Political science?

 Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Alexander Cockburn, said an interesting thing about models:

“When you study natural objects you have to abstract away from irrelevant phenomena that can obscure nature. This is called idealization (which is a bit misleading because it actually carries you closer to reality). If you study the planets, for example, it helps to think of them as points which have mass and move in elliptical trajectories around other points. Of course, the planets are not points-a point has no dimensions-but if you treat them as such, you can predict and understand the solar system more clearly. That is a model. Scientists have to do this all the time when studying complex phenomena-which is why they do experiments instead of taking photographs of whatever is outside their windows.”

So much for observatories.

But… I actually like this idea of this person taking photographs of whatever is outside the window. Who does that? Is it a discipline? Is it art?

Is the picture outside the window an irrelevancy? Does it have a place in political science?

There was, in the sixties, an idea that the novelist – especially a novelist named Norman Mailer – could look out the window and use his sixth sense, his novelistic sense, to tell you what was going on in the culture. You didn’t need a weatherman to tell you where the wind blows – you need a novelist.

Science is immanently routinizable. You don’t need an Einstein to work the computers at CERN. Once you have the formula, it can go into a program and then you “experiment”. The novelist’s equipment, though, is not so routinizable. Mailers spawn Tom Wolfes, and Tom Wolfes intuit on a very reactionary platform, rolling out doorstoppers for the country club crowd.

Yet yet yet – my own intuitions about the political have long been bent by what I want – the form of justice I would like to see established, given the capitalist/folkloric machinery at play. And I have corrected for this by thinking that I am so out of sorts, such an exception, that my view must be a minority view, and I would have to eat neolib pablum the rest of my life.

I think that we are all choking on that pablum now. In the U.S., in Europe, in South America, in India, in East Asia, the rejection of choices pushed by the right has presented itself as one way out, while the center keeps asking: do you want a little more pablum?

But the solution to Oliver Twist’s problem surely can’t be: a little more gruel, sir.