Problems of Reflexivity and Dialectics in Sociological Inquiry (RLE Social Theory)

Language Theorizing Difference

Barry Sandywell, David Silverman, Maurice Roche, Paul Filmer, Michael Phillipson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317651321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

This is a work of social theory and philosophy which seeks to make the constitution of social theory a 'social' activity. It is essentially a collaborative text, by five authors, committed to a re-awakening of some of the forgotten dimensions of social theorizing. The collaborative work was originally occasioned by an attempt to analyse the notion of social stratification and its treatment in the sociological tradition. The authors' main concern here is with the nature of social theorizing, and in particular the 'difference' between Self and Other, being and beings, Language and Speech. The papers in the book focus on themes that are fundamental to the sense of inquiry and tradition which they are concerned to display. The themes discussed include speech, Language, Identity, Difference, Critical Tradition, Community, Metaphor, Dialectics, Observing and Reading.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL TRADITION
Barry Sandywell

…The Way from Writing to the Thing is no less necessarily by and through Language.

J. G. Hamann

My interests in the following Introduction and in the papers which expand upon it seek no more than a sketch for a different sense of Language and Tradition which revolves around the notion of how speaking differentiates and collects in one unfragmented movement. The words themselves point to the stratifying rules and practices, talk, rhetoric of theorists like Marx as instances of the pervasive theme of Difference. Thus the recurrent reference to Marx’s themes: Class, Class Struggle, Class–in–Itself, Class–for–itself, theorizing the immanent Transcendence of Class, de–Classing thought–and–action, and so forth. However these words constitute sketches – a first word or occasion for the revival of dialectical, speechful, articulating theorizing to–gether. They are in principle unfinished, unfinishable – and in this sense are avowedly audacious. This audaciousness is intended to move the reader to formulate the sense of this and other occasions in his own Voice. The audaciousness engineers a sense of the praxis of Writing in order that we may retrieve talk as making reference to perennial themes which sink deeper into language than the surface forms of that talk insinuate. Specifically I wish to refer the reader to the auto–stratifying practices of theorist’s talk – as instituting them into a collective identify, morality, commitment; more generally, I wish to refer these irremedial auto–stratifications back to deeper notions which, like tributaries of a river, lead to the sourse of any possible social reflection, and possible social theorizing.

This source is regarded as the stimulus and the ‘telos’ of languaged activities – it is regarded as adumbrating a moral sense of Self. An incomplete cycle of these themes which might be called essentially unavoidable notions forms the ‘grammar’ of an emergent concept – and this is Critical Tradition. Thus essentially unavoidable notions cluster about Language (as ‘Logos’), Language as unavoidable Articulation, Speech, Speechful Labour, Theoreticity as the ideal of moral speechfulness, Speechfulness as referring the speaker to the essencing of authenticity, Theoreticity as Critique, Critique as Critical Reason which aspires to Wisdom, Critique as Critical Reason, Critical Reason as both concrete and analytic liberation not from but for the sway of tradition.

Such an intertwining variation of themes also contains their negation – a correlated forgetfulness which is the shadow that accompanies theorizing tradition.

This cycle of notional forms provides the mirror–play for all thinkable social thought, a subterranean Limit, Measure, Grammar which must be concretely filled out before any form of social thought becomes possible. It is the way that modes of speaking concretely fill–out this grammar which leads to the pathways that have been carved into our tradition – and it is these ‘Holzwege’ which we wish to raise to the surface under the rubric of Critical Tradition. Unavoidably we trade upon a lexicon which is likewise ‘on the way’ – there are no standard footholds nor ready paradigms to be cited for this venture. The reader must accept as an a priority the speculative intelligibility of this (kind of) writing. ‘Where he does critically accept the text, he has already become a re–writing Reader.

My listening and canvassing of this mirror–play is more radically an invitation to the reader that he enter and theorize along–with the writing; the mirror–play is such that it essentially in–volves him – for the oblivion of language touches all speakers. In this sense we are ob–lig–ated, we find ourselves tied together in the common pursuit of a difference that would collect us as theorizers. In order that this be concretely advanced the reader must be dislocated into taking two steps back before he stands forth to inherit pathways (speechways) into tradition, in my–our sense.

