Archive for 'Social Science'

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

~ Michel Foucault

(1982) “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview”, in L.H. Martin (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock, p. 9-15.

What is this strange thing about writing that requires courage? Where is the risk? Why is this task so fraught?

“It’s the problem with reading so many primary sources,” L Magee suggests the other day, when we discuss this issue, “You think you have to be that good.”

I mention that I am relatively good with situational pieces - the context is known, and bounded. It’s developing the boundaries that is difficult for me - deciding when it’s okay to stop. LM shares this worry: “I say to myself, how can I possibly write on this, when I haven’t read…” I wince, as LM manages to list some works I also don’t know - I feel the boundaries pushing farther back. Involuntarily, I remember ZaPaper discussing how research is fractal: no matter how much you drill down, things never seem to become less complex - if you don’t rein things in, ZaPaper argues, “One ends up investigating everything and writing nothing”.

In my conversation with LM, I change the topic quickly to get my mind off of all the works we have convinced one another we must read (I’m actually embarrassed to list the things LM and I are planning to read together this term - embarrassed because it’s simply absurd, the number of works - the number of fields - we are frantically trying to cover, in our quest to feel vaguely adequate to the problems we are posing. I’m reminded of Scott Eric Kaufman’s search for complete world knowledge - I think that’s a fairly good description of what we’re telling one another we’ll manage to cover in the next six months…).

I offer that I do better when I have a specific audience in mind, when I have some idea what concepts are shared, and what concepts need to be developed and explained in detail. “Write for me, then,” LM volunteers, “Let me be your audience - then you’ll know to keep things simple, break things down.”

LM is being modest - as if I haven’t received the most thorough criticism of my work in our conversations - I hardly need to be simple in our discussions.

The issue, though, isn’t really audience, or situation - or even background - these are all deflections from the core challenge, which concerns the question or problem. Writing begins in earnest for me when I’ve decided what the core problem will be. Knowing the audience or the situation makes this easier, because the universe of possible problems that interest me can be narrowed to the much smaller set of problems that jointly interest me and specific interlocutors, or that intersect with some specific situation. But the core issue is still defining the problem.

At the moment, I’m balancing across a few core problems, and have been writing at a level of abstraction high enough that I could keep all of these problems suspended at once. This was useful, very useful, for a period. But now I need to move back to something ever so slightly more concrete (realising that this term only ever applies in a slightly ironic way to my work), which will force me to leave some of these problems to the side for a time. As a step in this direction, over the next couple of months LM and I will be working on a proto-collaborative project from time to time, starting with a set of reflections on The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, and tentatively organised around the question “Is There a Logic of the Social Sciences?”

Ironically, this topic picks up on the very earliest theoretical question I addressed on the blog: whether it is viable or productive to seek to understand the emergence of the social sciences, and the relationship between the social and the natural sciences, with reference to some kind of strong ontological distinction between forms of human practice, or the properties of social and natural worlds as objects of knowledge. When I first addressed this issue here, I contested the validity of this kind of theoretical move, but left (as an exercise for the writer… ;-P) what a developed alternative might look like. We’ll see whether this collaborative dialogue allows me to pick up on some of these issues in a more adequate way - and how the question comes to be refracted when translated into a more interactive exchange.

I should note by way of apology that I pulled an unintentional bait-and-switch to get LM on board with this vision of a collaborative project. We’ve been talking about doing some form of collaborative writing for some time, but have both been too busy to undertake anything more involved than what we’ve attempted from time to time on the blog. Now that our schedules are lightening a bit, we returned to the issue of collaborative writing with a more serious intent. I suggested an upcoming (low key) conference, LM suggested something around The Positivist Dispute, and I proposed that perhaps we could look into the competing meanings of “the critical tradition”, as this concept was central to this debate. All well and good, and so we shared dinner and a nice conversation around what we might write, and then, just when all seemed settled and we were wandering into the subway station to go home, I was suddenly hit with the concept and burst out, “You know of course what we could do instead? We could also look at the whole notion of the logic of the social sciences - maybe title the presentation is there a logic of the social sciences?”

