I’ve bounced off of Ellul again. This time I was trying to go through Propaganda and I just kept hitting moments that made me go “hang on”. And it made me do something that I’m sure other people do but I never hear anybody talk about: the “_____ sucks” search. It is pretty much what it sounds like. I type “Ellul’s Propaganda sucks” and see what it comes up with. I tried this a couple different ways and came up with nothing but praise. It wasn’t until searched for reviews of his work on JSTOR that I found any skeptical opinions.
If you are the kind of academic that gets off on “academic pettiness” or things of that kind, it will be hard to beat the review of Propaganda made by Daniel Lerner in the American Sociological Review. He starts out with heat: “What this book tells us about propaganda is less interesting than what it tells us about Jacques Ellul, about the present state of mind of French social scientists, and about the ‘Cartesian method’ today.” But this isn’t what really grabbed me.
What stuck out to me about Lerner’s critique is the extent to which Ellul comes across as a rank amateur. “Moreover, Ellul does not really know this structure [a database of findings], apparently having relied wholly on a dozen or so standard American books and anthologies, and he uses these works in the most cavalier fashion”. I looked at a few more reviews of Ellul’s work; three French reviews of Propaganda (with Google Translate to help muddle through) and an English review of The Technological Society. Two of the French reviews were vaguely complimentary of Ellul’s work in a way that made me think they hadn’t really engaged with it. The other French review was more skeptical but was also brief and its issues were more high-level. It was the two English reviews which actually best laid out how Ellul’s work was inadequate.
But I’m not bringing all this up to dunk on Ellul. I’ve got nothing against dunking on Ellul, but that’s not why I’m telling you this. The reason I bring it up is because the difference in opinion between the non-academic view of Ellul and the academic view is striking. For the non-academics, he’s a prophet of modernity with a unique insight to our condition. For the academics, he’s a novice of some minor interest who is largely restating the work of earlier thinkers and doing a debatable job of it.
That is the difference between not knowing and knowing. And that’s something I have to grapple with.
I’m not going to shy away from the claim of being an amateur academic. That is what I am, college degree notwithstanding. I’m not using the resources of academia, I don’t have access to the currents flowing through academia, I’m not completely familiar with the kinds of questions that a typical academic in the field would ask. And there is a clear difference between a work that feels groundbreaking and a work that actually provides something to the world.
The question I have to ask is what I am working for. To take Ellul as an example, while I can criticize him for clearly being against developed technique and propaganda, the reason that his work appears shoddy is that he is not writing sociological research, he is writing polemics against concepts he is opposed to. He has a clear reason to write. The fact that he was not building upon prior works is beside the point; he was aiming at recontextualizing technique and propaganda in a way that made them opposed to humanity as he conceived of it.
Obviously, this is my conjecture about Ellul, but it makes much more sense to me than the idea that Ellul was not aware of how his work would be taken; in fact, both of the French reviews which were not so critical of Ellul praised him for bringing the subject of these “consequences” up.
I bounced off of Ellul because I don’t think he has a good point, but it took me reading the work of trained sociologists to properly lay out the issue I had. And this is the issue with amateur academics. Again, Lerner sums up my own apprehensions about diving into these topics: “this preference for dialectical interpretation of reality has signified mainly an evasion of the grubbier activities of data-collection and data-analysis.”
I would say that this is perhaps the line that hit me the hardest. It made me realize that what I’m engaged in is not necessarily more sophisticated than what Ellul is doing, and that the real work behind finding out whether something truly works is not in thinking up the process, it’s in going through and proving that the process exists, supporting that idea. That’s what makes work like Capital and The Nature of Money so fundamentally compelling: it isn’t simply that the argument is sound, it’s that the work to construct the argument is apparent, convincing, and solid.
Without even the meager resources available to academia, it’s almost impossible for amateurs to work in data collection. I think the role of amateurs in academic pursuits will largely be to devise novel theories which can then be analyzed and tested. This isn’t to say that professional and working academics could not do this; it’s more to say that amateurs can’t expect to do much more than this, not in societies which have the institutional barriers to data that we do.
But amateur academics should always keep this distance, and this lack of possibility, in mind. It’s possible to imagine a perfect solution to a problem which is not workable in real life. I am not familiar with Ellul’s life, so I cannot speak on what he did or did not do, but I think the goal of any amateur academic is to gain the resources to do further work in their field. They can’t assume that their relatively unfounded and untested ideas are deserving of consideration on their own.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve probably heard me say that I’m going to work on “my Geohell“. Geohell is a book I haven’t read by some internet guy whose name I don’t remember. It’s about… something. I think it’s about how we are currently living in ecological hell. It’s not important. What’s important is that it was a kind of meme book, just some random guy writing a theory-of-everything and really pushing it like he was going to change the world. How did that end up? Well, I’m pretty sure nobody even knows what I’m talking about when I say “I’m gonna publish my Geohell“, that’s how it ended up.
Now, I am going to do this. I’ve never not been going to do this. If you are reading Journal of Cogency, you could probably feel that I was working towards something like a Geohell. But I have to put this into perspective. And I have changed how I look at what I want to do over the years, and I’ve lowered my expectations.
I’m putting out a thesis; not even a theory. I’m planning to do more reading and research, and I’m a far way off from even having a draft ready. But even with that said, what I produce just can’t be more than a theory. There is too much that I don’t know, too much I need to be able to respond to. It’s very easy to believe that I’ve read enough to have a good idea of the whole field. If you think that way, I’d invite you to look at the reference list in The Nature of Money, and then go look at how densely he employs his sources. That is academic work.
That doesn’t mean give up. It doesn’t mean stop trying to do amateur academic work, academia outside the academy, however you want to phrase it. But there are real limitations to being outside the general conversation of scholars, and more often than not, the misgivings that scholarship has on a subject are real and necessary. Deciding to disengage with academia doesn’t mean those problems no longer exist, it only means you don’t have access to the history of investigating those problems. Do what you can, but you can’t do it all on your own.