Producing Trash

The Labor of Difficult Theory in the University

1_Introduction In the university, teachers and students alike constantly produce trash: knowledge, represented in formal and informal verbal and written statements, that fails to meet the institutional standards of quality. Such knowledge isn’t inherently trashy; rather, it is turned into trash. Epistemic content undergoes a process of evaluation against formal (structure, clarity, length, language, and so forth) and substantive criteria (argument, originality, contribution, etc.); once evaluated—for instance, in a seminar discussion, or in the grading of a paper—and its areas of failure established, a verdict is issued. Whether in the eye roll of a colleague, a teacher’s attempt at verbal correction, or the return of a marked paper, the enunciation of the verdict accomplishes an act of failing, instantaneously transforming the pending ‘knowledge’ into ‘trash.’ [1] When I reflect on epistemic trash, I think of a particular piece of my own writing: a draft chapter of my dissertation for the SOAS University of London’s Master of Research (MRes) in Politics with Language (Japanese). I titled my (final) dissertation: “The German Red Army Faction and the ‘War on Terror.’” In my MRes dissertation, I set out to illuminate the reconfiguration of the discourse of the Red Army Faction (RAF, a left-wing terrorist group in postwar West-Germany) in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror.’ I worked with the tentative thesis that in the ‘war on terror,’ the othering of non-Western Islamist terrorists facilitated a transformation of the RAF from a condemnable renegade into a preferable enemy because the RAF’s familiarity now constituted it as an intelligible opponent. Until 2017, the intercollegiate SOAS Politics MRes program with Birkbeck University of London was a two-year program that accepted students from different disciplinary backgrounds and offered students training in social science methods. Teaching staff at SOAS often emphasized the unique preparation this degree offered for a subsequent academic career, reflected in part in the 25,000-word dissertations that MRes students produced (compared to a more typical 10,000-word limit). In this essay, however, I refer to the recent SOAS guidelines and assessment criteria for such 10,000-word dissertations in one-year Politics Master’s programs. These guidelines more closely resemble the requirements of other higher education institutions across the United Kingdom (UK). [2] In my experience, however, SOAS is uniquely open towards heterodox methods, as well as methodological and theoretical approaches and the study of ‘niche’ empirical phenomena. After completing my MRes, I continued under the same supervisors at SOAS to…