If you go into almost any sociology department in the US right now, you might see an odd thing on a professor’s desk or pinned to a graduate student’s bulletin board: a small, illustrated card with the face of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, or Anthony Giddens on it, along with a list of their intellectual strengths, weaknesses, and what we can only call “special skills.” School in the United States now has trading cards with theories on them. Without making a fuss, in secret, and about 25 years later than planned.
The first cards were not at all American. David Gauntlett, a British cultural theorist, put out a set of twelve trading cards every month on his website Theory.org from 2000 to 2001. Each card had a picture of a famous person in the fields of media studies, gender studies, or social theory. Giddens was the first person to write about structuration theory, The Third Way, and everything else. Butler then wrote Gender Trouble, in which she made the case that biological sex is just as socially constructed as gender. Then Foucault came along with his ideas about sexuality, power, and how institutions shape us, whether we like it or not.
The format was meant to be fun. “Creative knowledge you can put in your pocket,” Gauntlett called them. The cards could be used to play a game of trumps, matching theorists based on their strengths, weaknesses, and special skills. It seems that Foucault’s ability to throw out old frameworks was almost as good as Marcel Duchamp’s amazing ability to make everyone in the room confused. Putting decades of hard work into a card game stat is both funny and very smart.
The first twelve cards were never meant to cover everything, and they didn’t. Karl Marx, Carl Jung, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Said, Germaine Greer, and Walter Benjamin were some of the unofficial additions made by academics and students almost right away. In British academic circles, the project, which had only a few clear goals, took on a life of its own. As good ideas often do, it spread naturally through seminar rooms and student unions, with no one really in charge of it.
It’s interesting how long it took for the same amount of energy to cross the Atlantic. For all their intellectual depth, American sociology departments have had a hard time making theory feel approachable in the past. A card game can feel silly, even when the content is very serious, because of the way it’s usually taken seriously, which can even become solemn. To explain Foucault with a trump card is still to explain Foucault. The medium does not water down the idea; it only makes it easier to grasp.
Talking to younger professors and graduate students who have started using these cards makes me think that the appeal isn’t really about nostalgia or something new. It is educational. Putting together a theorist’s most important ideas on a small card requires some mental discipline. What is the most important thing here, and why? It seems that students who might not pay attention in a structuration theory class will argue for twenty minutes about whether Giddens or Butler has the better conceptual toolkit. That’s pretty much the kind of argument that a theory seminar is meant to make.
It’s still not clear if this will spread from individual classrooms to a more official level. Things that seem to make serious work too fun are always met with resistance in American academia, where things tend to become established slowly. But the cards are being passed around. They are being seen by others. That being said, Gauntlett launched Theory.org in 2000, and no one thought that a deck of illustrated theorist cards would change the way people teach and learn social theory for the next twenty years. Small formats can sometimes hold the most important ideas.
