>Carrol, Paul, Angela, Yoshii or anyone: Maybe you could help me
assess the
>usefulness of the term meta-narrative if you would explain the
difference
>between meta-narrative, theory, and paradigm, as you understand those
terms.
hi roger,
some brief comments, definitely not exhaustive, and as i've seen them used:
meta-narrative comes from a theory which sees the deployment of theories themselves as (depending on the author) inherently, or always, or unavoidably narratives. they might use it to refer to philosophy, cultural products, or simply any way of speaking. meta, meaning after, would mean a narrative which is a commentary on narratives whilst not partaking in them. the position you might take on meta-narratives would then have a lot to do with what you thought the relation between levels of discourse were, if indeed there were levels to be distinguished. i think it is useful, but only as a question i would ask to make me complicate how i understand stuff, rather than an explanatory principle i would make use of. it strikes me as a methodological/epistemological practice - not one i would get very excited about.
theory - well, it certainly has a history as a contested concept in the disputes over whether the mind or body were the route to sure knowledge in days begone, but this dispute regularly makes its appearance in different ways today, for instance, in whether marx was a theorist or an activist, etc ad infinitum. 'theory' is used either disparagingly or as a sign of goodness, depending, once again on what your version of the mind/body thing might be. i would say that theories are ever-present, that empiricists are theorists who don't want to question their categories of research, and theorists who don't think there is an empiric beyond theory cannot see the 'preponderance of the object' (adorno) which is always the occassion for doing theory in the first place. ie., theories are the answer to a question, and they become ideolgical, if not exactly idealist, if they don't ask the question, which i would say is always an empiric question but not empiricist. like why would butler sit down to write the stuff that she does if it weren't for the fact that queer politics or feminism has run up against the historical experience of the tensions between recuperation and opposition in a new way? this wouldn't be the only question, but i think it might be a crucial one. we can chide butler for not explicitly asking this question, but then how can any of us be sure what the questions always are that prompt us to write. historians have a retrospectivity on this, like when marx said that 'the phenomenology of spirit' was written with the guns of jena booming in the background. which he didn't mean the 'phenomenology' was reducible to or explained by, but that it was the occassion for it.
paradigm is made famous by kuhn. this would probably be closer to the map that someone referred to, ie., a representation of the thing. kuhn was interesting in that he wanted to show that science did not accumulate knowledge of the object, but that science made use of paradigms which transformed what science could even see as the object, and that these shifts occured as major shifts. it may well be that the term paradigm is an idealist one, probably more idealist than many uses of the term meta-narrative are. but, like theory, it too has a vernacular use - less resonant of the epistemological contests of years ago - which means using the word isn't to necessarily use it in an idealist way.
some of this has been true,
angela