[lbo-talk] Bruno Latour on post-post-modernism

snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Wed Apr 28 10:55:56 PDT 2004


At 01:37 PM 4/28/2004, Charles Brown wrote:


>^^^^^^
>
>CB: Sure. With practice (not just "experience", empiricism) as the test of
>theory, with a practical-critical epistemology.

this is precisely what some pomos say (Sandra Harding, Steve Seidman, Richard Harvey Brown) though I think they'd suggest that it wasn't a process that would ever end. I also think that, Marx was much more certain that there was a reality out beneath the veil of ideology. I don't think that's the approach PM/PS takes. I wrote this, elsewhere:

Frank Steinart wrote:


>The comments about the relativity of social constructions of knowledge
>do not excite me at all. Isn't this what sociologists have been teaching
>all along? I seem to recall that debate vividly took place between
>Dilthey and Weber, and we could probably push relative knowledge back
>further without working up a sweat. Call it what you will, the social
>construction of reality is a very old concept, and was recognized as
>such.

Exactly. Why do we try to weed out human bias with methods if we believe that we naturally access facts, unmediated by emotions, ideology, or what Randall Collins calls the "nonrational foundations" of society? Even what Steve has offered can be understood as a method for dealing with this bias: self-reflexivity.

However, I think what Carolyn is objecting to is the assumption that there is no objective truth out there to be grasped at all. But this isn't quite what they're saying. It's not necessarily an ontological claim about the nature of reality (no facts), but an epistemological claim about how we know and how we end up re-presenting(theorizing) what we know.

So, what of the relationship between "facts" and "emotion" --which I'll read here as signifying science and politics? PM/PS departs from the Postivist-Interpretivist debate by radically politicizing _all_ knowledge, upholding a radical relativism in which all knowledge claims inevitably must compete in the agonistic arena of the public forum. This isn't the same thing as saying that modern medicine is the equivalent of faith healing or that modern medicine's achievements are on equal footing with those of faith healing. Rather, it means that the questions that ultimately matter to us are political questions. (But, I think we knew that already. :)

Critics of PM/PS reject the claim that "all the world's a text." Jonathan Turner, f'rinstance, says that this claim, if taken seriously, means that we cannot ever hope to locate the causally "operative dynamics" of society. Consequently, we are led "directly to a corner to contemplate" our "navels."

A sociologist like Richard Harvey Brown, though, argues that, just because all schools of sociological theory rhetorically construct _sociological_ truths, this does not mean we must deny that an extra-discursive social reality exists. What he denies is that it can be isomorphically grasped. Hence, we cannot appeal to an extra-discursive social reality as the final arbiter of disciplinary disputes--let alone the final arbiter of disputes between sociological practitioners and their publics (or, customers, if you're a Dean :).

I find such a position valuable, mainly because it keeps the discipline's feet to the fire. Steve Seidman has articulated one of the most moving positions as to why this position has much to offer sociologists. He's not for everyone, of course.

Kelley



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