Stepping Out into the Open
In 1971 Argentinian writer Julio CortĂĄzar, internationally renowned for his magnum opus Hopscotch (1966), as well as for his fantastic short stories, wrote a piece titled Prosa del observatorio,1 a text which according to conventional literary genres would seem to be unclassifiable. While CortĂĄzar is certainly well-known for a form of literature where not only realism and fantasy are intertwined to the point of becoming indistinguishable, but which also transgresses the rules of composition of literary cannons, many of the reviewers of From the Observatory (2011) agree in regarding this piece as his most unconventional work. A dream-like visual prose poem-cum-letter-cum-essay that today might be associated with a speculative fabulation on science and life, I read From the Observatory as a plea that speaks to the future. Indeed, to a possible future which, while perhaps unlikely, remains a vital source for cultivating a different mode of inhabiting the world.
By moving between a response to an article on the life cycle of eels published in Le Monde on 14 April 1971, and the spectral, visual experience of the wonderful structures of the Maharajah Jai Singhâs eighteenth-century astronomical observatories in Jaipur and Delhi, the poem articulates a proposition for a different mode of cultivating that very peculiar kind of experience that we normally call âknowingâ. A mode that, throughout this book, I will attempt to make resonate with some of the challenges with which contemporary forms of social inquiry are confronted today.
In encountering the poem, one realises that what sets it into motion is nothing other than an experience of perplexity. And such a perplexity is twofold. First, it concerns the lively, moving, and disconcertingly epic life cycle of eels,
In attending to their adventures, CortĂĄzar wonders about those eels that spend their lives âat the edge of blades of waterâ travelling upstream while in the process they âgrow and change color [âŠ] the muddy mimetic yellow [giving] way bit by bit to mercuryâ; those eels that, according to âan obscure piece of wisdom from remote bestiariesâ, at some point in their life âleave the water and invade the vegetable patches and orchard groves (those are the kinds of words they use in the bestiaries) to hunt for snails and worms, to eat the garden peas as it says in the Espasa Encyclopedia, which knows so much about eelsâ (2011: 40). He wonders, perplexed, about why, after such a saga, the eels âcommit suicide in their millions in the sluice gates and nets so the rest can pass and arriveâ (2011: 29).eels born in the Atlantic depths that begin, because we have to begin to follow them, to grow, translucent larvae floating between two waters, crystalline amphitheater of jellyfish and plankton, mouths that slide in an interminable suction, bodies linked in the now multi-form serpent that some night, no one can know when, will rise up leviathan, emerge as an inoffensive and terrifying kraken, to initiate the migration along the ocean floor [âŠ] [After living] for so many years at the edge of blades of water [the eels] return to submerge themselves in the gloom of the depths for hundred meters down, lay their eggs hidden by half a kilometre of slow silent thickness, and dissolve in death by the millions of millions, molecules of plankton that the first larvae already sip in the palpitation of incorruptible life. (CortĂĄzar 2011: 19â20)
Perhaps what is most striking to CortĂĄzar, however, is what becomes of the tragic adventure of the eels as they encounter the knowledge-practices of science, that âlovelyâ science whose âsweetâ words âfollow the course of the elvers and tell us their sagaâ and whose astronomers from the observatory in Jaipur once âwielded a vocabulary just as lovely and sweet to conjure the unnameable and pour it onto soothing parchments, inheritance for the species, school lesson, barbiturate for essential insomniacsâ (2011: 29). What he finds puzzling, as do othersâmyself includedâis the manner in which the quest for a knowledge that could be called âscientificâ transforms the eelsâ adventures into a set of âtheories of names and phasesâ that âembalm eels in a nomenclature, in genetics, in a neuroendocrine process, from yellow to silver, from ponds to estuariesâ and attempts to hold the cosmos still by âgather[ing] into one mental fist the reins of that multitude of twinkling and hostile horsesâ. For CortĂĄzar, the consequence is inevitable: âthe stars flee Jai Singhâs eyes just as the eels do the words of scienceâ (2011: 42).
