Beyond Qual and Quant: On the Genealogy of Disciplinarity

Beyond Comparing and Contrasting

At the start of The Age of the World Target, Rey Chow reflects on the act of ‘comparison’. Comparison is obviously central to disciplines like comparative literature. But comparing is also an ineluctable part of its partner term – contrasting. And all disciplines, in fact all forms of conceptuality, are based on acts of contrasting – the production of a binary in the specification of a ‘this’ versus a ‘that’.

Chow notes that any act of comparison relies on the normally unconsidered perspective or position of not simply the person doing the comparing but also the (or their) assumption of the existence of a stable basis on which to draw the comparison. So, comparisons made in ‘comparative literature’ are not simply based on subjective (or intersectional) matters of aesthetic taste. They take place more fundamentally on the assumption that there is a thing called ‘literature’ and that it exists as a stable entity, practice and institution that endures across time and across cultures.

To be slightly fairer to comparative literature (and other academic approaches to the study of literature): the enabling gesture of presuming the existence of a stable, enduring and transcultural entity called ‘literature’ can and will also be employed in such spaces to interrogate and challenge its own initialising presumption. It will be in such academic spaces that the most sophisticated understandings of how problematic a term ‘literature’ really is.

I mention this because similar presumptions underpin and structure a wide range of disciplines or subject areas.

Qual vs. Quant

Consider, for instance, the ‘qual’ versus ‘quant’ contrast that is used to organise or categorise much work in the humanities and social sciences. I came to the qual versus quant binary late in life. But it bothered me from the first time I ever heard it, and it’s only recently that I’ve taken the time to work out why.

After spending my undergraduate and postgraduate studies in the arts, and then working in various arts and humanities schools and departments, I remember being somewhat dumbfounded to learn, quite late in life, that apparently, I did ‘qualitative’ work, and that the only available alternative to doing qualitative work was to do ‘quantitative’ work. The latter seemed to involve converting stuff into numbers and graphs, which I regarded as running away from actual stuff and into a bizarrely abstracted and formalised fiction. Because I hate maths and don’t understand graphs, I grudgingly accepted the interpellation and agreed that, ok, I suppose I do qualitative work then. (I hoped this might mean that they would stop giving me students who wanted to fill their dissertations with numbers and graphs instead of words. But I’m still waiting for that day to come.)

A Social Sciences Distinction

Perhaps the distinction ‘qual vs quant’ did not sit easy with me because I learned it late. It would never occur to anyone in my former schools of English or Art History to activate such a distinction. This is because ‘qual or quant’ is a social sciences distinction. It has crept or oozed into the mainstream from the interface of humanities-meets-social-sciences interdisciplinary work. More than this, it is a distinction that has been naturalised within and become a structuring binary in contexts that it arguably has absolutely no business being in at all.

Stabilities

To return to Chow’s observation. Comparison in an academic context requires a presumed stable third term upon which acts of comparing and contrasting can be used as the foundation upon which to form disciplines. So, we might ask: what is it that must be presumed present, real and stable enough to allow academics to construct disciplinary spaces in which one of the structuring binaries defining those spaces is qual versus quant?

An easy answer is a realist one: there are real things in the world, and you can either do quantitative things like count them, measure them, dissect them, etc., or you can do qualitative things like reflect on their aesthetic qualities, the experience of our interaction with them, the histories of their uses, or exploring people what they feel about them, etc. So far, so good.

Stabilising Writing

However, there are other kinds of stabilising assumption at work here too. One is that academic work of either qual or quant varieties must take the final fixed and stable form of a piece of written work, one that is composed according to a recognisable genre of academic writing.

The comparison/contrast activated is here academic (i.e., disciplined) versus non-academic (i.e., non- or un-disciplined) writing. ‘Proper’ academic writing is regarded as disciplined. Meanwhile, literary, poetic, unconventional or ‘bad’ writing is regarded as non-academic. Academic writing is disciplined because it must perform certain regularizable functions. It must follow conventions.

