95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method

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Overview

When Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenberg, he offered a challenge to the dominant establishment of which he was a member. In this provocative book, political scientist Anne Norton proposes 95 theses that launch a brilliant, witty polemic against the reigning orthodoxies in her own field. Rejecting the antiquated and stultifying models encountered in textbooks and in courses on methodology and championed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of a narrow and parochial political science, Norton opens the gates to new practices, new principles, new questions, more methods, and more demanding ethical and scientific criteria. Practice, she argues, has outstripped old models and conventional standards. Drawing on the most daring and rigorous work in structuralism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, literary theory, institutional analysis, and the philosophy of science, she offers practical advice for students of politics, culture, and method."A wise, tough, savvy, iconoclastic attack on the social science establishment. 95 Theses is a strong, daring, and important book. Everyone in the social sciences ought to read it."-James Morone, author of Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History

Author Biography: Anne Norton is Alfred Cass term professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include Blood Rites of the Poststructuralists: Word, Flesh, and Revolution and Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300100112
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 12/28/2003
Edition description: New Edition
Edition number: 1
Pages: 160
Product dimensions: 6.38 (w) x 8.32 (h) x 0.64 (d)

1	Culture is a matrix	1
2	Culture is not a variable	2
3	Politics is in culture	7
4	Culture is political	9
5	Culture is in language	12
6	Language is political	13
7	There is no neutral language	15
8	We are in language	16
9	Authority is political and literary	17
10	Culture can be considered as a text	22
11	Literary devices have direct counterparts in political strategies	23
12	Culture constitutes the body and makes it readable	26
13	Gender, race, and sexuality are cultural constructs	27
14	Commodities serve as semiotic lexicons	31
15	The natural is a cultural category	33
16	Culture is an observable concept	34
17	Culture is made in practice	36
18	Culture, as practice, is continually changing	37
19	The formal is always accompanied by an informal counterpart, the structural by the antistructural and the unstructured	39
20	Change comes from the liminal	41
21	All cultures are syncretic	42
22	All cultures are exceptional. No culture is exceptional	44
23	Culture is wild and various	45
24	Subjects have multiple identities	47
25	Identities are performed	49
26	Identities have multiple expressions	51
27	Every identity is in reference to a collective	52
28	Identity and community are coeval	54
29	Identity and alienation are coeval	55
30	Every political institution calls for identities	55
31	Identities make interests. Interests make identities	57
32	There are no "interests." There are "interests of" and "interests as."	58
33	Every identity is partial	59
34	Community entails alienation	60
35	Belonging may be expressed as affirmation or rebellion	61
36	Each institution calls for its own resistance	62
37	There is no culture without resistance	63
38	There is no culture without internal critique	65
39	Meaning is made out of difference	65
40	Power is productive	67
41	Opposition is productive	68
42	Lack impels. Lack is productive	69
43	Power comes from the absence of power	70
44	The most effective domination is internal	71
45	The most effective rule is invisible and appears as inevitable	73
46	Domination is through and of the senses	74
47	Prohibitions produce institutions and resistances. Prohibitions interpellate identities	76
48	Ruling structures constrain the rulers as well as the ruled, the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged	77
49	That which is overcome, remains	78
50	Nothing runs ahead of its time. Many things run ahead of their time	79
51	Facts do not speak for themselves	80
52	Facts are made	80
53	Facts are artifacts of the methods that produce them	81
54	There are no neutral methods	82
55	There are no neutral scientists	83
56	Work speaks simultaneously of its ostensible object and of its author and context	84
57	There are no general laws	86
58	There is no evidence. Evidence is always of and for something	87
59	Nothing is noncontributory	88
60	That which is omitted, absent, and silent is as important as that which is committed, present, and conspicuous	89
61	Description entails analysis	90
62	No account can be comprehensive	91
63	Representation alters the represented	93
64	Quantification is distortion	95
65	Formality obscures more than it clarifies	98
66	Every method has an evaluative hierarchy	98
67	Every method has an aesthetic	99
68	Parsimony is an aesthetic criterion	101
69	The form in which something is expressed determines its meaning. The signifier constitutes the meaning of the sign	102
70	Surfaces are as meaningful as that which lies beneath them	103
71	Name constitute. Categories constitute	104
72	All categories are subject to an interior articulation and to an articulation of their relations with others. No category is internally homogenous, or independent	106
73	Correlation does not establish causality	107
74	Accurate prediction is not proof of correct reasoning	107
75	Replication is not proof	108
76	Repetitions alter what they repeat	109
77	Falsifiability does not establish validity. Falsifiability is not a necessary attribute of a theory, nor an index of superiority	110
78	Subjective satisfaction is not an index of the truth or the merit of a theory	111
79	Systems of knowledge are systems of power	113
80	Truth is a cultural category. Truth is in culture	115
81	Experience confers only a limited understanding	116
82	Lies and errors are meaningful	117
83	Time is an attribute of the observer, not of the observed	119
84	A statement of a causal relation is not a theory. Theory does not require causality	122
85	Schemes of causality are narrative fictions driven by illusory personifications	123
86	Culture has dimensions in time and space	126
87	Cultures have tempi	127
88	If one can ask where, then one can also ask when. If one can ask when, one can ask where	129
89	What comes before may have come after	129
90	The past is accessible only in and as the present	131
91	The designation of origins is a political act	133
92	There is no incorruptible discourse. There is no perfect method	134
93	The ideal appears in the material	135
94	The abstract appears in the particular	136
95	Theory cannot exhaust the particular	137

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95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method / Edition 1