While the scope of CortĂĄzarâs plea exceeds the specific procedures and requirements of neuroendocrinology and astronomy to encompass science as a whole, including the social sciences, it is not a mere rejection of either scientific practice or knowledge. He does not claim that the lively journey of eels or the cosmos should intrinsically escape scientific inquiry, nor does he necessarily anticipate that his own poetic experiment might be better equipped to come to grips with the dynamic, open nature of reality as such:
Rather than opposing scientific inquiry, what CortĂĄzarâs plea is trying to resist is a specific kind of science. He opposes a science that, in exclusively attempting âto measure, compute, understand, belong, enter, die less poor, to oppose this studded incomprehensibility hand to handâ (2011: 41), would not risk stepping out into the open thereby failing to come to terms with what matters to those it addresses. As he forcefully affirms in addressing his two figurative epitomes of scientific rationality:dear Madame, what would we do without you, Lady Science, Iâm speaking seriously, very seriously, but besides there is the open, the redheaded night, the units of excess, the clowning, tightrope walking, somnambulist quality of the average citizen, the fact that no one will convince him that his precise limits are those of the happiest city or the most pleasant countryside; school does what it does, and the army, the priests, but what I call eel or milky way persists in a species memory, in a genetic program Professor Fointaine has no idea of, and so the revolution in its moment, attacking the objectively abject or enemy, the delirious swipe to bring down a rotten city, so the first stages of the reencounter with the whole man. (2011: 62)
In this way, the plea that opens up the space for such an unclassifiable text bears the mark of a challengeâa challenge for scientific inquiries not to demand compliance of what they seek to understand, and instead, to learn to come to terms with it. Again, learning to come to terms with it does not imply ceasing to ask questions and dissolving our inquiries into utter mysticism. Rather, it involves speculating on the possibility of inventing new and different modes of asking questionsââwe mustâ, he urges us, âfeather and launch the arrow of the question another way, from another departure point, toward something elseâ (2011: 43, emphasis added).So, Professor Fontaine, itâs not diffuse pantheism weâre talking about, nor dissolution in mystery: the stars are measurable, the ramps of Jaipur still bear traces of mathematical chisels, cages of abstraction and understanding. What I reject while you gill me up with information on the course of the leptocephali is the sordid paradox of an impoverishment correlated to the multiplication of libraries, microfilms and paperback editions, enlightenment ĂĄ la Jivaro, Mademoiselle Callamand. Let Lady Science stroll through her garden, sing and embroider, fair is her figure and necessary her remote-controlled distaff and her electronic lute, we are not the Boeotians of our century, the brontosaurus is well and truly dead. But then one goes out to wander in the night, as so many of Lady Scienceâs servants undoubtedly do too, and if one lives for real, if night and our breathing and thought link those meshes that so many definitions separate, it can happen that we might enter parks in Jaipur or Delhi, or in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-PrĂ©s we might brush against another possible profile of man; laughable or terrible things can happen to us, we might access cycles that begin in the doorway of a cafĂ© and end up on a gallows in the main square of Baghdad, or stepping on an eel in the rue du Dragon, or spotting from afar like in a tango that woman who filled our life with broken mirrors and structuralist nostalgia (she never finished doing her hair, and we never finished our doctoral thesis). (2011: 56â57)
Reconstructing Social Inquiry or, What Is Ethics?
In a sense, the plea that From the Observatory articulates in its own inimitable style is one that resonates with a series of urgent questions with which the contemporary social sciences are confronted todayâa series of questions that constitute the very core of this book. How might the knowledges produced by the social sciences come to terms with this global and complex world, indeed, this world of âblooming, buzzing confusionâ, as William James (1957: 488) once described it from the perspective of the early experience of a baby? What new modes of feathering and launching questions might we have to invent, from where and in what directions would we launch them, were we concerned with producing forms of knowledge that will contribute not merely to the multiplication of paperbacks but to the future of those who, in CortĂĄzarâs words, âlive for realâ?
Insofar as the invention of the modern social sciences in the nineteenth century can be said to be related to the emergence of practical problems of governance of expanding and increasingly complex populations, such questions may be thought to be anything but new. However, the modernist mode of posing those questions, the subsequent history of the social sciences throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century, as well as the global socio-material transformations of the world during this period, testify to the need, or more, the demand, to simultaneously reclaim those questions and reconstruct the manner in which they are cultivated and launched.
