>not only do i not have time to elaborate or defend this thought, i also am
>over-posted, already. i shall therefore eagerly await correction and
>amplification from friends (and others :-) on this list who understand
>this stuff better than i do.
>
>j
Ok. Well, ugh. Forgive this, what is a draft version of something written 7 yrs ago. I was, for quite some time, obsessed with the competing conceptions of the self (individual) and its relation to society/the social in modernist, postmodernist, and poststructuralist social theories. Boy, I should finish the phud and go back to writing with several years of business and journalistic writing under my belt. I could get a gig making sense of this stuff in understandable terms. :) (I flatter meself :)
Anyway... I would love commentary. I'll just ignore bullshit from those who have an axe to grind re pomo/poststructuralism. been there, done that. i don't consider myself much of a pm/ps type person. I like to get all dirty with the data. but, i was taught that you take your critics seriously, advance and criticize their position in the best light possible, and advance your domain of knowledge/understanding.
There's a part 2 on political practice, aristotle, etc. if anyone wants more. Oh, yes, forgive typos, etc. As I said, the only copy I seem to have is a draft version of a conference paper.
Charles, it ain't Foucault, but I think this answers your question. And, you have such a great background in phil soc. science, I bet it would be something you can grok.
smoochiez,
k
The ability of a mirror to reflect is conditioned by its opacity. It is a pane of glass, like a window; but, unlike a window, it is not transparent nor even translucent. Opacity requires the impenetrability of light. In an early essay, Jean-Paul Sartre criticized the Cartesian tradition of reflexivity in terms of opacity. For Sartre, the transcendental ego to which the dualism of reflexivity gives rise has no reason for being. Such an ego would "be a sort of center of opacity.... This superfluous 'I' would be a hindrance...would tear consciousness from itself; it would slide into every consciousness like an opaque blade. Sartre, at least in his early work, rejected the opacity of the transcendental ego. However, Sartre's heirs -- contemporary French theorists associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism -- have enthusiastically embraced the fundamental opacity of, not only the self, but all projects which aim toward a reflective consciousness or knowledge of the social or society. Such projects, postmodernists complain, subscribe to an essentialist ontology and a foundationalist epistemology. They presuppose the possibility of locating a self-identical, irreducible reality as the object of inquiry and that social reality can and should be known objectively.
Essentialism and foundationalism ultimately underwrite claims for the autonomy of sociology and the possibility of a neutral sociological language which directly corresponds to its referent -- society/the social. Sociology's claim to a superior epistemic status resides in the assertion that the sociological project is product of modern, industrial capitalist society and yet it is, nonetheless, fully capable of providing a scientific, objective theory of the whole of society. A modernist sociology presumes a transparent relationship between sociology and its object of inquiry; this stance forms the basis of its disciplinary authority.
In the following paper I shall further explore the implications of postmodernism for sociology in general. I argue that the postmodern turn seriously challenges the very identity of sociology because it calls into question the very meaning of science. However, the debate between modernist and postmodernists has too often been posed in terms of a grand Either/Or: either sociology is a science or it is not. To pose the question in such dramatic terms, though, leads to a cul-de-sac: Neither position ultimately questions the primacy of the positivist conception of science. While there are many facets of positivism which are open to critique, here I shall focus on the positivist conception of science which requires that adequate scientific theory must be disengaged from the ethical-political horizons of the public sphere.
The postmodernist challenge rejects the modernist authorization of sociology which assumes that it is possible and desirable 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 knowledge/mirroring of society. This disruption of the correspondence relation between sociology and society reveals how sociology is coextensive with its object and, therefore, any investigation of society is simultaneously an interrogation of sociology. To be sure, 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 the discipline.
A postmodernist approach, moreover, would eschew the possibility and desirability of grounding sociological inquiry in any metatheoretical discourse which presumes to delimit epistemological and ontological boundaries. Sociology would, instead, recognize that analysis can only proceed discursively, textually. This claim, though, is more than the claim that sociologists must now study texts or even that society or the social is somehow a text to be analyzed. Such a claim would be nothing new for sociology has always proceeded through the analysis of texts in the form of statistical data, transcripts, film, audiotapes, field notes, etc. Sociological data has always and can only be rendered through texts or language. The postmodernist claim, rather, is that analysis can no longer be understood as the simple representation of an extra-discursive reality. Instead, sociology would be understood as the practice of writing about/of/in the dynamic of an intertextual field.