LM blanched, and reminded me that I had recently been lamenting that, when I present, people tell me I am… er… scary: did I really think, LM wanted to know, that presenting on this particular question would assist me in overcoming that perception? I found myself rationalising - oh, it won’t be that big of a deal - no one will show for the presentation, really, because the topic is just too abstruse - if people do show, it’ll just seem like a discussin of a dead debate, etc. LM seemed sceptical, and began to list people that would be likely to attend. I suspect I’m too tempted by the topic, by the problem, to let other concerns get in the way… This reaction no doubt has something to do with what tends to happen when I present… So here we are - at least for the moment - having decided to open a discussion on the blog, and then see what develops from here that we might (or might not) turn into a presentation in a couple of months.

Note that we haven’t settled on any particular order or schedule for posts. I’ll try to write something over the weekend to get things started - most likely focussing solely on Popper and Adorno’s original contributions to the debate, and exploring how the competing notions of critique yield different concepts of the social sciences. We don’t have any specific plans for what will fall out of this discussion - whether it might yield some kind of joint presentation, duelling presentations from competing stances, or a decision that the topic isn’t productive for what we each want to write at the moment - these decisions will emerge over time. Hopefully we’ll both find it productive for our current writing, not knowing how all of this will end…

Research students keep being referred to me to discuss their “theory chapter”. My reaction to these referrals is complex. First, it continues to amuse me that I’m coming to be regarded as a “theory expert” - I’m not personally sure what such a creature would be, and I seriously doubt the kind of theoretical work that I do even vaguely resembles what people have in mind, when they make such referrals.

What I end up doing, generally, is asking someone what their question is, then asking them how they’re trying to cast light on that question, and then telling them to forget about “theory” in any formal sense, and just write what we’ve just discussed, as this is really the “theory” underlying their work… Having done this, they can then step back and see whether they’re actually comfortable with the theory they’re using: does their question, and their means of answering that question, reflect how they really think about the world? about how we come to learn about the world? If not, then they may have some serious thinking to do, about whether their theory-in-practice - their theory as manifest in what they are actually doing - or their theory-in-thought - the collection of beliefs they hold about the world and our knowledge of it - might need to give way. And having done this to their (preliminary) satisfaction, they then need to ask themselves, based on what they’ve read in the literature, how they think other researchers might respond to similar questions. With this in mind, they then need to have another think about the adequacy of their theory-in-practice. Rinse and repeat…

Although all of this is important, it’s nothing so profound, complicated or specialised as I think it’s often perceived to be - and when giving this kind of advice, I’m certainly not drawing on the subject matters in which I might have some claim to substantive expertise: any supervisor could give comparable advice, without the auratic experience of sending a student off for some kind of mystically potent consultation with a “theory expert”…

So my approach to this whole process is rather informal and pragmatic - and it violates what I suspect is the expectation that someone can refer a student my way, and they’ll leave the office propounding on poststructuralism or logical positivism or whatever other intellectual tradition might be most relevant to their work. I almost never discuss formal intellectual traditions, unless a student makes clear that they are already familiar with such things by introducing the issue into the conversation of their own accord. Otherwise, I can’t actually see how a sprinkling of polysyllabic labels can serve anything other than a talismanic purpose… The labels are a convenient shorthand for the concepts - but the concepts themselves can’t be shorthanded, and I can’t teach them in a one-off interaction during office hours, which means that the most productive thing I can do, is build a conversation around what a student already knows, and suggest how that existing knowledge can be leveraged, over time, into something that looks more like “theory” in some formal sense.

These conversations take place in a discursive field already stacked against them: the fact that research students are taught to think in terms of something called a “theory chapter” - something that can be isolated out from the rest of their writing, something that they will “test” by their research, something that is often tacitly conceptualised as existing in a contingent relationship to the object or method of analysis - already slips in so many ontological and epistemological assumptions that an enormous effort will be required to engage in more than a fairly limited range of theoretical work.

