can do Without style; indeed characteristics identifying a particular author
are liable to be not marks of style but violations of principles of good
usage.
As Albert Einstein noted in the introduction to his layman’s ac
count of relativity. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, he “ad
hered scrupulously to the precept of that brilliant theoretical physicist L
Boltzmann, according to whom matters of elegance ought to be left to the
tailor and to the cobbler.’*49
Many would go beyond the mere assertion of good taste or appro
priateness in the choice of an objective voice for scientific discourse For \
them the public verifiability of scientific findings is an essential part of the
scientific method, and public verifiabfljty demands a public, an objective '
language. Lmguist Leonard Bloomfield, in his Linguistic Aspects of Science’ ‘
explains: “Saence deals with the phases of response that are alike for all
normal persons. Its observations and predictions can be tested by anyone.... Unique personal or communal behavior figures in science as an
object which may be observed like any other; but it does not figure as a
part of scientific procedure.”™ Whether or not all traditional scientists to-
16
Science and Literature
Introduction
day would endorse this view of precisely why their language is the way it
is, most would almost surely agree that it is, as -Bloomfield describes it, a
language devoid of “private connotations.”
It is also a language, they would agree, that eschews rhetoric. This idea
is venerable. Thus, Robert Hooke, from his draft preamble to the sututes
of the Royal Society: “The business of the Royal Society is: To improve
the knowledge of natural things ... (not meddling with Divinity, Meta
physics, Morals, Politics, Grammar, Rhetoric,, or Logicks).”51 Nor is this
simply an old-fashioned attitude. Gunther Stent, a contemporary molec
ular biologist turned historian of science, accepts the traditional split be
tween the objective language of science and the affective language of art.
Thus, Stent says, science deals with “the outer, objective world of physical
phenomena. Scientific statements therefore pertain mainly to relations be
tween or among public events.” Artistic statements, on the other hand,
“pertain mainly to private events of affective significance.”52 The Bloomfieldian view of scientific discourse is that, just as the scientist-writer tries
not to express individual, subjective, and affective material, the scientist
reader learns not to respond to or to ignore any such material that is un
wittingly expressed. “As, by convention and training, the participants in
scientific discourse learn consistently to ignore all private factors of mean
ing, the lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of their informal dis
course become indifferent: each scientist responds to each discourse only
with the relevant operations or their linguistic substitutes.”5’ Scientific lan
guage, in short, insulates itself from the provocation of any response other
than operational understanding.
With respect to traditional scientists’ view of the “artful” character of
their writings, it probably coincides with the judgment about scientific doc
uments given by the traditional critic, namely that they have no intrinsic
interest as writing, that they merely serve — adequately enough, perhaps—
their utilitarian purpose of having their scientific say. Indicative of this
judgment is the phrase “Reconstruction of an Investigation,” employed as
a chapter title in one technical writing text to describe the report-writing
process.54 At the same time this view is entirely consonant with the sci
entific views that hold that the scientific work is merely a representation,
that it is not expressive, that it has no rhetorical effect. Thus the scientist’s
paper is a land of artless setting forth of what has been done, a transcript,
a recording, a “mere” representation, writing that serves no purpose other
than to transmit clearly whatever view lies behind it. Ideally, it is itself
unseen, unobserved, undetected — certainly un-“interesting.”
i
1
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i
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A central tenet of the “mystique” of science is that science is by virtue
of its method insulated froni any social, political, or economic pressures.
- Science, it is said, is dedicated to discovering the truth undeterred by
extrascientific concerns; it is, in its essence, socially disinterested, ethically
neutral, morally uncommitted, and pragmatically indifferent.
The scientific method itself is what is said to isolate, objectify, and neu
tralize science-free it from the curse of the human, individually or col
lectively. To make this possible, the scientist, or the apologist for science,
often will divide the enterprise of the scientist into two portions, the phase
of generation, in which the ideas are bom, and the phase of justification,
or verification, in which they are tested.55 The scientific idea may come
from anywhere — myth, ideology, the unconscious — and one need not be
concerned, because the scientist at once moves on to the process of veri
fication. Now the contaminated idea is tested in the crucible of the sctentific method. The fire of scientific scrutiny bums away from the idea—
the hypothesis or the-theory—the stain of its origin. In this way, one can
acknowledge the humanity of the scientist and yet maintain the ultimate \
1
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objectivity of the endeavor.
