can ignore the situation of enunciation and the subjectivity of any author. What we find in the changes marked by the evolution of the APA Publication Manual is the replacement of one rhetoric by another. In the new rhetoric science consists of carefulness rather than good reasoning. References are defensive guarantors of thoroughness rather than encounters with other reasoners. Philosophic problems disappear before the small, incremental bits of acknowledge. Looking for faults in other work becomes a major genre. Above all, perhaps, the fixed sections with their standard subtitles eliminate the transitional reasoning that characterize argument. Here, the form is the argument because it both drivers from – and enforces – the tacit agreement of the community. Professionalization through training means above all learning to work and think and write within the form of discourse required to publish. An economist has written of the APA Publication Manual, it is clearly meant to be a joke. A jolly good one it is, too, giving for instance page upon page of advice on style couched in the most miserable style the editors could manage, and fully ten hilarious pages on the official formula for a scientific paper (McCloskey 1985:175). The APA Publication Manual, in effect rules on how to remain within the middle levels of conceptualization, eschewing semantic reasoning and any questioning of the status of the fact itself. Although it is a guide to only the more formalized of the social science, it embodies the rhetoric of antirhetoric that marks scholarly ethos across the board. Poovey and Bazerman each describe how poetics invades this realm: Poovey by citing Shelly’s metaphoric solution to the problem of particulars and meaning; Bazerman by detailing how the narrator, narratee, and structure of emplotment become increasingly frozen as the genre of the article slowly shifts from argumentative inquiry to experimental report. If the science effect continues of hold away in certain social sciences, responses have not been lacking. A revived sense of a new science of aesthetics in social science has emerged, a science in the Vichian manner that examiners human knowledge and truths as the inevitable errors of our finite position in the world, working with tools we have ourselves fashioned. In the rest of this chapter, I shall discuss work in political science, sociology, economics, and history, with an eye toward moving the conversation toward its logical conclusion by raking up, one by one, increasingly radical presentations of the case.
Society as Text
Richard Harvey Brown has spent two decades developing a vision of sociology as a form of poetic discourse, caught between two opposing conceptions, positivism and romanticism. By the protean term positivism, Brown means an attitude to representation (or rather, statements) that demands a one-to-one correspondence between the voice of science and its objects. What must be excluded in this voice is connotation, the resonance of language that brings an uncontrolled personal voice into the conversation (Brown 1977:27). That resonance is consigned to poetry and its ingenious nonsense, as Newton put it. Romanticism championed the higher truths of intuition and art, put in doing so took an inward turn that all but surrendered the field of nature and the outer world to science. So Brown can summarize the institutional forms of positivism and romandcism thus:
Science Art
Truth beauty
Reality symbols
Things and events feeling and meaning
Out-there in-there
Explanation interpretation
Proof insight
Determinism freedom
Brown proposes a cognitive aesthetics that will overcome the partiality of the scientific construction of society through a dialectical hermeneutic that recaptures the fuller meaning of a thesis by transcoding it and thereby transcending its partiality (Brown 1977:48). The optimism of this formulation does not remove us from what Brown refers to as the tragedy of culture, the recognition that our world is an alienation of reality, but it places at the forefront a metaphor of wholeness which will serve Brown as a goal through later books. It is through irony that Brown seeks to overcome the partiality inherent in social science. Irony creates a tension and dramatic richness by revealing contradictions between intentions of actors and the outcomes of these intentions. It emancipates by showing the audience not only the mismatches between actions and results, but also casts the observer as yet another ironic position in the process of comprehension. The observer becomes an actor, with all of the uncertainties that this entails. Disillusioned in advanced, ironic social scientists will look back upon themselves as (interpretive) actors in the social process, and see the role played by poetics and figural language, for example, the theatrical metaphors that have dominated this paragraph (Brown 1989:117-88). In this description of dialectical irony is society as text, Brown takes a Hegelian stance. When faced with two plausible alternatives, the social scientist must affirm them both on a more sophisticated and reflective level (Brown 1987:142). The silence between opposing positions will figure forth a deeper meaning that will free us from moralism of all sorts. Put poetically, a sensitivity to the misrepresentation inherent in all realistic presentations will heighten our ethical intuitions that moral norms are also figural errors; this is the truth as error that Vico had suggested was our destiny (Brown 1987:173, 182, 187). The relativism fostered by rhetorical criticism is the challenge Brown offers to absolutists. To ponder alternative constructions is to render their effects visible and make them more open to improvement. Rhetoric here serves as an ethical touchstone, humanizing and making whole what was once a fractured and distorted image of the social (Brown 1995:9). Brown is careful to distinguish between both the mere rhetoric scorned by positivists, the rhetoric that constitutes our sense of facts, logic, and truth and the critical rhetoric that announces its own partisanship (Brown 1989:171 n.1). In the same vein, he separates epistemic from judgmental relativism (Brown 1995:10). Irony, another of Brown’s key terms, also has two forms – a conservative one that serves as a safety valve for social pressures and a free or mastered form that liberates (Brown 1987:187). Perhaps a telling example of this irony would be the episode in Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) in which Art, the cartoonist-author recording the experiences of this father on Auschwitz, argues with the old man about the existence of an orchestra in the camp. Vladek insists that there was no music; Art argues that the historical record proves there was. Who is the authority, the camp survivor or the son who relies on books and photographs? The ironic dilemmas of experience versus discourse should be acknowledge and made an opportunity for reflection (Spiegelman 1986:54). If a cognitive aesthetics, in effect, an ironized poetics, can relativize sociology so as to increase its sensitivity to a variety of moral norms and to undermine positivist absolutism, one might wonder how such a change is to come about. To turn a discipline, even toward sensitivity, is an aggressive act, a political act with consequences for careers and the training of fledgling scholars. Where in what context, could the change take place? How can a discipline be redirected? The answer to this question is political, and it is in political science that a response takes shape.
Epistemics are Rhetorics are Politics
Ideas take form in academia by becoming official subfields. So the attention to the constitution of the social sciences in discourse has come to be called the Rhetoric of Inquiry. Beginning at the University of Iowa in the 1980s, the Rhetoric of Inquiry movement has promoted a wide