It’s also not terribly unusual for students to have run into the view that they shouldn’t “waste time” on theory - that they should finish their “real” work first, and then read around in the theoretical literature to see how they might be able to “generalise” their “findings”. I know a reasonable number of PhD candidates who plan on “reading some theory” in their final six months, once the bulk of their write-up is complete, so that they can include a “theory chapter” in their thesis. I say none of this to be critical of the students: people do as they’ve been taught, and the absence of postgraduate coursework for research students (other than the one research strategies course into which I teach) eliminates one of the major opportunities to explore different approaches to theoretical work. The same structural constraint restricts the options of faculty advisors, as they have no ready institutional means to refer students for apprenticeships in more complex theoretical approaches…

When I’m at the point of supervising higher-level research students in a more formal way, I suspect I’ll run my own off-the-books seminars (since there’s no way to run them “on the books” here) - as the price of admission for supervision… If nothing else, perhaps it’ll reduce my workload by encouraging people to seek supervision elsewhere… ;-P For the moment, my strategy is as I’ve sketched above: to try to demystify the concept of “theory” by referring back to what the students already do and think, and hoping this will at least provide them with some sense that this is how all theoretical approaches originate - as attempts to understand and discuss with others what we believe and how we learn. Everything else is commentary… Which they should now go read… ;-P

LMagee and I have had occasional conversations this past year on the ways in which the interdisciplinary transmission of ideas takes place. One recurrent theme in these conversations has been the issue of time lag - how concepts and works from outside one’s core discipline or sub-discipline are so often appropriated in the form they occupied decades ago, with little appreciation for how subsequent specialist discussion might have transformed a tradition - whether enabling a tradition to address pivotal early critiques, or causing a tradition to be rejected in spite of its early promise. Another recurrent theme has been the issue of marginality - how texts and concepts can sometimes come to have interdisciplinary resonance, and even - in the minds of non-specialists - come to signify a discipline, when that discipline’s own practitioners might regard those texts or concepts as dubious, marginal, dated, or mundane statements of the obvious.

The fact that a disciplinary discussion “moves on” - that specialists are no longer so taken (or may never have been taken) by specific works as are those of us looking into the discipline from the outside - is not automatically grounds for rejecting an interdisciplinary appropriation. It may in fact be that a work is simply more valuable for the thoughts it sparks outside its home ground, that specialists have become jaded through familiarity, that the influence of a foundational work has come to be so taken for granted that its novelty and importance are no longer recognised within its own field - or that, as Sinthome has suggested, pressures driving toward novelty in academic production have created a cottage critical industry that, for all its volume and detail, takes nothing away from the overarching brilliance of an earlier text.

Being unaware of these broader specialist debates becomes more of a problem for interdisciplinary work, however, when people succumb to the temptation, not only to be inspired by a work from another discipline, but to steal some of the aura of that discipline to add a kind of nonconceptual force to their re-presentation of a borrowed idea. LM and I have recently been discussing some examples of this in relation to social science appropriations of quantum mechanics and set theory in particular, where occasional authors have quite selectively appropriated very specific interpretations of highly contested issues within a complex specialist discussion, and presented these appropriations to nonspecialists as “discoveries” - as established and firm bits of factual knowledge or analytical technique. These kinds of “auratic” interdisciplinary appropriations often strike me as attempts to raise the prestige of a claim by exoticising it, removing it from the everyday experience of intended readers and interlocutors, and effectively placing the claim within a black box of inherited authority, in which position it is shielded from critique…

As someone quite committed to interdisciplinary work, I always find myself a bit frightened by the risk of “auratic” appropriations: I don’t think such appropriations are always intentional, or are consistently recognised for what they are, and I want very much to avoid falling into this practice. This is why I so often emphasise the metaphoric nature of concepts I appropriate from other fields, and try to remain tentative and agnostic about extrapolating the significance of empirical work from distantly-related disciplines, assuming that, as in those more familiar disciplines closer to home, exotic fields will also have their intractable debates, their unaccountable fads, and their creative interpretive frameworks that are massively underdetermined by the evidence… Like any tourist, the interdisciplinary researcher needs to take special care not to overlook potential dangers whose existence would loom large to a disciplinary native… At the same time, interdisciplinary travels are the only way that certain kinds of questions can be answered - often, in fact, the only way that certain kinds of questions can be perceived. Fear of what might go wrong therefore must not undermine our willingness to undertake interdiscilinary work. The question becomes, not whether to conduct interdisciplinary work, but how to do so at a high level.