In a similar view, the traditional scientist will insist on the freedom of
science from contamination by the ends to which it is employed. Science
may become a social tool, may do the world’s work, but it remains un
tainted by that use. Science, in this official view, is an instrument; its blade
can be used for life-saving surgery or human sacrifice and will wipe as clean
in either case. One can acknowledge the misuse of science, its employment
in unsavory ways (as in the Nazi concentration camps), while maintaining
that science itself remains uncorrupted by such (mis)employment. Indeed,
the traditional view will hold, science cannot long be misapplied because
its method carries the mechanism to prevent such misuse, namely its own
need for freedom of inquixy. The all-important verification procedures of
science must be free to operate unchecked or the whole enterprise will
cease to work
Similarly, to much of the world of science, any reference to the “textuality” of its substance, any assertion that its language is operative in
shaping its thought, in constituting its world, would be simply incompre
hensible. To traditional scientists, the notion that their language is itself
operative - a force, an instrumentality, that shapes the course of sciencewill, simply, not be believed. Such a scientist is, without consciously di
recting attention to the matter, convinced that scientific language is itself,
as Barthes has described it, “transparent,” the invisible, intangible, im- |
18
Introduction
Science and Literature
I
potent carrier of the scientific thought. What matters is the substance of
scientific thinking, not its formulation.
Traditionalist scientists, then, agree with their counterparts in the
literary world not only in their judgment as to the dichotomy of their respecuve discourses - two cultures, two languages - but also in their delin
eation of scientific language as essentially representational and devoid of
those other qualities - expressivity, affectivity, artfiilness, social artifactuahty, textual constitutivity-variously thought to give literary language
ns literariness.
56
parcel of the content of the thought itself. Thus, even countertraditional
8
The countertradition, needless to say, makes its own very different
companson of the respective discourses of literature and science. Neither
within the saentific camp nor within literary criticism have the counterculturahsts systematically developed modes of comparison of the two
forms-a gap this book is intended in part to fill. But one can certainly
make some observations as to the thinking that lies behind the various
countertraditional critiques.
Within science, even the countertraditionalists will probably not trouble
themselves to challenge the traditional view that scientific discourse is in
considerable measure rtpr^tational- after all, even nontraditional science
is about something. Nor are countertraditional scientists likely to insist
contra tradition) that their discourse is eaprernve; traditional insistence on
the objectivity of saentific discourse is very difficult to shake off. But the
countertraditional scientist, as noted, will see a degree of ^cation in sci
entific: discourse and will not hesitate to acknowledge some rhetorical ef
fect if not rhetorical intent. Even the Fiesers advise their fellow chemists
on how to ease the burden of the reader.” Furthermore, such scientists
will concede that the saentific document is something of a construct-“a
man- or woman-made text,” as Roald Hoffmann says-not perhaps an art
object, like a poem, but nonetheless something that is crafted and shaped.
Although modem saence is a collective affair, and working scientists
daily immerse themselves in the activities of their scientific culture - itself
embedded in the social structures of the world at large - nonetheless, like
most of us engaged in soaal practices, scientists are likely not to perceive
the soaal constraints on their thought, but to see them simply as part and
19
i
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scientists are not much given to pressing the case that their scientific dis
course is socially shaped, let alone socially determined. It is true that eth
nographers, as noted above, have been forced to consider their own
subjective cultural frames as shaping their perceptions of the object cultures
they encounter. And historians ofscience have for some time viewed social
forces (in this case, largely external social forces) as shaping the scientific
enterprise, Marxist critiques, in particular, having a quite extended his
tory. Recently, countercultural historian Robert M. Young, in arguing
against the conception of separate “internalist” and “externalist” histories
of science, has emphasized the mutual exchanges of influence between sci
ence and the social, political, and economic realm.” But it is largely the
new sociologists of science who have made the countertraditional case that
the scientific document is, in effect, a social artifact shaped by and func
tioning in the social milieu-the milieu of science and the milieu of the
surrounding world.
................................
