richard bernstein, the new constellation: the ethical-political horizons of modernity/postmodernity
angela, in a grumpy mood, wrote:
>ken remarked that there is a separation but it is an aporetic one. I might
>go a little ways else and suggest that the separation, including its aporetic
>character, is very historically specific.
this is what i'm getting at. ken hasn't answered me. you seem to be and i buy what you are saying because i agree with your marxist theoretical framework. but i buy it at a discount because, when i step back and ask myself whether i'd be persuaded if i didn't, then i find the assertions too stark and heavily reliant on presuppositions that haven't been elucidated or adequately justified. this is, in part, a drawback of this medium. however, i think it is also about translation. i included the above quote for this reason.
my argument is twofold. the positions taken up here are no less premised on this separation than the positions that are criticized. the arguments engage in the conceit of methodological dualism.
i bring up rorty because this procedure is analogous to the one rorty uses:
argument proceeds by outflanking one's opponents by finding objectivism, universalism, and foundationalism in every criticism. and he is rather smug about maintaining that he can see foundationalism, etc everywhere and others can't [a variant of methodological dualism].
what i'm reading here is similar: "those who i criticize hold positions that ab initio rest on this separation even while they pretend that they can escape it; my position makes no pretenses to such an escape and so it is the better position." argument then proceeds by continually seeking out these separations which aren't too hard to find because, by definition, they are everywhere. in the end, it seems to me, the maneuver means that you will always need to find what you are looking for. and so you will.
now this just puts me in stitches.
yes, ken, rorty says he doesn't need justification in a technical sense; but he does know he has to answer to the charge of relativism even if all he does is evade it by continually redescribing his interlocutor's claims as 'bad' enlightenment thinking. yes, zizek does not agree with rorty, but that only makes zizek's position more vulnerable to same sorts of criticisms that are lodged at rorty.
and dear, dear, what on earth would people who don't do social research do if they didn't have social research to find inadequate? i'll admit that, in some ways, i'm being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian in this post, but this is a very serious question.
as much as you seem to want me [and social researchers more generally] to, i don't deny your characterization of what passes for social research. that you assume that there is some pressing need to delineate these deficiencies reveals more about your position than mine. the critique of social research i read here seems to require the existence of some sort of monolithic, undifferentiated, static body of research theory/practice that simply does not exist. worries about doug's cranky portrayal of 'the masses' are a little more than amusing. it is accurate to characterize most social research as engaging in the kinds of practices you describe; but it is...well...a bit wrong to characterize all social research as premised on these assumptions. not all social research proceeds the way you want it to.
i am wondering about these specific charges you make though. why is it a problem that sennett has never done manual labor before? surely you aren't suggesting that he shouldn't do this work simply by virtue of who he is?
and why is it a problem that he acknowledges that he finds this world alien? would it have been better had he not acknowledged this; surely it would have been disingenuous at best to say anything but. you say that he thinks the world he finds 'exotic,' how so? does he really engage in the rhetoric of exoticization in order to persuade? it is true that ethnographers have used this rhetorical device to convince their readers of their objectivity: "see here, i've entered a world that is completely alien to me and therefore i bring no presuppositions and praise be levi-strauss my account is objective i say" i see little evidence of this conceit in HIC and i'd be curious if you find it in corrosion. i don't think, given HIC, he naturalizes these differences, but perhaps this is your argument. but michael is right on the money, corrosion needs to be read as part of a body of work, though i'd argue that this shouldn't have to be said in the first place. it is a body of work that is likely much more sympathetic to your position than you've imagined, though, like michael, i agree that there is much to be criticized.
all social theory proceeds by the same objectivating procedures as social research. the interview transciption, the film, the observations recorded in field notes, the novel, the answers to survey questions, the philosophical treatises, records of consumer spending, the pscyhoanalyst's observations and interpretations -- all are traces of human interaction. and those traces are all that we can ever work with to begin with, whether we do social theory and/or social research. zizek's work, for example, is, no less than sennett's, only possible as part of this split you speak of and his work also requires objects--films, novels, philosophical treatises--that are made over once again into the objects of his analysis. zizek's work and that of critical ethnography differ from mainstream social research and social theory in their *methodologies* --in the way they theorize the relationship between theory, method, practice; how they write about their analyses; and how they position themselves in these regards. that is a better criticism to be made, i think.