All of this is a very long prolegomenon to mentioning that I am currently reading Manuel DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History - which Russ suggested to me some time back, and which I really ought to have read long ago, given that it is an attempt, like my own work, to reason through the philosophical implications of historical experience within a materialist framework. DeLanda’s materialism is of the expansive form associated with the Annales School - seeking to embed human history within a much broader and subtler field of material life than most other “materialist” approaches. DeLanda draws on a very wide range of scientific and social scientific disciplines - mined particularly, I gather, for their insights into potentials for spontaneous self-organisation and “emergence” - as inspiration for his philosophical work, which attempts to understand the implications of complex and nonlinear trajectories he regards as characteristic of material systems and of human history.

I’m too early in the text to comment meaningfully, but am fascinated by the ambition and scope of the work - and am also enjoying reading an author who attempts to dig deeply into the relationships between philosophical concepts and historical experience. I am also particularly interested in how the work navigates the interdisciplinary minefield I mentioned above - how it might draw inspiration, while avoiding the risk of aura, when the disciplinary appropriations are themselves so multi-faceted, and the object of analysis so complex and vast. I’m eager to dig into the details… If others who have read DeLanda would like to comment, I’d also be interested in learning what different folks have taken away from DeLanda’s work.

I’ve mentioned previously that I’ve found myself reading much more draft student work this term than I normally do. While this has been a somewhat sudden development, the work involved is continuous with work I’ve done in other academic contexts - I don’t think I’m anyone’s notion of a master of English prose, but I have done a lot of thinking and teaching on academic writing, and believe I can provide at least passable assistance to most students who are struggling with the genre.

What has been more surprising this term has been the number of requests I’ve been receiving for consultations on research methodology. I realise it sounds a bit odd to be surprised by this, given that I’m teaching a research methods course. And I do love teaching into this course - it’s my favourite “subject” to teach, specifically because I enjoy the process of workshopping the logical connections between students’ broad interests, their narrower research questions and their methodologies. It’s one of the most creative teaching processes I currently engage in - an intrinsically unpredictable, decentred, energising form of teaching practice that would be very difficult to replicate in other contexts.

Still, before being invited to teach the course, I had never previously thought of myself as any kind of methods “expert”. Having taught the course for a year now… I still don’t… And yet here I am, sketching on scraps of paper and whiteboards, trying to help people map out connections between intellectual interests, research questions and methodologies… And, since I like the work and want to continue doing it, I’m engaged in a process of trying to increase my skills so that they begin to seem somewhat proportionate to the faith people are placing in them… Problem is, I’m not sure that all of this effort is getting me any closer to any kind of methodological expertise - instead, I mainly seem to find myself refining ways of communicating some fairly straightforward dimensions of academic practice, such as (in no particular order):

Scott Eric Kaufman’s Acephalous blog has been hosting an interesting discussion about intentionality and the unconscious. The immediate provocation for the thread was a particularly unfortunate slip of the tongue by talk show host David Lenihan, who, apparently inadvertantly, used a racial epithet in an on-air discussion of Condoleeza Rice.

The discussion at Acephalous revolves, among other things, around the issue of to what degree a mistake like this should be considered a “Freudian slip” - that is, a slip of the tongue that signifies something meaningful about the speaker - in this case, latent racism.