However, sometimes, even ‘disciplinary’ requirements can develop into a regularized kind of hyper-self-reflexivity. This can make the writing feel largely impenetrable to all but those others who have struggled to learn the codes and conventions of ultra-self-reflexive philosophical and theoretical academic writing. We see this, for instance, in critical theory, continental philosophy, and the ‘high theory’ end of fields like cultural studies. This is often read or misread as a kind of intrusion of the literary into the academic terrain.

Deconstruction

A large part of the project of the philosopher and theorist Jacques Derrida was to interrogate the supposed exclusionary binary between realms like (academic) philosophy and literature. This was work done in a context in which philosophers thought it important to insist that philosophy was very different and distinct from literature. Derrida pulled apart this binary and showed that philosophical discourse is actually steeped in and constructed through literary techniques. Consequently, a large part of poststructuralist scholarship internalised this kind of practice as a key, obligatory, responsible element of any study of anything. This was a development that helped to make cultural theory impenetrable to so many readers.

Ir/Responsibilities

Most of the reflex operations of poststructuralist scholars are felt by them to be responsible and necessary. These include explorations of the etymologies of key concepts, reflections on their ranges of meanings, considerations of their histories, associations and connotations, how they came to feel like stable terms with obvious or singular meanings, and so on.

These are, however, considerations that many on both sides of the qual/quant divide would dismiss as ‘excessive’ or ‘unnecessary’. It has led to the emergence of another third term: is your work quantitative or qualitative… or… theory?

‘Theory’, here, is not the invisible third term enabling the contrast between qual and quant. It is more like what Derrida called a ‘dangerous supplement’, one that threatens to pull any work away from being either proper qual or proper quant work. Viewed another way, ‘theory’ is the name given to any activity that exceeds the qual/quant binary. This excess takes the form of not fitting into either: qual would class much that is deemed to be ‘theory’ to fit better into qual, while qual may be inclined to say that it absolutely does not fit there either.

There is a lot more to say about this. But for now, let’s merely note that what lies beyond qual and quant approaches to scholarship are many other genres of practice. I have focused on ‘writing’ here. Yet, there is absolutely no necessity that the culmination of scholarly work should take the final form of a piece of writing. These are all stabilisations.

On this matter, Jacques Derrida once pointed out the following:

All that a deconstructive point of view tries to show, is that since convention, institutions and consensus are stabilizations (sometimes stabilizations of great duration, sometimes micro-stabilizations), this means that they are stabilizations of something essentially unstable and chaotic. Thus it becomes necessary to stabilize precisely because stability is not natural; it is because there is instability that stabilization becomes necessary; it is because there is chaos that there is a need for stability. Now, this chaos and instability, which is fundamental, founding and irreducible, is at once naturally the worst against which we struggle with laws, rules, conventions, politics and provisional hegemony, but at the same time it is a chance, a chance to change, to destabilize. If there were continual stability, there would be no need for politics, and it is to the extent that stability is not natural, essential or substantial, that politics exists and ethics is possible. Chaos is at once a risk and a chance, and it is here that the possible and the impossible cross each other.

- ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996), p.84.)

One reason why I have never felt comfortable with the qual/quant distinction is that it is premised on a precisely delimited and demarcated understanding of what ‘academic writing’ is, and hence what ‘knowledge’ or ‘academic practice’ is. Writing is treated as something to be made as clear as possible by relying on stabilised conventions. The academic work is to produce a signified meaning or content that shines through the signifier. However, the moment one notices these conventions, one might query whether this adherence to precise disciplinary strictures is all one can do when ‘doing academic work’. Some signifieds – some points, purposes, orientations, activities, etc. – cannot survive any attempt to surgically excise them from precise contexts, and will either vanish or die in the attempt to transplant them into the supposedly ‘neutral’ or ‘clear’ world of academic writing, whether of the quant or qual variety.

Both qual and quant are disciplinary stabilizations of social science. They have little no place within other disciplinary contexts, and their colonisation of the academic terrain of the arts and humanities forces alterity into the status of what Jacques Rancière might term the part which has no part.