“Fuck Nuance”?
A Call for Clear Abstraction in Sociological Theory
Knowledge is nuanced and the devil is in the details, so the expression goes, but simple truths deserve our focused attention. Postmodernism is both an archeology of knowledge and a war on it. Deconstruction has left behind a fragmented field; the remnants and ruins of such intellectual conflict. Relativism has culminated in a free-for-all of opinion, and post-truth politics has emerged as the dominant narrative.
The coping strategy of academics prior to this utter collapse of meaning have been to embrace nuance; to be humble and honest before the complexity of the world, and err on the side of caution. For the most part, this nuance is justified and necessary, but there is a great gulf between holism and hair-splitting that needs to be bridged.
In the twilight of postmodernism there is proliferation of increasingly marginal and compartmentalized research. Scholars have taken advantage of (or are pressured by) academic freedom (/constraints) to play it safe and produce very circular research that essentially concludes nothing, as if that is their job, making it little more than a game of intellectual showmanship.
Intellectual and political discourse has reached a terminal point of diminishing returns, in which various sides can argue their position ad nauseam. It’s time for a rude awakening. It’s time for an academic apocalypse (great reveal). It’s time for metamodernism and abstraction in sociological theory to restore order to the void. It’s time to Fuck Nuance, in the words of Kieran Healy writing in a recent paper (2017) in Sociological Theory.
Abstract: “Nuance is not a virtue of good sociological theory. Although often demanded and superficially attractive, nuance inhibits the abstraction on which good theory depends. I describe three “nuance traps” common in sociology and show why they should be avoided on grounds of principle, aesthetics, and strategy. The argument is made without prejudice to the substantive heterogeneity of the discipline.” — Fuck Nuance
Nuance, like abstraction, is a double edged sword. You can get so deep into the minutia of empiricism that you can essentially “prove” anything, but this is false consciousness. Climate denial is pseudoscience, Race-IQ theories are junk science, etc… But more to the point is that regular science is often biased or irrelevant in very subtle ways. The nuance is nuanced! Proponents of psuedoscience are exploiting the nuance in the research.
Of course, nuance is also a necessary feature of theorizing, which Healy defends in the general sense. Thankfully, this type of nuance will never go away; it’s part and parcel of education and critical thinking. Healy acknowledges that he may not even be nuanced enough in the present article, but in the current context of US sociology, we would be wise to simply heed his warnings against nuance. Sociologists must ask the broad impactful questions, and deliver the world-changing answers.
“Figuring out whether a theoretical concept is a good one is a central problem of abstraction.” — Fuck Nuance
Healy singles out three main types of nuance traps; that of the fine-grain, the conceptual framework, and the connoisseur. Fine-grain nuance means including as many extraneous details as possible, to explain the anomalies. While this type of nuance is important, it also can be abused in the absence of shared standards in research. Too much nuance compromises the integrity and parsimony of the abstractions (concepts) we are using.
The nuance of the conceptual framework is the tendency towards grand theory, of which The Abs-Tract Organization is proudly guilty of. This type reminds us that it is not the micro-details of Marx’s anthology that people remember, but the definitive observations of historical materialism. Weber gave us even more clarity with his ideal-typologies. This nuance trap peaked with Talcott Parson, who systematized the shit out of sociology — abstraction ad infinitum.
Third, the nuance of connoisseurship is complexity for its own sake, aesthetically motivated such as in the nuance of wine-tasting. The sociological connoisseur is the sophist; the likes of David Frum or Paul Krugman, who have a great deal of expertise but daft aversion to the paradigm shift around them.
A NEW DIRECTION
Did Mohammad Ali use nuance when he spoke out against the Vietnam war? Hell no. Did Martin Luther King mince words when he spoke out against segregation? Absolutely not. Do Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning backtrack or swerve from their moral course? No way. That is because despite the persuasive complex forces rationalizing and justifying war, on the face of it, it’s wrong, and they know it. Not only that, they know they can defeat it by speaking truth to power.