Several complex issues range through this kind of debate for me. The first is the empirical status of Freudian theory - the question of how difficult it is for any interpretive theory (not just psychoanalysis) to extricate itself from problems of confirmation bias - of examining only those slips of the tongue, for example, that produce meaningful words that are potentially subject to interpretation, while overlooking the various stutterings and mis-steps that don’t appear to produce meaning. The second is the contested issue of whether psychoanalytic approaches have taken seriously the question of what evidence would be required to falsify or force a rethink of core concepts within the theory.

Yet these sorts of empirical questions, which have entered into other discussions of psychoanalytic theory at Acephalous in the past, were not really the core issue at stake in this particular debate. Rather, the major issue seemed to be the way in which the folk appropriation of psychoanalytic theory so often leads to something like a notion of “unconscious intentionality” - so that, once you believe, for example, that this slip of the tongue must be meaningful, and then conclude that the slip must signify a transgressive desire like unconscious racism, you then also judge the person for these unconscious impulses, as if the conscious mind must somehow have been complicit all along, for such unsavoury unconscious impulses to exist.

I tend to think of this issue by analogy with work I do on social structuration. I am interested in broad, pervasive patterns of historical change - in forms of perception, thought and practice that tend to span geographical regions, disciplinary boundaries, and fields of practical activity.

One common way of explaining the existence of patterns of historical change is to invoke a kind of conspiracy theory: to say, in effect, that “natural” or “unconscious” change ought to be random in character, so the existence of a meaningful pattern implies intentionality. Meaningful historical patterns then come to be taken as evidence that, somewhere in the background, some group of persons must be making conscious, deliberate choices to cause the world to become as it is. This mode of reasoning in the social sciences is of course analogous to the concept of Intelligent Design in the natural sciences - both approaches assume that complex patterns cannot arise in the absence of intention. Where Intelligent Design is marginalised in the natural sciences, however, variants of conspiracy theory can often be quite central to some social scientific traditions, in explicit or tacit forms.

I favour an alternative, which focusses on historical patterns as the unintentional consequences of actions that, even if they are consciously undertaken, are intended to produce very different results than what they actually effect. The interesting historical problem then becomes understanding why it should be the case that a non-random pattern should arise, if no one consciously intends to bring that pattern into being.

When examining the social realm, once we conclude that patterns are likely generated without conscious intent, it is fairly clear that there is no “place” where these unconscious social processes reside, other than in the myriad actions of the individuals who inadvertantly reproduce such patterns. When we look at nonconscious patterns that arise from the human mind, we are less sure - and, perhaps as a result, retroject notions of intentionality that could only ever be appropriately applied to conscious behaviour, into a nonconscious realm to which it doesn’t apply.

Ironically, I don’t see Freud as having this particular problem - I think he was quite clear, in his descriptions of the unruly, contradictory, fragmented id, that the logic of the conscious realm should not be applied to nonconscious actions - and, in fact, extrapolated that much suffering resulted precisely from guilt inappropriately experienced in relation to unconscious impulses. It is an interesting question whether, in still maintaining that unconscious impulses could be interpreted - that unconscious behaviours have meaning - Freud might inadvertantly have slipped a bit of the logic of the conscious world back into his analysis of the unconscious. But I won’t make any strong claims on this issue without thinking it through far more thoroughly than I have here…

Regardless, in percolating through popular culture, psychoanalytic concepts have retained the Freudian notion that unconscious desires are meaningful - but taken the unconscious as the cipher for the “true” person, such that inadvertant and unintentional acts are taken to be more fundamental, in some ways, than acts that are consciously chosen. In this respect, folk psychoanalytic categories join up with a phenomenon I blogged about a couple of weeks ago: the tendency, within the liberal economic and political tradition, to regard order that arises spontaneously as more “natural” than order that arises from conscious planning. This suspicion of consciousness is apparently an interesting red thread uniting many otherwise contradictory philosophies…

I’m not sure where this leaves me in terms of the issues discussed in the Acephalous thread. It does, though, sound a precautionary note on the need for theory (social and psychological) to take seriously both the reality of conscious intentions and the potential for non-conscious patterns, rather than reducing one of these phenomena to the level of appearance, in some sort of essence-appearance dichotomy.