I should post some of my ‘hoon moral panic’ paper here, probably the closest thing to some of my actual thesis work that has been in public circulation, then we’ll see if people think it is unreadable!?!?!

Again, just because I am not writing for the mass public, doesn’t mean members of the public could not read it.

Hmm I don’t mention whether or not the object of my study is sociological or should be done in cultural studies or whatever. Maybe I should? Haven’t thought about it, really. I don’t really see the point? I just do research.

It is ironic that the only book on hot rodding (the post-war US culture of enthusiasm for hotted up cars) has been done by a _strict_ british sociologist (he gets angry with pomo and bcccs subcultural theory!) purely as a historical study of the hot-rodding ‘archives’ (mags, club minutes, other notes, etc). He doesn’t engage with the actual street-based practices of enthusiasts beyond what is reported in magazines or the papers and he didn’t do any fieldwork at all. I do everything he does (mags and stuff) but updated for contemporary modified-car culture in australia and I have actually done fieldwork on cruising and street racing. A massive difference he doesn’t have to contend with is the internet, which has changed things considerably, and the so-called mid-1990’s ‘rise of the imports’, which problematises any notion that the car scene is homogeneous.

Oh, I agree with Rex about the distribution of thesis work. I have already started distributing some of my thesis work in an oblique way. I interviewed ‘Mr A’ who is the executive producer of the infamous Getaway in Stockholm series of films. I gave a seminar on it while in Sweden. Most academics in Sweden had not heard of the film series. The GiS crew have sold tens of thousands of copies to 48 countries around the world. Part of my interview appeared in Autosalon magazine. Secondly, I have been helping some dudes in Melbourne make movies. Mainly with the language of press releases and thinking through concepts and stuff. So far, I think it is fair to say, their best effort is a short film called “The Chase is On” but they are also submitting something for the next Carnes Film Festival.

Weber of course claimed Sociology to be an interpretive science and some would argue it sits on the borders of social science and the humanistic disciplines.

And just out of interest, what do you make of a writer such as Andre Bazin, if you’ve ever read him?

Some French theory has value, some doesn’t. I use Derrida in my own work, as people who’ve been reading my stuff for a while know.

My principle point, though, is that reading French philosophy for insights into cultural practices means that you’re misusing a body of work that developed for other purposes and out of other debates. Your example about “virtual” in Empire should be an object lesson.

Rex and Jason, I don’t think there is such a thing as “knowledge for its own sake” and Glen doesn’t think that’s what he’s doing. I think any research should be oriented to having a real impact - that’s not to say it should be dumbed down or be atheoretical. I think Mark is right when he says that Glen is lauding French theory for the sake of it. That’s the sense in which he’s being elitist. I think Fyodor showed that what he’s talking about is in no way comparable to technical language in a scientific discipline.

I, also, am still puzzled by the object of the thesis and the way that theory will be used to engage with the data.

And from my own experience, if you can’t spell out to examiners in a few sentences and very clearly what your research question is, then you’re in trouble.

My point is that if the object of your investigation is (for the sake of argument) the way popular culture icons of femininity influences girls’ perceptions of their life chances (the topic a friend did her PhD on) then what you need to do to research this is to have a theory which can be tested against the data. In other words, you need to build on previous insights from theoretical and empirical research that is directly relevant to the topic and derive hypotheses from it.

If one wanted to be interdisciplinary, then it would make sense with a topic like this to look also at theory in cognitive and developmental psychology, and the sociology of childhood and youth as well as theory which examined the interaction between cultural products and subjectivities and identities.

If you just went and read Deleuze and then wrote speculatively then in my view you would be:

(a) applying a theory which has no relevance;
(b) writing at too high a level of abstraction;
(c) writing speculatively rather than iteratively moving between theory and data.

I presume in your thesis you are collecting data. What I can’t understand at all from your comments is how you organise and make sense of the data and how you develop a theory which will explain it.

That’s assuming that the object of your investigation is understanding a particular subculture. It may be something else.

It would seem to me that if you were going to be transdisciplinary that you would find a lot of relevant stuff in social anthropology and the sociology of deviance and accepted methods of research. That’s taking into account what you’ve said about there being little existing research in the field.

This is not “high theory” in the sense that you probably understand but social-scientific theory that can be used to make sense of phenomena in the world. If you wanted to use French theory, phenomenology would probably be a help.

I think that you’ve got what I see as being an endemic problem in Cultural Studies happening - a disdain for any “theory” that might have an immediate application to data and a hypostasisation of anything that comes from France.

Badiou seems to me, for instance, to be a thinker of little originality or interest. He’s just the latest person out of France that people want to talk about because he’s difficult to read.

Agamben is largely derivative and if you read Schmitt and Foucault, you’ve understood most of what he’s saying already. To some degree he builds on Foucault’s insights about bio-politics but unlike Foucault he fails to investigate comprehensively actual instances of what he talks about and his work is much more open to attack accordingly.