Finally, countertraditional science, most notably quantum mechanics,
m largely removing the privileged status of the scientist observer and forc
ing a consideration of the observer-observed as a single system, which must
be judged in its entirety, has made the scientists’ activities, as reported in
their papers, m considerable measure constitutive of their results. In the
quantum mechanical field, at least, scientists have been forced to concede
that much of what they “find” they have themselves contrived or collab
orated m. For many contemporary historians and philosophers of science,
too-most notably the paradigm-relativists and the constructivists - the
subject matter of any body of saence is largely determined by the frame
work in which that science is conceived. Even these arch-countertradi- t
tionalists among the sdentists and the historians of science, however, are I
unlikely to focus on the language formulations of science as themselves
being determinative of scientific knowledge. Thus, the countertradition of
science takes a step, but only a step, along the pathway from the traditional
emal of the textually determinative character of scientific discourse. In
sum, then, countertraditional science and historical, philosophical, and so
ciological students of saence would modify the traditional view of scientific
discourse as sharply marked off from literary discourse (in all but its rep
resentational aspects), particularly in emphasizing its rhetorical and social
aspects and m recognizing, to a degree at least, its character as text, and
indeed as constitutive text.
21
Science and Literature
20
Introduction
o•
Within literary studies, the countertraditional view of _Ae dis-
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pap'rtematic analysis of scientific discourse is most associated with the
work of Gerald Holton, although the study of thenjauc usa8e
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22
Introduction
!
To proceed, we shall take up each of the six perspectives noted
above as adopted at various times and under various circumstances for the
reading of literary texts, investigating in turn the utility of each for the
reading of scientific texts. (Even those approaches not currently in vogue
in literary circles will prove relevant to the project.) In the argument, we
shall adopt the convenient fiction that six discrete theories exist, each
making its own competing claim for validity in the reading of the text: (1)
representation theory, which sees the literary work as essentially a repre
sentation of the real world; (2) expression theory, which views that work
as an expression of its author’s thoughts and feelings; (3) evocation theory,
which values it as an evoker of response from its readers; (4) art-object
theory, which judges the work as an objet d’art, interesting in its purely
formal properties; (5) artifact theory, which situates the work in its social
milieu; and (6) instrumentality theory, which places the work among the -i
signifying systems that organize, structure, indeed constitute, the world. J
Successive chapters will, in turn, briefly examine each theory for its general
validity for scientific texts and with reference to specific texts seek to de
termine the value of the theory as an entree to the faller reading of the
texts in question.
■ ->
To anticipate the outcome, we shall see that the traditional judgment
should be essentially reversed: that though scientific and literary discourses
both represent, they do so in rather different ways, and that both bodies
of discourse are approachable by methods suggested by other theories.
Thus, we shall find, nothing in the literary critical armamentarium is per
se to be ruled off-limits in the examination of scientific texts.
Indeed, each of the six theories will reveal something of importance
about the reading of scientific texts: something scientists need to know if
science is to proceed with fall awareness of its own methodology; some
thing the world of literary criticism needs to know if it is to understand
fally its own modes of reading and their range of applicability; something
all who dwell in the world science has made need to know if they are to
understand that world and how it works. If there are two cultures, they
interpenetrate. And if the world is to appreciate what the scientific culture
is saying, and what it is doing by saying, it must employ the methods of the
literary culture to discover how it is saying, and doing, it.
CHAPTER TWO
The Problematics of
Representation
LTHOUGH TRADITIONAL SCIENTISTS ARE LIKELY NOT TO DEMUR ATTHE
suggestion that their writing is in some sense representation, they
are less prone than the literary critic to refer to that representation
as imitation (the famed mimesis of Plato and Aristotle). This may
merely be because few scientists are raised on Aristotle’s Poetics.
More important, however, it suggests that scientists do not think
that the markedly illusionistic effects commonly attributed to lit
erary representation are important in their kind of discourse. Most
people would probably agree that there is little scientific discourse
that creates the kind of felt presence traditionally associated with
literary representation; one would never expect the botanist’s daf
fodils to “flutter and dance” before our eyes as Wordsworth’s do.
Saentists, to be sure, are expected to describe their experiments
in enough detail to permit their replication by any other scientist
similarly trained, but their descriptions are not required to create
the illusion that the described events occur as real events before
one’s eyes, any more than the cook’s recipes do.
Scientists, above all, hold that their representations are not fictive, as literary representations may frankly be; they report what,
in fact, the scientists believe really to have occurred. At the same
time, however, the scientists’ representations need not be faithful
to life or our expectations of life, as the classical view of mimesis
holds that literature must be “probable,” as Aristotle decrees,' be
cause the scientists’ events purport to be true. The most unlikely
23
24
The Problematics of Representation
or unexpected of scientific results may be thought to carry with them the
stamp of truth, so that they need not be made to seem likely, just as they
need not be made illusionistically real. Sir Alexander Fleming did not need
to conceal his surprise that his bacterial cultures had died in the vicinity of
Penicillium molds, nor did Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner seek to make
“probable” the finding of light atoms among the products of uranium
decay.