By pointing our reader along the way to that Difference which ‘makes’ (poetizes) all difference we destroy nothing; like the Delphic oracle these fragments are signs, indications, digressions, reminiscences on rationalities and madnesses – whose ‘point’ lies elsewhere. let these digressions – indeed this digression – are spoken for a reason. One of the first great reflexive speakers already declared that he came not to destroy but to fulfill – to provide the world’s talk with its forgotten communal ways and means – with its vital grounds. In a similar way, the emerging notion of interrogative or critical tradition, seeks to preserve through the disruption and terrors (for concrete speakers) of listening and articulating formulation. Hence the dislocation spoken of a moment ago – a dislocation felt when the concrete speaker is referred back to the Difference which makes a difference, gathers his talk and makes him speak ‘differently’, makes his outpourings a difference within a curtain of Identity.

We come not to destroy but to preserve. It is this disruptively respect–ful attitude which I’d like to draw attention to at the very outset; to give a reader the hint which transforms his egological desire to depict Being into the desire to formulate it – to explicate his stance and consciousness of his sense of explication and criticism – to achieve a Community of formulation and therein radically ground his words. For there is no problem of the radication of meaning, the radical problem is the communal construal of senses of meaning resourcefulness – Difference is; what are the Differences?

In a way what is so difficult for us to research is the simple question: How do practioners of instituted communities come to formulate Being in the languages (in the depth of Language) grounding those communities? Once this question is richly specified, made ‘concrete’ in the Hegelian sense, it shades out into a notion of tradition and the variegated texture of discourses which provided a tradition’s possibility. Receiving concretion likewise transforms the ‘simple’ problem into the most difficult research of all – for this research not only seeks the grounds of the Other’s rhetoric but also seeks to know its own, and the double movement of reflexivity can only be furthered in the same attitude of re–trieving a sense of language and critical tradition. How does Being come to disclosure in those beings which form the fabric of tradition – in discourses? How does Language sustain the being of languages, discourses, rhetorics in its sway in order that depth be instituted as the resourcefulness of all speaking. How and as what does the world come to be said in the voices which form the secret history of tradition? It is in this nexus of questions and problems where we can authentically locate the enterprise of Criticism as one further rhetorical possibility.

We recall that discourse is an instance of what it speaks about; talk has a deep ontological status bound up with this ‘about–which’, Language itself as a communal ‘mittence’, a perdurance through social frames of time, is both instrument and product of communally disclosed Being, It is this peculiar dialectical nature of discourse which makes disclosure and self–disclosure possible. Discourse leads us to formulate Being as the ‘about which’ we talk, as it also discloses itself as that by which we ‘talk about’. There are profound reasons for interpreting this two–fold openness of discourse as a dialectical tension, a sort of ‘hyphen’ from which begins reflection and self–reflection which are necessary for any kind of articulate speech. The hyphenated dialectic of discourse contains the possibility of reflexive articulation. Speech, so to speak, is internally divided for it is ‘already about’ Being as ‘already about’ itself as an instance of Being. Speech exhibits itself as ontologically construed in projecting itself toward the world as construed. Discourse is self disclosure, self–referring, self–exhibiting. Throughout its essential twofoldness, however, speech remains coherent; it does not fall apart into the ‘about which’, nor does it simply revolve into an exhibition of itself. Speech retains the unity of its own intelligibility. Like the Heraclitean Bow and Lyre discourse is a harmony from opposition, a Unity across Duality, a deep Oneness whose sensible functions rest on a twofoldness. Language, in short, is the articulatory realm of dia–logue which the ancients baptized Dialectic. Language is already a community of two.

We might formulate this intrinsic logic of exhibition which is innate to discourse by saying that the unavoidable disclosure of ‘Logos’ in any kind of human discourse deeply requires that speech be the region or site both of disclosure and self–disclosure. Fundamental to the intelligibility of any kind of discourse is, as it were, a ‘logic’ of revelation. The possibility of self disclosure (a communal sense of Being, reason, language) or revelation might be thought of as the firstness of Language, a minimal ontological re–requirement of articulate speech.

To utter intelligibly means ‘already’ to be a subscriber to this condition; to talk ‘about’ anything at all requires its presencing; to ‘refer’ to a supposed autonymous ‘reality’ with an instrument which is itself partaking of the same ‘real’ requires the same resource. And so it goes. Revelation – the hyphenated structure of Unity through Difference – becomes a category central to our considerations of Language and Tradition.