I just don’t see how reading Badiou, or Deleuze, or Agamben or Negri would help you write your thesis. That’s not an argument for not reading them of course. But I’ve found it very difficult to understand your explanation of how theory helps you in the research process.

What I’m talking about is the way that social-scientific research proceeds. Any text on research methods would describe it - it’s not particularly hard to grasp.

What I don’t understand about what you’re saying is:

(a) What the purpose of the research is - is it to contribute to theoretical debates or to research a real phenomenon? (It’s possible to do both but difficult).

(b) What the relationship between the theory and the research method is.

My sense is that a lot of cultural studies is in effect sociology without method or purely speculative thought. Perhaps I’m wrong. But nothing I’ve read in this thread has convinced me that I am.

There are however a number of problems with the evidence adduced in support of the second argument against the validity of secularization. First, the exceptionalism of America and the differences in patterns of secularization count only against the most broad brush theories of secularization — Martin‚Äôs 1978 study A General Theory of Secularization is a nuanced and plausible argument which explains such variations. Secondly, surveys which report on the incidence of belief in (for instance) life after death necessarily reveal very little about the degree of importance placed on such beliefs (or often whether they are strongly held or specifically Christian) and it is difficult to see how the persistence of the cultural and symbolic significance of religion per se counts against secularization when it is a theory of differentiation in modernity and of a resultant decline in the social significance of religion. In addition, there are explanations for such survivals (particular in regard to rites of passage rituals and the historic origins of institutions such as marriage) in Martin‚Äôs theory which are rarely adequately refuted.

That’s from a conference paper.

This is from my thesis:

I argue elsewhere (Bahnisch 2002b) that the current world situation — and in particular the return of war as a symptom - needs to be understood as emblematic of serious decay in the existing political imaginary extending broadly from Westphalia to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union is itself — at the level of the symbolic — illustrative of the exhaustion of previously existent and hegemonic political narratives. It would be a serious mistake to take globalisation seriously as social theory, when in fact its emergence is a second order result of transient ideological and political constellations. These ideological symbols and their consequent political strategies, mistakenly unified under the rubric of ‘globalisation‚Äô, themselves reflect a shift in the understanding of the nature of the political, which needs theorisation from a comparative historical sociological perspective. In short, if globalisation is a social fact, it is so only indirectly in the way it manifests itself in political discourse and the impacts political language has on how we see the world, and it is an effect rather than a cause. To remain within the discourse of globalisation is to be unable to escape the way it narrows and redefines the scope of politics. Globalisation theory is itself a barrier to creative social action. It is not the role of social scientists to map out directions for political action. However, the contribution a critical sociology can make is to further understanding of the historical dimensions and underlying causes of the world‚Äôs current woes, and therefore clear a path for progressive action.

Does that make sense?

I think maybe you should step back a little and not take people’s comments on your thesis and theses in general so much to heart.

Jason is correct is backing up Glen, about theses being accessible to everyone. Theses simply aren’t for everyman. But this doesn’t imply they have to be obscure either. They need to be intelligently written , for an specialist audience. Clear writing is a bonus in writing anything, but you should not assume your audience is the mythical average adult.

But what would I know? I gave up in my Honours year because I thought earning money was a better idea. I do know from watching my wife spend 5 years of her life and a good part of mine too, writing her PhD thesis. I also know that at parties, when the general audience (in this case typically possessing a bachelors degree) finds out the topic of the thesis, they are quite to easily misinterpret its subject (a history of the human image in new media), even though on elaboration, its possible to explain it to this audience.

The idea proposed by Kim, that the thesis has to be relevant immediately to some outside audience I believe is incorrect. The thesis is placed in the _university_ library and the digital thesis online project. The audience of _that_ I believe not particularly general. The content of the thesis (its research) can be used by its author to produce books and articles, even books for the generalist audience. But this requires another level of ‘translating’ the thesis into those forms, as I have been witnessing my wife do in recent weeks. The publishing houses typically want to see 25% of the book already done in the proposal itself; they don’t want the thesis text itself.

And, Jason, instead of making silly comments, have you got an example of a dissertation that is ‘accessible to everyone’? People seem to be invoking this utopian ideal without any concrete evidence to back up the rhetoric.

How would it help those within the discipline, Mark? To self-police the discipline or what? But then we wouldn’t need comments threads like this one!

1) Some people seem to assume that because I am not explicitly writing my thesis so it can be read by any monkey, then that means that it cannot be read by anyone. Great logic there… Anyone else writing a dissertation that can be read by anyone?

2) Technical language used badly, is exactly that and nothing else. People seemed to be inferring this means that all technical language should be dropped, for what? Some universal scholarly language?? Maybe we should speak in binary.

3) Mark, why can’t work originating from France be used in Culural Studies? Surely if there is a history of people drawing on the work of French academics, then this, in part, constitutes the Cultural Studies discipline as much as the British, US or Australian influences? Or not? Either you are implying that such work (from a French context) has no value — if so, then just say it — or you are implying that the value of such work should not be tapped by other scholars — if so, then why not?