[back] Agonism has still another serious effect: It is one of the reasons scholars have a hard time getting policymakers to pay attention to their research. Policymakers who come across relevant academic research immediately encounter opposing research. Lacking the expertise to figure out who's right, they typically conclude that they cannot look to academe for guidance. Note her cheerful assumption that academics should have, not just any old political influence, but unquestioned power of a type logically incompatible with their engaging in anything remotely resembling academic enquiry. See Henry Farrell on the problems of ideologically driven research which aims to influence legislators rather than shape scholarly debate about the truth, and consider that Tannen proposes this as the ideal. One wonders just how she is going to decide which of the competing views is going to be put forward as the new unified position of Academy Inc., and which view will be silenced, but... The infuriating thing about this argument is that it reveals Tannen's true nature: not a fuzzy, community minded person but one whose guiding principle is "my way or the highway." Everyone will have to agree with her on every point and we'll have to hear a lot of hippy crap about barn-raising as well. I really can't think of anything worse. Oh, here's another: In the classroom, if students are engaged in heated debate, we believe that education is taking place. But in a 1993 article in The History Teacher, Patricia Rosof, who teaches at Hunter College High School in New York City, advises us to look more closely at what's really happening. If we do, she says, we will probably find that only a few students are participating; some other students may be paying attention, but many may be turned off. Furthermore, the students who are arguing generally simplify the points they are making or disputing. To win the argument, they ignore complexity and nuance. They refuse to concede a point raised by their opponents, even if they can see that it is valid, because such a concession would weaken their position. Nobody tries to synthesize the various views, because that would look indecisive, or weak. Or Hegelian. I am not going to make any snide comments about The History Teacher or Hunter College High School. I'm just not. [Too late. -ed.] Moving on: fool that I am, I might have concluded from the struggles of these fledgling agonists that we should not do the following things: offer bad arguments, construct and demolish straw men, refuse to concede valid objections, and so on. Tannen assures us the answer is that we shouldn't offer any arguments at all. One question that goes through my mind as I read Burke is this: how seriously do the people he works with take this stuff? Do his colleagues ever try to make him feel bad by taking this line? Obviously he won't really feel bad, but is he ever forced to pretend to feel bad? I worry a bit because of this: Gerald Graff in his recent work Clueless in Academe does a good job of pointing out how Deborah Tannen’s oft-cited attack on the “argument culture” as a male-dominated enterprise ultimately functions as a supremely skilled example of that which it claims to despise, how Tannen not only participates in “the argument culture” but in some ways trumps it by melding her evidentiary claims to a rhetorical strategy that places any objection in a patriarchal prison before that objection even begins. A "supremely skilled" instance of argumentation? I would have thought "catastrophically blundering" might have fit the bill a bit better. The part about it being a trick is right, though. The rhetorical gambit has really performed beyond expectations if someone as smart as Burke is loath, as he obviously is, to say: this is total crap. There are genuine issues about women's voices in academe, but Tannen is contributing zero to their analysis and is muddying the waters with nonsensical suggestions which, if you think about them for more than one second, slide directly into creepy totalitarianism. More seriously, I'm not quite sure what I feel about all this. Tannen is right about one thing (stopped clocks, etc.): there is an element of blood-lust and cock-swinging about the highly agonistic debates that are the meat and drink of, say, philosophy departments (sorry for the mixed metaphor there which may have resulted in an unappetizing image.) It's also true that many women don't like this sort of thing, feel shy about speaking up in seminars, get crippling anxiety attacks the night before they give their papers, and so on. If there is a blowhard in your seminar who talks all the time even though he is a bit dim and often restates the obvious, at length, in a condescending tone - well, the odds are about 99 to one he is a he and not a she. But, then again, men can be shy, anxious, averse to disputation. (I used to wonder how even big-name philosophers felt the night before giving talks at Berkeley when they knew Bernard Williams and Barry Stroud were going to be poking them all over with scalpels in front of lots of people.) [And Sam Sheffler. It was usually the Barry/Sam tag-team that wore folks down. Bernie was always a gentleman. - ed.] Burke, being a man, approaches the issue from the male angle, i.e. what should men conscious of these issues do or not do to ameliorate real problems? I think his main suggestion might be: don't be an asshole. This is right. I naturally think of it from the