Excellent thread that lines up with some observations I’ve made on here recently. What’s interesting is that it’s possible to find an academic niche where all you really do is express these legitimation/delegitimation narratives, to varying degrees of explicitness.
https://twitter.com/rechelon/status/1341597090321997824
This is basically what's responsible for the proliferation of terms like 'post-structuralism' in the humanities, which is a very loose and thematically suspect label not avowed by any of the figures it is supposed to group.
However, there's a niche to be filled articulating the narrative that compresses the messy history into a set of methodological ideals that might organise a research project in some humanities (or adjacent) discipline.
There are whole courses run in UK universities dedicated to making grad students familiar enough with the dominant narratives that they can converse with one another. This is related to my complaints about the pervasive ambiguities of terms like 'epistemology' and 'ontology'.
But here's the thing: I'm not anti-narrative. I'm quite pro-narrativisation of intellectual developments as a tool for compressing information and orienting students in the discursive landscape they find themselves in. Big fan of Brandom here.
As @rechelon says, it's not about rejecting narratives, as they're playing a crucial functional role in articulating the dialectical interactions between those who take opposing positions in any complex debate. The important thing is to do it explicitly.
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