Underdog Theory

There are many ways to serve food for thought

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Let’s imagine two talented, hard-working chefs.

The first chef goes to a prestigious culinary school, then gets a job at a Michelin-star restaurant. They work in a high-pressure environment, where they create interesting, experimental dishes for affluent clientele.

The second chef is self-taught. They started as a dishwasher and quickly realized they love everything about working in a kitchen. Whenever they have an opportunity to learn something new, they pounce on it.

It’s tempting to ask which chef is better. But the answer to that depends on what you happen to care about. Are you interested in food as abstract art? Or are you looking for a good place to eat with your family?

It’s more interesting to ask what would happen if they both opened restaurants in the same neighborhood. Since the formally trained chef has access to more resources (name recognition, an institutional affiliation, a larger social media following, etc.) the self-taught chef will have to find creative ways to level the playing field.

The above scenario invites us to think about strategy. Like the self-taught chef, theorists working outside the university often find themselves competing with professional academics who have access to more resources.

It can be really hard to get published when many of the other folks writing theory have better databases, external funding, professional development opportunities, and a network of peers and mentors who can help them find a home for their writing.

One way for theorists working outside the university to overcome this resource disparity is to approach their writing strategically. Ideally, this means leveraging your available resources (including your experience, talents, and secondary expertise) to offer something other theorists don’t.

Writing Strategy, Strategic Writing

In his book on the subject, Sir Lawrence Freedman writes that strategy is “the best word we have for expressing attempts to think about actions in advance, in light of our goals and our capacities.”

Any good strategy begins with a comprehensive assessment of the rhetorical situation. This involves taking inventory of our goals and capacities, as well as the internal and external constraints we’re working under. It means identifying our intended and unintended audiences, along with the exigency we’re responding to.

But Freedman is also inviting us to think about the social dimension of argument, explaining that strategy:

comes into play where there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns.

This is why I’ve spent so much time writing about the importance of lateral reading and exploring the literature base around your topic. Any strategic assessment of the rhetorical situation begins by identifying your interlocutors, the key players currently participating in the parlor conversation around your topic.¹

Freedman writes that strategy is often described as the plan to achieve a desired outcome, when it’s really about leveraging available resources to successfully adapt to new information and changing circumstances. According to Freedman, strategy

is rarely an orderly movement to goals set in advance. Instead, the process evolves through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated or hoped for, requiring a reappraisal and modification of the original strategy, including ultimate objectives.

Freedman is speaking of strategy as a general concept, but the language he’s using here also describe the process of revision. When a text goes through multiple cycles of feedback and revision, the writer’s goals and message are modified according to what they learn about audiences, interlocutors, and stakeholders. Revision is one of the best ways to approach your writing more strategically.

Freedman has a few other observations about strategy that are worth considering in the context of our ongoing conversation about what it means to approach critical theory rhetorically, as a genre of long-form argumentative writing.

1. He explicitly rejects the metaphor of a duel for discussions of strategy because “it suggests a fight to the finish with only one winner. Yet conflicts can be resolved through building on shared interests or forging a winning coalition with the next available partner.” Freedman isn’t referring to the writing process when he defines strategy, but he is advancing an excellent rationale for stasis theory. He knows the goal of persuasion isn’t to prove you’re right, so much as move the audience in a particular direction. Sometimes this means making strategic concessions.

2. It’s easy to be strategic (and by extension, persuasive) from a position of power because the “sensible application of superior resources tends to be successful.  [...] This is why underdog strategies, in situations where the starting balance of power would predict defeat, provide the real tests of creativity.”

If we’re thinking about our two chefs, it’s easy to see what Freedman is talking about here. Strategically, the self-taught chef’s best approach is to offer something creative and unique that the other restaurant simply can’t. To do this effectively, they’ll have to lean into other advantages they might have: local knowledge, a relationship with the community, a family-friendly atmosphere, etc.

Similarly, theorists working outside the university can lean into the skills, talents, and experiences they’ve spent their lives developing to find authentic and compelling ways of contributing to the parlor conversation. You don’t need a doctoral degree to make a smart, insightful contribution to an ongoing discussion. In fact, it’s often someone’s sense of humor, personal integrity, or listening skills that draws others in.

Good luck with your writing!

1. When you’re writing long-form argument, it’s also strategic to identify stakeholders. These are people who may or may not be participating in the parlor conversation around your topic but are nonetheless affected by the outcome.

The distinction between interlocutors and stakeholders is important. Conversations start to feel elitist and anti-democratic when interlocutors decide key stakeholders are no longer welcome to participate. It’s easy to imagine an academic who writes a lot about Marxist theory, for example, but dismisses what workers themselves have to say about wage labor.