> But I think it's important to keep in mind
>that rationalization--even as Kel defines it--is not a necessary
>or even constructive component of human societies. --And to
>treat rationalization as something that all humans everywhere
>aspire to (or should aspire to) is, to me, pretty crass ethnocentrism.
>
>Miles
kel is defining exactly as habermas defines it. well, in third grade words.
more on pomo, marxism and archimedean "grounds"....
The postmodernist challenge rejects the modernist authorization of sociology which assumes that it is possible to obtain knowledge of society through some sort of reflective correspondence to a unitary social reality and that such knowledge can be theoretically represented in terms of a neutral observation language. The postmodernist challenge demands that sociology come to terms with the fundamental opacity of a sociological knowlege/ mirroring of society. The possibility of sociological knowledge requires opacity and that opacity is the text: the text is the foil -- the silvering for the looking glass -- that allows for the very project of sociology.
This disruption of the correspondence relation between sociology and society reveals how sociology is coextensive with its object and, therefore, how any investigation of society is concomitantly an interrogation of sociology. This insight is not particularly new for others have recognized that sociology is implicated in the very society it studies. Yet, earlier theorists have generally tried to locate an Archimedian point from which sociological analysis might proceed: free-floating intellectuals (Mannheim), marginal intellectuals (Horkheimer), marginal groups (Marcuse), women's and Black women's standpoint (Smith and Collins). A postmodernist stance, however, rejects any such appeal to a self-grounding foundation which authorizes (founds and funds) the discipline.
Moreover, a postmodernist approach would eschew the possibility and desirability of grounding sociological inquiry in any metatheorietical discourse which presumes to delimit epistemological and ontological boundaries. Sociology would, instead, recognize that analysis can only proceed discursively, textually: it should be understood as the practice of writing about/of/in the dynamic of an intertextual field. As Richard Harvey Brown implies, the social is written and sociology is writing.
This claim, of course, rests uneasily with modernist conceptions of sociology in which theoretical adequacy is measured in terms of a correspondence to empirical evidence -- whether generated through positivist or interpretive models of scientific research and explanation. Modernist sociology is only allowed to ask why particular events occur as they do. And, even when sociologists are explicitly concerned with meaning, they generally only ask what an event or practice means. However, once the social is conceived as a textual production another question may be asked: "How does the social text mean?" The postmodernist stance allows for -- indeed demands -- that such a question be asked because it conceives of sociology as a discursive practice in which social reality is produced.
The question of how the social text means, moreover, requires a dissolution of hiearchical opposition between social reality and representation, fact and value, objective explanation and normative evaluation. <...> A postmodernist sociology would entail a deconstructive practice: disruption of binary oppositions, displacement of the privileged term, reinscription through a privileging of the formerly repressed term. The practice of reinscription, then, informs the postmodernist focus on difference, otherness, writing, narrative, the local, the irrational -- all considered repressed terms in Western philosophical and scientific discourse.
Critics of postmodernism frequently reject the attempt to import into sociology the semiotic claim that society/the social is written and that there is no extra-discursive social reality in which sociological theory can locate a stable referent. Such claims are open to Jonathan Turner's complaint against phenomenological solipsism. While phenomenologists suggest that human knowledge can never get outside of the structures of consciousness, postmodernists suggest that we can never get beyond language. In either case, Turner's complaint is that excessive contemplation regarding either the cognitive or discursive character of human knowledge is incapable of locating causally "operative dynamics" of society and leads us instead directly "to a corner to contemplate our navel.
Yet, even interpretivist sociologists more concerned with meaning would find Richard Harvey Brown's conception of sociological truths not a little unsettling. The postmodernist thrust of Brown's work undermines any attempt to claim that a theoretical stance or methodology has a more adequate access to social reality. All schools of thought rhetorically construct sociological truths. Thus, he calls for a radical pluralism in which no theory or methodology has privilege. Social reality cannot be denied to exist, Brown insists, but it cannot be isomorphically grasped; thus, we cannot appeal to an extra-discursive social reality as the final arbiter of disciplinary disputes.
For Brown, self-reflective pluralism and de-centering science does not necessarily entail that sociological inquiry is nothing more than "ideology, propaganda, or fiction." Instead, it demands that we recognize that sociological theories must and can only be rendered through rhetorical practices that, in part, construct the meaning of sociological truths: "the ways we talk about the world become as important as the objects of the worlds that, in talking about them, become available as objects of our experience" To recognize that we cannot get beyond language, however, does not (at least for Brown) lead to relativism. Instead, it demands that we become aware of and accountable for the rhetorical construction of sociological truths. De-centering science means that there is no final court of appeals as what counts as meaningful truth. The adequacy of sociological theory is not only a question of how well theory corresponds to/mirrors reality. Instead, the adequacy of theory must also be gauged in terms of "performance" -- the ways in which sociological truths conform to the rules of representation specific to the various poetic genres. For Brown, the "performance" of theoretical truths takes place in the 'public' realm of the sociology. And, the adequacy of such performances is, apparently, to be judged by the community of sociological inquirers
Brown can be read as offering up a notion of what it means to be a citizen of the sociological community. Citizenship requires the cultivation of "prudent judgment" in the construction of sociological truths; it is a sort of self-reflexivity that enables one to move in and out of various poetic genres without presuming that any one is "the correct perception of reality." Brown's reflection on the ways in which he, himself, has deployed the rhetorical devices of various genres is proffered, then, as a model of sociological citizenship: prudent judgment is not reserved only for the work of others but must also be deployed in one's own work in an effort to detach oneself from one's own version of theoretical truth in order to self-ironically reveal the poetic construction one's own claims to sociological truth.
<...> Brown argues that a poetic metatheory provides the self-grounding discourse and the tools of ironic, humble self-reflexivity: we can escape the "choice between either amoral objectivity or unreasoned ideology. Instead, the choice becomes that of a self-conscious and responsible use of language as against naive and unreflective writing." The superiority of sociology, then, is grounded on the claim that sociology is and is not a science; that its practitioners happily acknowledge this; and that the adequacy of sociological theories can now be gauged in terms of the capacity of its practitioners to recognize the irreducible plurality of these truths as well as the fundamental ideological character of its claims.
But, is such transcendental escapism possible? As Stephen Turner suggests, the appeal to metatheory -- even one self-grounded in the criteria of correct sociological practice -- becomes problematic for such debates cannot, in the end, be resolved. Metatheories, he suggests, are ultimately incommensurable; attempts to resolve disputes require increasing levels of abstraction in the search for a secure foundation from which to assess the epistemological and ontological assumptions of social and sociological theories. Brown's claims for the superiority of a poetic metatheory ultimately rest on the ironic and unrealistic hope that sociologists can somehow relinquish their identification with a particular school of thought, theoretical and/or methodological orientation. <...>Brown's alternative metatheory does not challenge or alter the conventional positivist understanding of science. Indeed, Brown, paradoxically, requires a positivist framework because the alternative concepts he offers merely define themselves against objectivism and naive relativism. <...>