In a sense, then, the attempt this book will make could be associated to a transformed version of John Deweyâs (2004) project of âreconstructionâ. Deweyâs aim in his project of reconstructing philosophy after the First and the Second World War was marked by what he saw as the demand upon philosophy and the problems with which it was concerned to become relevant to the continuous changes in human affairs which at times constitute veritable events in the worldâs history. Concerned with what he perceived as a profound disjunction between the premises of philosophical inquiry and the unstable consequences of the ingression of scientific inventions into the realm of human affairs throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Dewey sought to redress this disconnection by producing a reconstruction of the manner in which philosophical inquiry is conducted.
Philosophy, Dewey argued, cannot continue confining itself to dealing only with that which is âtaken to be fixed, immutable, and therefore out of time [âŠ], that is, eternal.â In contrast, it had to become capable of dealing with the urgent demands of the world with which it was then confronted. Demands that, in science, in technology and in politics, forced one to âabandon the assumption of fixity and to recognize that what for it is actually âuniversalâ is processâ (Dewey 2004: viiâviii, emphasis in original). So what is a reconstruction?
As Dewey (2004: xvii) forcefully claimed, âreconstruction can be nothing less than the work of developing, of forming, of producing (in the literal sense of that word), the intellectual instrumentalities which will progressively direct inquiry.â Deweyâs aim was the production of intellectual instrumentalities, of conceptual tools, for the âconstruction of a moral human scienceâ which would allow a reorientation of human affairs and provide âother conditions of a fuller life than man has enjoyedâ (2004: xxii). The inquiry that the production of such intellectual instruments would progressively direct was, for him, an inquiry concerned with the âdeeply and inclusively humanâthat is to say, moralâfacts of the present scene and situationâ (xviii).
The kinds of criticisms that CortĂĄzar levels against âLady Scienceâ, namely, the proliferations of technical names, of methods and instruments at the expense of an âimpoverishedâ experience of the world, one that prevents us from coming to terms with what matters for those who âlive for realâ, intimately resonate with Deweyâs plea for reconstruction. To be sure, they also seemingly resonate with the dangerous backdrop against which C. Wright Millsâs The Sociological Imagination (2000) attempted to articulate a liberating promiseâa promise against the danger of indulging in totalising yet impenetrable and thus, inert, âgrand theoriesâ, on the one hand, and of an inhibition prompted by confusing methodology with the substantive issues at stakeâwhat Mills terms âabstracted empiricismââon the other. Today, Millsâs âpromise of social scienceâ is one which has regained importance in current debates around the so-called crisis of contemporary social science. Such a crisis, I shall argue later in the book, can be read as a series of demands for such sciences to both justify and enhance the ârelevanceâ of their practices at a time when their institutional and material survival within universities seems to be under threat of dissolution.
Given this historical conjuncture, I am of the view that a project of reconstruction might constitute a productive means of engaging some of the challenges faced by the contemporary social sciences. If they are to intervene productively in the institutional and intellectual challenges that besiege their presents and possible futures, we need now, more than ever, a creative, reconstructive activity of conceptual and practical invention. Nevertheless, because the conditions that the social sciences face today differ in important ways from those that constituted the point of departure of the Deweyian project, we cannot carry out a reconstruction of contemporary forms social inquiry without, at the same time, posing anew the question of what the task of reconstruction might involve today.
Thus, while in the early twentieth century Dewey saw the construction of social and human sciences as a promising mode of reconstructing philosophy, the developments in the mainstream of such sciences throughout the last century suggest that, today, they might themselves be the ones in need of reconstruction. These developments show, moreover, that the âdeep and inclusively human factsâ that he regarded as the aim of such enterprise have been taken to beârather disappointinglyâonly âexclusivelyâ human. As I shall argue later on, in an age of global crises of both economy and ecology, a reconstruction that reclaims the concern for the deeply and inclusively human is not about an entrenched defence of the all-too-modern forms of anthropocentric humanism. Rather, what it requires is precisely that we question the exclusiv...