Introspection is often necessary in academic work, not simply concerning the objects of the mind, but also the actual manner in which intellectual work is done. This typically comes under the heading of methodology. Yet the meaning of methodology is not always clear, particularly within the so-called theory disciplines that span Marxism, feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and related fields. Some prefer the self-serving and somewhat vain conviction that theory and methodology are one and the same pursuit. Hence “doing theory” would seem to preempt the thorny exercise of methodological introspection, rendering it moot. Why speak of method, when theory is nothing but method? Why worry about other tasks, when theory is king?
Yet the reality of higher education contradicts such pat conclusions. In fact academic halls are teaming with a vast array of different research methods, from the positivistic expediency of quantitative investigation, to the staging of ethnographic interviews, to the narrative reductions of historiography, to the various instrumentalized strains of hermeneutics such as the Marxist reading, the feminist reading, or the psychoanalytic reading.
In other words methodology today has a distinctly liberal profile. For every taste there is a method to match. For every predilection there is a satisfaction to be had. In order to be successful today a student or scholar must internalize the many options and enact them appropriately given the task at hand; this method for that problem, followed by a new method for the next. In this sense methodology today is often more a question of appropriateness than existential fit, more a question of personal style than universal context, more a question of pragmatism than unwavering conviction.
But appropriateness is a thorny business and not everyone agrees on matters of taste. Many methodological discussions devolve into a sort of popularity contest. Who advocates what method and for what purpose? Which general equivalent trumps all others? Is it sexuality, or is it class, or is it the logos, the archive, the gaze, desire, play, excess, singularity, resistance, or perhaps life itself, elevating one methodological formation above all others in a triumphant critique (to end all future critique)?
A contradiction thus emerges: the historical forces that generate liberal ecumenicalism, are the same forces that strive to canalize and entrain such heterogeneity under a single symbolic order. The liberal profile of contemporary scholarly methodology is thus a kind of method-effect in which diversity of method is simultaneously asserted and withheld.
The situation is even more puzzling however, as many humanities disciplines have in recent years marked a shift away from qualitative methods, as diverse and multitudinous as they are, in favor of more quantitative and empirical research techniques. In an apparent rebuff to methodological ecumenicalism, the positivistic expediency of quantitative research has tended to outflank other methods within Western modernity, as today's debate around digital humanities again makes clear. Appeals to empirical verification, to the reduction of complexity into simplicity, to the principles of repeatability and objectivity, to the sequential logic of the syllogism or the deductive argument, appeals, in short, to the paradigm of Enlightenment reason handed down since the Baroque turn of Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and Leibniz, have gradually edged out all the others. A liberal array of possibilities, galvanized to a single methodological tendency--but why, and how?
Perhaps the very question of method refers to that moment in history when knowledge becomes production, when knowledge loses its absolute claims to immanent efficacy, when knowledge ceases being intuitive and must be legitimized via recourse to some kind of meta-discourse. The ability to speak authoritatively is not a newfound right bestowed to humanity in the modern period, as recounted in the various narratives around triumphant secularism, the death of God, and the rise of reason. Today such authority is precisely the thing corrupted and debased into all manners of intellectual haggling. Method is already fragmented when it arrives; the apotheosis comes later.
So to observe that quantitative, rationalistic methods became dominant is not simply to claim that scientific positivism won the battle of wits, having transformed the nature of knowledge production and truth since the early modern period. It is also something else, for the liberal iteration of methodologies (in the plural) is itself a method-effect. The liberal iteration is precisely the only flavor available to anyone subscribing to the cult of scientific positivism in the first place.
What other mode could possibly be as efficient as pure suitability itself, pure individual appropriateness, the raw granularity of every body satiated by its own unique specificity? As with postfordism, what results is a field of infinite customization, where each thinker has a method tailored to his or her preferences. Such capacious liberalism takes great pride in the fact that no single methodological authority can ever truly be triumphant, whether that authority be God, jouissance, pragmatic reasonableness, or positivistic verifiability. In other words, even in the face of the seeming liberal fragmentation of the many methodologies, such liberalism nevertheless simultaneously enshrines the law of positivistic efficiency, for what could be more efficient than infinite customization? What better way to wrangle this rainbow coalition than to grant everyone in it the freedom to do what they will? Standardize the world and kill the spirit, but empower difference and the individual is unchained. In short, under postfordism liberal ecumenicalism and positivistic efficiency share a special relationship.
For cultural workers this presents something of a problem. The triumph of quantitative methods seems to devalue and exclude much of what cultural workers do. And the reverse is true as well, since many cultural workers often see little point in positivistic pursuits, regularly writing them off as wrong-headed, soulless, or myopic. Faced with such crises of method, some cultural workers prefer to withdraw into a more rigorous critical practice, not, as their detractors might claim, to cling to some sense of cloistered security granted to the armchair philosopher, but because of the newfound perspective gained from thinking in a way that is asymmetrical to the current state of affairs.
Yet humanists pursuing quantitative research methods face an additional challenge. For today’s corporate titans consist of little more than highly evolved modes of quantitative research. An Internet search company’s page rank algorithm taps into a mass of intellectual labor performed in the field. It supplements this laboring mass with its own intellectual labor, the labor of data extraction, storage, and processing. So in many cases what used to be intellectual work is now industrial work. When using quantitative methodologies in the academy (spidering, sampling, surveying, parsing, and processing), one must compete broadly with the sorts of media enterprises at work in the contemporary technology sector. A cultural worker who deploys such methods is little more than a lesser Amazon or a lesser Equifax.
A century ago capital had a monopoly on the physical materiality of production. Now it has a monopoly on the immaterial sphere of informatic commerce. Industry has finally moved into the realm of intellectual labor, and by most reports it is excelling beyond all expectations. Many scholarly researchers must therefore face a startling fact: the corporate sector simply has far superior data reserves at their disposal. Thus, in the information society, the scholar of information will forever be trapped in a deficit of resources, playing catchup behind the scads of mathematics PhDs on staff at Google. Never before in history have immaterial and informatic assets been so closely intertwined with capital.
But beyond the challenge of unequal talent and resources is the question of critical efficacy. Is it appropriate to deploy positivistic techniques against those selfsame positivistic techniques? In a former time such criticism would not have been valid or even necessary. Marx was writing against a system that laid no specific claims to the apparatus of knowledge production itself--even if it was fueled by a persistent and pernicious form of ideological misrecognition. Yet today the state of affairs is entirely reversed. The new spirit of capitalism is found in brain work, self-measurement and self-fashioning, perpetual critique and innovation, data creation and extraction. In short, doing capitalist work and doing intellectual work--of any variety, bourgeois or progressive--are more aligned today than they have ever been. Hence there appears something of a moral crisis concerning the very validity of scholarly methodologies. Such methods are at best underfunded and impotent cousins to the new algorithmic industries, and at worst unknowing shills for that same system of canalization and debasement.
The question is no longer can we use the master’s tools to take down the master’s house? Today the question is can we still use our own tools, now that the master has taken them up?
(Excerpted from Alexander R. Galloway, “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25, no. 1 [2014]: 107-131.)