. Yet, just as the classical and the neoclassical critics claim literary repto be generally true, to assert a widely applicable truth,2 so sci
entists, they would hold, aim ultimately at general laws. A scientist who
does not uncover laws of general validity is not functioning as a true sci
entist. When scientists, however, arrive at general laws, they, unlike the
poet, enunciate them. The job of the poet is to exemplify truths, not to
formulate them in words. Poets clothe their insights in actions that show
them to us; scientists give us their insights verbatim. Whereas Newton
states his laws of motion, Shakespeare portrays his truths of the human
heart by particularizing them: There are, indeed, literary traditions in
which the authorial personae speak to us, direct our thinking, even dictate
our judgments, but these must themselves derive from the experience pre
sented, and there is clearly a tendency to favor—Jamesian realism indeed
demands—the suppression of such overt instruction. “Showing,” in the
words of the English teachers, is preferred to “telling.”
Further,, the neoclassical view of literary representation typically holds
that what is portrayed is to be shown as in some way better than what is
real. There are suggestions of this even in Aristotle,’ but it is the neoclass
ical critic who gives the idea fall voice. Thus, Sir Philip Sidney asserts:
Nature’s “world is brazen; the poets only deliver a golden.”4 Traditional
scientists, in their turn, would not think of improving on nature in what
they represent; their only aim, they aver, is to find and depict what is really
in nature. This view, to be sure, we must not let stand unchallenged, even
I provisionally, for every effort the scientist makes, as we will see, is to “imI prove” on nature: the curves have been artificially smoothed, the equations
are merely approximate, and the laws hold only in some ideal Newtonian
» universe.
Traditional scientists, finally, do not trouble themselves to be “realis
tic,” as literary realism proclaimed literature must be. Or, rather, it does
not occur to them they can be anything other than realistic; they believe
that they are setting down, representing, what really happened, and that
that representation must be, on the face of it, realistic. Nor do they detect
The Problem-acs of Representation
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25
external conventions that might determine their view of how reality is to
be experienced, like those that we have now come to believe affect the
artist’s view of reality. In this respect, the scientist joins with the artist in
being largely unconscious of the social conventions that so heavily deter
mine their respective views of reality. As to changing artistic conventions,
however, here the artist- and the scientist are likely to part company.
Whereas the artist is likely to be aware of altering the conventions of the
craft—or to feel that he or she is abandoning conventions of representation
altogether—in the name of achieving greater fidelity to “nature” or to
“truth,”5 the scientist will likely feel no such impulse. To be sure, many
scientists may believe that the “pictures” they paint of nature are a more
faithful likeness than those of their predecessors, but only by virtue of the
efficacy of their science, not because of the skill of their representation.
The scientist deals, science believes, with “eternal” truths. The dis
course of science, to the scientist who holds to a traditionalist view, is a
cumulative, ever-growing store of knowledge, not quite unchanging per
haps, but approaching asymptotically to the absolute truth. One wellknown historian of science presents the traditional view of the working of
science as follows: “The examination of records of observations by trained
minds leads to classification; from classifications general rules or ‘laws’ are
deduced; these laws may be applied to further observations; failures in cor
respondence between new observations and accepted laws may result in
alterations of the laws; and these alterations lead to yet further observa
tions; and so on. This is usually held to constitute the ‘method’ of science.”6
In this view, scientific representation can be only true and universal. Even
when “records of observations by trained minds” give laws that need ul
timately to be altered, the “records of observations” still stand; the altered
laws must account for them as well as for the “new observations.” Viewed
thus, the discourse of science displays no counterpart of the changing con
ventions, the shifting notions of what constitutes realistic representation,
that give the literary world its look of undergoing periodic waves of altered
sensibility.
As to literature, it must be noted that representation theory is not a force
in literary criticism today. The theory that played so leading a role in clas
sical and neoclassical criticism, that formed the very credo of realism, has
had but an exceedingly minor role to play in the theater of criticism since
the coming of modernism and the New Criticism.7 And, perhaps not co
incidentally, epistemology, as Richard Rorty points out, has now aban
doned its own version of representation theory—namely, that the mind
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