That we cannot avoid thinking of our being–in–language as a path or way from language to the thing (‘reality’) already bespeaks the pervasiveness of one rhetorical possibility, behind which functions the hyphenation of revelation. let this is a possibility only for those already operating deep within the continent of Language and Tradition. It is like a metaphor grown cold. These remarks are attempts to re–animate this kind of metaphor, working necessarily, from within their dominion. Kant’s great contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann, points metaphorically to our metaphor when he reminds us that the Way from Writing to the Thing is no less necessarily by and through Language. That we can come to know this is a bequeathal and celebration of the revelatory hyphen itself.

And as there are many paths and mansions toward co–responsive thinking, so the shape of formulation will display all the richness and variation of active interruptions in the juncture of Text–World. Writing our way into a Tradition does not primarily mean mirroring the objects which that tradition has found eminent – out–standing – but rather attending to the modes of eminence, the modes of things’ outstandingness. However, the Great Mirror of Language is a potent and violent way of self–formulation – and to that extent would have to be respectfully retrieved and ground in its essencing. Or take the tradition–oriented work of Philosophers of Science – the so–called ‘New’ Philosophy of Science which engages the active “seeing–as” of language and requires theory–ladenness as its watchword; take the expression ‘Criticism of Language’ – take this Word much slower in order that we might hear in it the ambiguous voices of ‘Logos’. To attain a foothold to the emerging notion of ‘critical tradition’ it might be useful to experience the dialectics of ‘Criticism of Language’ – for all ‘Criticism of language’ presupposes inquiries of the kind adumbrated here; they are unavoidably circular ventures into the spaces of signification given that Inquiry and ‘Criticism of Language’ are co–implicative. Likewise presupposing the fact of a Community – Membership – who might listen as ‘Critics’, ‘Inquirers’, ‘Consumers’, and so forth. Critical tradition is also a ‘Critique of Logos’ – a separating and collecting in order to display the various senses of identity and difference which are tied into any kind of speech. To do ‘Criticism of Language’ in our sense would then be to retrieve and resuscitate the very terms of criticism (Inquiry, Community, Dialectic, Intelligibility, and so forth); where – in Kantian vein – we are concerned with the grounds of the possibility of… as well as the ‘and so forth’.

In our Anglo–American tradition it is the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, Michael Polanyi and their friends who, like the dialecticians of science on the continent – Bachelard, Gonseth, and the like, have most seriously tried to re–think Science from within a critical linguistic tradition. Science is reformulated within this ‘Criticism of Language’ as a community’s ways and means of claiming a certain kind of authoritativeness for its statements and propositions. The historicity of Science’s conceptual dialectics is nothing other than the necessary working through of endemic structural relations to be found in altered form in other institutions designed to produce epistemic claims as objective reports upon Nature. Science is both communalized in its essence – as inquisitive research (Normal/Revolutionary Science) and brought back within the possibilities of Language as another highly articulate attempt to discourse with Being through particular authoritative social forms. Kuhn, of course, restricts his thesis to the concrete problems thematized by the traditional historian of science. In this respect he – and other texts in the Dialectical tradition – are more important for what they omit and gloss over in silence than for what they articulately claim to be speaking about. The notion of theorizing the very grounds of anything like ‘the history of Science’ as itself part of a critically discursive tradition, is left for the metaphysicians. Kuhn’s retrieval of Science however is symptomatic of both a conceptual need – witness how his talk around paradigms has been consumed in great uncritical draughts – and a deep rooted unwillingness to inquire into the grounds of one’s own thematizations. Through this fundamental oversight examples of the ‘New’ Philosophy of Science and the ‘New’ History of Science are forced to resort to a positivist notion of Community and Communal authority, rather than pushing deeper into the grounds of community and posing the question of the reflexive possibility of ‘society–talk’ in the first place. The failure to give an account of one’s accounts bedevils Kuhn – and writing of that kind. Scratch his texts and we find a concretized version of the Hegelian dialectic which refuses to think its own Limit and measure.