the characterization of all social research as assuming method as technique and, worse, as entirely unaware of this critique is an over generalization that seems unwilling to accept the existence of an entire body of social research that takes seriously these criticisms and has for quite some time.
indeed, this criticism is so commonplace that very few social researchers believe that methods are neutral techniques. there are a number of authors i could point to, the best example, and one that speaks directly to your concerns, is judith stacey's _brave new families_. there is also a significant and overlapping body of research that recognizes that method and methodology are not the same. it is quite true that very few accept or understand this critique on marxist terms, but there are enough who do to reveal this characterization of social research to be a gross generalization. it is also true that the majority of social researchers ignore the political axis of methodology, but it is still inadequate to characterize all social research as ignorant of the issues raised here.
it also tickles me to read that sennett is 'pretending to listen'. would anything have persuaded otherwise? what would make for social research in which the researcher 'really' listened. it's not clear how this conclusion was reached so i'm curious what inspired this charge and if it can ever really be overcome.
of course, sennett comes at his work with an agenda; he could not do otherwise, nor could any of his critics. a more adequate criticism would be that his agenda is wrong and inadequately theorized and reflected on. i wouldn't go so far as to say that sennett fails to reflect on and theorize his agenda, however. perhaps he fails to do so in corrosion, but this is simply not the case in HIC. he his clearly aware that he has an agenda and tries to flesh it out, perhaps in adequately. but, that he did it at all in 1971 is extraordinary because that sort of reflexive, politicized commentary was very rare, and it was surely rare among sociologists with sennett's background.
these arguments against social research, it seems to me, can be shortened considerably. a <yawn> would suffice since i sense a curiously radical apathy about the project and potential of social research to begin with.
>ok, I'll stop now. you can tell I'm feeling grumpy today? but if no one
>mentions sennett or rorty (even habermas most probably) again for a while, I
>think I can manage to calm down.
perhaps we should take note of all the thinkers who are off limits and start a list and doug can post it at lbo. better yet, it could even be an auto-generated file attached onto each post.
call for nominations to be added to the list which i humbly compile based on past observations: habermas, sennett, rorty, zizek, lacan, butler weber, durkheim, becker, rand.....
oh and perhaps you might want to reconsider some assumptions about sennett's work, particularly what i think you interpret the title, the fall of public man, to mean. is a bit misleading, though michael is right that there is much to be criticized. indeed, grab iris marion young off the shelf and you'll find that she quotes him approvingly in her chap. on city life. his work, in part, is a critique of the myth of community as transparent face-to-face relations, particularly its uses in the reproduction of racism and classism. sennett also focuses on therapeutic individualism--the belief in a unique essence or interiority of the self conceived as haven to which one can retreatto locate a very nearly sacred source of authority. his is a critique of the pop-psych common sense that gives rise to statements such as, "i need to get in touch with myself and figure out what i *really* want before i can be in a relationship" he laments is the loss of the *potential* of public life which, like habermas, he sees as having begun to crystallize with modernity but was quickly crushed by the juggernaut of capitalism. but his is not some appeal to gemeinschaft community but a critique of it in, and a critique in the service of celebrating city life as public, as diverse, and generative and not as always and only privatizing, destructive, and anonymous to the point of extinguishing differences . his work was opposed, as i alluded to earlier, the mass society thesis which lamented the demise of community. similarly, the uses of disorder is counterintuitive since his claims in that work have been celebrated as favoring anarchism in its exploration of counter-cultural revolt. again, none of this is immune to critique, i don't mean to suggest that, but i did want to correct what i thought were biased assumption about his work based on his latest.
"myths of an absence of community, like those of the soulless or vicious crowd, serve the function of goading men to seek out community in terms of a created common self. the more the myth of empty impersonality... becomes the common sense of a society, the more will that populace feel morally justified in destroying the essence of urbanity, which is that men can act together, without the compulsion to be the same" [p 255].
i'm off for fishing fun and probably busy over the next coupla daze so ken doll i'll have to get back to ya.
kelley