other side: what should the women in question do? Take into account here that I am talking about humanities departments. Now I'll come out and say it: I don't think that any women are actually being oppressed much to speak of within this magic circle. Generally I feel that the solution to being "silenced" is just to speak up again a little louder. What form does this sinister "silencing" take, anyway? Claiming that you are wrong about something? If you are such a fainting flower that it hurts your feelings when people disagree with you - and hurt feelings seem to be the main concern of someone like Tannen - then take some assertiveness training or something! When someone interrupts you, glare and say, "as I was saying..." Grow up! Listen to your mom on that sticks and stones thing! It's just not that big a deal. You think you are right for some reasons, hopefully -why not expatiate on them a little? Get involved in some give and take? Win the damn argument?! Now, having written those words, I realize that I sound like the dad of a nerdy 4th grader who is being bullied: a good-natured, blustering fellow whose first instinct is to show his son how to land a right hook. Now, that may actually be good advice, even the best there is. Equally, it may completely miss the point from the son's perspective. You see, full discolsure requires me to tell you that I really like arguments, and intellectual conflicts of every stripe. I think they're fun, and I hate to lose. Also, I'm good at it. I'm kind of an abnormal girl in this respect (not in being good at arguing, but in really liking it.). So it's easy for me to say everyone should just suck it up and start fighting to win. If I were required to do something I didn't like and was not good at in order to participate in the communal life of the mind; like, say, bargaining - well, I wouldn't like it. I feel very awkward when I haggle over the price of something (which I have to do all in time in Asia); it's as though I were insulting or trying to cheat the seller, even though I know it is a ritualised exchange with benefits for both parties. It is just part of the charade to act shocked and hurt by a low offer, and sadly insinuate that you are being driven out of business. After the money is handed over it's smiles and cups of tea all around. I know that some people, mostly women, feel the same way about arguments: that you are insulting and denigrating the person offering them when you say mean things like "that doesn't follow". But what, apart from Tannen's Borg-collective idea, is the alternative? Sit in some fancy French Cixousian dovecote listening to the cooings of the pre-Oedipal mother? There's the rub. There's just one way to check whether something holds together, and that's to try and shake it apart. You can do it yourself, but you have blind spots, so why not engage in a community barn-levelling effort and let your colleagues help? I'm not winding up to any big conclusions here, but I'll try to disentangle a few strands. First, if you are a woman (or a man) who genuinely thinks it's "mean" to offer counter-arguments or counter-examples, or to ask tough questions after talks are given, then you are confused and you have a serious problem. The problem is not male power or structures which priviledge the male voice. You have badly misunderstood the nature of the whole enterprise. There is nothing your male colleagues can do that will make this be OK for you unless you retreat into a charmed circle of like-thinking people hedged round with forbidding jargon. Please don't. There are enough of those already and they are cluttering up the landscape. Relatedly, it is the rankest sexism to say that rational argumentation is inherently male while woolly, nurturing conversations about personal experiences are inherently female. It wouldn't make it any better if that "math is hard" Barbie were being sold by N.O.W. Secondly, being afraid to speak up even when you have a good idea is not some special women's way of knowing that's really great. It is a drag, a handicap. It's the mental equivalent of having bad body image. Women who preface their statements with self-deprecating remarks like "you've probably all already noticed this, but..." and such like are suffering from intellectual dysmorphia: they look in the mirror and see a stupid person even though we can all see they're perfectly smart. Losing this negative attitude would not result in becoming more masculine; it would mean becoming more free. As Burke says, "I would rather distribute privilege to everyone than deny it to all." The goal should therefore not be to work around this "female" trait with complex conversational regulations, but to eradicate it. I know that some might object at this point that it is male attitudes and constant slights which create this intellectual dysmorphia, just as sexist assumptions about beauty and anxieties about controlling the female body create anorexia. I don't have a totally convincing response to this objection (though I might point out that we don't actually know what causes anorexia, either). I can only respond with a practical objection: what is to be done about that, always keeping in mind that we are talking about women in sociology seminars and not, say, bride burnings in India. Might not the easiest and most helpful thing be for the women to overcome their diffidence and speak up in class? Might this change not be most easily effected from within?