As my introductory sketch is more of a research statement I would wish to point out sources of possible work required if we are to retrieve historicity as discourse, Language. Kuhn’s work and the syndrome of critical debate it has instigated is a notable candidate for such reflexive theorizing: to re–think Science in terms of the uses and senses of the Communal which its practioners presume and display in the concrete actualities of their communications, reports, work. Not only are there something like ‘paradigms’ of theorizing, examples, problem–candidates, and the like, but also paradigms of the Communal which underlies and provides the intelligibility for surface talk about problems, instrumentation, methodology, operationalization, theory–testing, etc. This vast field of Rhetorical uses of paradigmatic senses of the social remains a field for reflexive work. No more than this can be said at this stage in the work.

For Kuhn and company a member becomes a special Member (e.g. of the community of Science) by displaying a sense of having internalized, utilized, appropriated (etc.) the institutional paraphernalia of that community which Kuhn points to with the richly ambiguous word ‘paradigm’. To be a practioner of Science means to be paradigm–practised or paradigm–conscious, though not necessarily paradigm–self–conscious. Paradigm self–consciousness seems to be a structure of language which is reserved for the various parasitical meta–scientists who tend and ‘care’ (cure) the machinery of the engaged scientist. Language comes to thematization for Kuhn merely as an available conceptual stock which periodically suffers internal convulsions and revolutionary re–organizations. Language is part of the instrumentation of science which meta–scientists care for as would a mechanic or a Lockian underlabourer. Thus although Kuhn’s work contains resonances with a critical attitude to the languaged–tradition as ‘Logos’, the work is uncritically located in a positivist description of language as tool or instrument available through paradigmatic ways for the practioners of a community.

We could in passing suggest that Kuhn’s ‘member’ or ‘practioner’ might more usefully be conceptualized as a languaged Self through which a community’s disclosure of Being (its languages) speaks and is channelled into practioner activities. It is only in this way that a Community achieves expression and ‘passage’ through the vehicles of concrete speakers. It is in the practices of these Selves where the meaning of a Community’s disclosure of Being is exemplified. The same argument applies, ‘mutatis mutandis’, to each and every other languaged–community. With this transformation all Communal construals of Being become essentially – not just contingently – moral enterprises and are thereby instituted rhetorically as ontologically political.

Movements in contemporary sociology variously labelled ‘phenomenological sociology’ or ‘ethnomethodology’ are thought of as candidates for critical de–struction and re–trieval. Ethnomethodology is a prime example of the practical rhetorical accomplishment of a research discipline which refuses to think through its rhetoric; refuses to move from its research object which it locates as everyday members’ practical, indexical accomplishments of sensible environments to the grounds of its rhetoric.

Ethnomethodology might be thoughtfully re–appropriated here not as a sociological discipline constituting itself about the constitutive rationalities/irrationalities of everyday social institutions – but as one rhetorical establishment of instituted reason, discourse, Language. Like Kuhnian criticism ethnomethodology contains more relevant silence than articulate sense.

If we wished to characterize the sense of this writing which is attempting to rhetorically constitute a tradition of critical language as Logos we might hyphenate the word Ethnomethodology and take the hyphenated structure to the letter. Thus Ethnomethodology would speak from its silence as:

‘Ethno–methodos–Logos’

and this triadic Concern (in Heidegger’s sense) now begins to speak to this paper in the voice of Language and tradition. In terms of its three components – ‘Ethno/Methodos/Logos’ we could speak ethnomethodology as our project. That is, we are seeking rhetorics by which Communities (Ethno–) articulate ways and means within language (Methodos–) in order to disclose, construe or articulate Being (–Logos). Our rhetoric might be located as seeking ways and means of re–opening Community paths (‘Methodos’) by which we can resuscitate and re–inscribe our Selves into the Ground of Language thought radically as ‘Logos’.

In a Hegelian manner, concrete ethnomethodology was a dialectical antithesis to the thesis of ‘The Sociological Tradition’ – that is Positivism or Constructive theorizing as re–presentational language/speech/writing which we are now attempting to ‘sublate’ through the internal contradictions which make the practise of ethnomethodology deeply impossible as a reason–able instituting (though possible as the ultimate ‘logic’ of Constructive theorizing). The ‘overcoming’ of ethnomethodology would occur by critically grounding it in the forgetfulness of ...