Do Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speak and govern with a high degree of nuance? Unfortunately, absolutely yes. We want to avoid the pendantic type of nuance. What about Donald Trump’s brazen rhetoric and policy? It breaks the nuance meter. His speech is at once so nuanced that it’s unintelligible and so direct that it’s offensive. President Trump is the vulgar extreme of “fuck nuance”; a blunt instrument, inverting nuance to the point of absolutism and despotism.
The implication of Fuck Nuance is we need to be more honest, direct, and truthful in sociological research, but Healy doesn’t really get into that with case studies. I will. The most dramatic example of nuance working against us is the entire discourse of [prohibition/ the war-on-drugs/ institutional racism/ private prisons/ health care]. There is scarcely a more clear policy shift that needs to take place than solving these interconnected issues all at once by legalizing drugs, turning prisons into health care facilities, and redressing the racist profile of incarceration.
This has not happened because politicians play the nuance card, as I’ve shown in detail in Vicious Abstraction and Republican Racism. Scholarship is united on behalf of ending the war-on-drugs, but it is made complicated by persistance of ideologues and lobbyists who cloud the issue. The plague of nuance around this issue focuses on particulars and proximate causes, forgetting or denying that the present injustice is the legacy of slavery.
“Demands for more nuance actively inhibit the process of abstraction that good theory depends on.” — Fuck Nuance
The other most obvious example is that of climate change/denial, and the repression of environmental movements that long precede the current climate psychosis. I’ve always lamented the fact that environmentalism has to be an ‘ism’ and a ‘movement,’ as opposed to just a normal principle of balance with our surroundings. After all, everyone occupies some kind of environment, whether its a home, office, or park, or a war zone or landfill. Why wouldn’t we want our environment to be hospitable and sustainable? Who refuses to call themselves an environmentalist in this sense?
The irony is that investment is put not only into destruction, but into undermining and ridiculing environmentalists. There is no human ‘nature’ without nature, and that is exactly what we are destroying at a rapid rate. Elites who carefully manicure their yards and social lives, while ghettos they legislated into existence degrade beyond repair, are ironically anti-environmentalists who arguably lack human(e) nature. Realize that we are all literally on common ground. There is no Other enemy, but the enemy within. This, I insist, is what is meant by Fuck Nuance.
I gather that Healy is also advocating generalization in theory, although he does not expand on it a whole lot. The term nomothetic means the tendency to derive general laws, and is used to contrast ideographic, meaning the practice of specification. According to Kant, the former is common in the physical sciences, and the latter is typical for the humanities.
I argue that we need to consciously practice nomothetic social science to address the general social problems (the meta-problem), and highlight generalized sociological knowledge. Abstraction implies moving across differently levels of analysis, and a scholar buried in his own discursive echo chamber will miss the forest through the trees. Interdisciplinarity is one way of being more abstract, but the nuance traps have to be avoided just the same.
In order to have that clarity of conscience, we have to know how to abstract. The Abs-Tract Organization is purposed to advanced generalized theory and knowledge in this way. Moreover, to answer Healy’s call to determine which concepts are viable and which aren’t. Explicit reference to abstraction is striking in Healy’s paper. He praises abstraction for its role in concept creation, and notes how nuance obstructs the process.
“[Nuance] blocks the process of abstraction on which theory depends, and it inhibits the creative process that makes theorizing a useful activity.”
“Free-floating calls for nuance, unconstrained by rules of method or logic, inhibit the process of abstraction that makes theory valuable.”
For this stickler, the only thing lacking in Healy’s paper is a better definition of abstraction. Granted, it is not easy in short space, but we are given a rudimentary expression of “throwing away detail, getting rid of particulars” in the process of object consideration and concept formation. In an abstraction proper the details are not ignored, omitted, or erased, but rather hidden, compressed, and enfolded.
I will advocate here what I call “nested nuance” as a way to address these leaky abstractions, in which details are rejected and lost forever. Complex abstractions like capitalism or democracy are not simplified without some vicious selection pressures, which cause different individuals to use them differently. As described in The Abs-Tract Organization’s original one-liner, we are for “absolute social philosophy,” and dispensing with frivolous nuance brings us that much closer.
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