Richard Harvey Brown has creatively appropriated the postmodernist challenge. For Brown, a postmodernist sociology means that we cannot move beyond the text: the social is written and sociology is writing. Brown, though, does not say this explicitly. Instead, he rhetorically implies it:
On the face of it, sociology and poetics would seem to have little in common. We sociologists study language as datum, and use it, so we say, only as a medium for reporting facts or truths that are discovered and conveyed through nonpoetic means. Indeed, much of our research methodology can be seen as an attempt to bypass...the symbolic resonances of language and to establish a one-to-one 'pointer-reader' relationship between words and things. ... There is one place, however, at which the interests of sociology and poetics converge: the text. Both sociologists and poets are writers; both must enscribe their discoveries in language. And though sociology may be a science, writing, even scientific writing, is an art.
This basic semiotic claim that society is written and that there is no extra-discursive social reality in which sociological theory can locate a stable referent rests uneasily with modernist conceptions of sociology. Positivists, such as Jonathan Turner, complain that such claims simply yield a linguistic solipsism. In the end, excessive contemplation regarding either the cognitive or discursive character of human knowledge is incapable of locating the causally "operative dynamics" of society and leads us, instead, directly "to a corner to contemplate our navel." For positivists, the postmodern turn collapses the boundary between social scientific inquiry and unscientific (though perhaps systematic) speculation.
Yet, even interpretivists who have challenged sociological scientism and are more concerned with meaning find the postmodernist claims regarding language and sociological truths problematic. The interpretivist critique of positivism rejected the equation of science with the search for causes, arguing instead that the realm of social interaction is fundamentally different from that of nature and thus requires a radically different approach: the interpretation of the meaning(s) of social phenomena. The interpretivist critique, though, was mounted in an effort to establish the superiority of interpretivism and undermine the adequacy of the positivist approach to theory and methodology. Hence, even interpretivists would find Brown's conception of sociological truths not a little unsettling. The 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 methodological approach has privilege. Social reality cannot be denied to exist, Brown insists, but it cannot be isomorphically grasped and there is no access to reality as the final arbiter of disciplinary disputes.
Still, 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. 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 various poetic genres. The "performance" of theoretical truths takes place in the 'public' realm of sociology. And, the adequacy of such performances is to be judged by the community of sociological inquirers. Thus, Brown offers a notion of theoretical adequacy which requires a concept of what it means to be a citizen of the sociological community: the cultivation of "prudent judgment" in the construction of sociological truths. Citizenship 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 good sociological citizenship: Prudent judgment must especially be deployed in one's own work. One must engage in an effort to detach oneself from one's own version of theoretical truth in order to self-ironically reveal the poetic construction of this claim to sociological truth.
Brown attempts to transcend the grand Either/Or: Either sociology is a science concerned with locating and empirically verifying the operative dynamics of society, or it is not a science because it can only reflectively interpret through the opacity of language. Brown suggests that sociology both is and is not a science: the ability of any school of thought to ground the superiority of it's claims is premised on its ability to appeal both to empirical evidence and rhetorical persuasion. Brown asks us to evade this Either/Or by taking a metatheoretical leap out of the fray. A poetic metatheory provides the self-grounding discourse and the tools of ironic, humble self-reflexivity. Thus, 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." Brown's metatheory establishes the superiority of sociology by grounding it in the claim that sociology is and is not a science; that its practitioners happily acknowledge this; 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.
But, is such transcendental escapism possible? As Stephen Turner suggests, the appeal to metatheory becomes problematic for such debates cannot, in the end, be resolved. Metatheories, he insists, are ultimately incommensurable; attempts to resolve disputes require increasing levels of abstraction in the search for a secure foundation from which to assess epistemological and ontological assumptions of social theories. Brown's claims for the superiority of a poetic metatheory -- grounded in the criteria of correct sociological practice --ultimately rest on the ironic hope that sociologists can somehow relinquish their identification with a particular school of thought, theoretical or methodological orientation. Brown accepts the postempiricist critique of foundationalism: objectivism and "naive" realism are no longer viable; the absolute independence of facts from our perceptions or theories of them is no longer plausible. Yet, Brown has not fully embraced the postmodernist insight that relativism and poetic/ironic constructivism are not alternatives to objectivism and "naive" realism but parasitic upon them. Relativism and constructivism paradoxically require objectivism and a naive realism. Brown's alternative metatheory, then, does not challenge or alter the conventional positivist understanding of science. Instead, the poetic metatheory he offers merely defines itself against objectivism and naive realism.