“See also Literary Criticism”: Social Science Between Fact and Figures
Kans Kellner
The (Anti) Social Sciences
A recent visit to a large national bookstore helped place for me the current situation of the social sciences. On the shelf marked “Sociology” was taped a small sign, “See Also Literary Criticism.” This juxtaposition undid a basic pro-position of nineteen-century thought, the splitting of a formal knowledge of human affairs away from the literary and the rhetorical. At the same time it reinforced in an informal but highly pragmatic way the dilemma faced by the social sciences: insofar as they aspire to the status of sciences, the social sciences must work with tools that disavow their conventionality as tools. In so doing, these sciences cease to the social and become incoherent. To be science for the last four centuries has been to separate one’s practice from the give-and-take of social action and historical change the scientific method, however describe, is a challenge to those forms of knowledge (which some philosophers do not see as knowledge at all) that are the result of the conflict and temporary consensus of a society of persons with competing interests. Of course, the sociality of the social sciences has been repressed ever since they took an academic shape a century ago. The goal was a science of, in the sense of “about”, the social, not a science know through its own social forms. At each of the points along the spectrum of the social sciences, the presumed purpose of the endeavor was an improved knowledge of an object in the world; these were discursive objects such as the events of the past, social formations, economic transaction, political forces. No one has ever seen any one of these “things” in the absence of the description that names it within a stipulated frame of meaning; no happening can be, for example, a historical event, or an event at all, in the absence of complex and tacit social agreement about what is historical and what is to be accepted as the structure of historical event, its inside and outside, so to speak. Yet these phenomena survive as objects of study because of an implicit agreement without which the enterprises known as the social sciences in their present forms would collapse. A part of the agreement that made social science possible was to keep tacit and untheorized the meaning that escaped the limits of methodology. For to theorize the grounds of possibility for a social science would surely have the effect of shifting attention away from reality – and the social science in their existing forms have little claim to attention or to resources if they lose their “realism”. in the sense of addressing something that is neither the science itself nor derived from terms implicit in the tools which uses, by acknowledging the depth of their debt to the forms of representation of reality, forms that always threaten to reveal themselves as more than representations, indeed as the actually constituting forces behind any claim to comprehension of the real. Access to the real, then, has depended upon suppression of the tools that seemed to provide that access, above all, of rhetoric and the poetic creation of meaning. To apprehend, for example, the Holocaust as a sociologist would is undoubtedly different from apprehending it as a political scientist, historian, or anthropologist would. But all of these social science are in accord in resisting the suggestion that language and the shifting world of human opinion create the “real” that those disciplines hope to confront and account for. The goal of each has been to produce a version of an event like the Holocaust that will stand as true, independent of the tides of opinion. They must, in short, produce a compelling argument without admitting that it is an argument, a persuasive action at a particular audience for a particular purpose. The so-called modernist understanding of the world that came into existence in the seventeenth century, and crystallized as a way of understanding human events in the nineteenth century, is a stable three-part structure comprising the observer, the thing observed, and the tool of observation. Each part of this triple structure is presumed to be an actual thing, separable from the others and possessing its own jaentity. The world and the things in the world are fixed things, and not dependent on either the tools used to observe and represent them or on the observer. The world exists apart from any perception of it. As with the telescope (eye-instrument-world ) or the sea journey (port of departure-ship-destination), the model conjoins observant reason with the existent would via a mediating signifying system that dose not interfere with either reason or the world. It is essentially identical with them both because it works the way they do (Reiss 1982:31). In other words cogita ergo sum. The signifying system, language, will present the world to us in increasing detail, and will interpret it properly for us through its very form (Reiss 1987:41). If this is taken to be the structure of the world, the discreteness and individuality of the mind of the observer is generated by the structure; the observer (or the subject) is what experiences the world, and thus knows it. From this, of course, follows the ethics that places the individual at the center of a system of rights and responsibilities that define humanity itself. The thing observed is the world “out there,” defined by its thing hood. The existence of things is no more problematic than the existence of individual minds that experience them. In this scheme, the world has joints at which it may be cut in pieces, just as the human individual exists as a namable, ethical, and experiential entity. There is nothing particularly modern about the conjoining of the observer and the thing observed. What is new in this structure is the central position of something that is neither observer nor observed, namely the tool of observation itself. The epitome of the structure is the image of Galileo gazing at the heavens through his telescope. It is the telescope that is new, modern, but also modern is the truth that is placed in what the telescope reveals. Metaphorically, the telescope stands here for the word, particularly the conceptual word, which may also be reviewed as a modern invention. For the older notion of the word, as arbitrary sign equivalent to a thing, has given way to the modern word, a telescope that will afford a vision of the object. The modern word is not a manmade world, but it is knowable (Reiss 1982:54). The social science took their parent shape at the end of the nineteenth century when the fascination with history and a relativism bred by that fascination brought about the division into a naturalistic historicism, where a rational plan governs the whole. The former view leads to a sociology, the latter to philosophies like Marxism. A third attitude toward human events, however, recognized both of these – indeed, any approach to the thing itself, actual human experience – as ideological. This third approach was an aesthetic social vision, and it took as its focus of the study not the events themselves but rather their representations. Aesthetic historicism believes, for example, that history is a function of historiography. The aesthetic standpoint calls into question the purpose of history, and of the human sciences generally, because it maintains that they cannot deliver on their promises. The truth of human affairs is what human being have made. It is thus a created, never a found, thing, fashioned from the changing material of life. Vico ([1725] 1984) had presented a version of this sensibiloity in opposition to the positivism of Enaghtenment thought. His idea was that human creations must serve human needs , and these included representations of human affairs. If a version of human actions was oppressive, frustrating to hopes and initiative, it must be overcome. This overcoming will always be in the form of an alternative rival version. In a sense, then, the goal of the science of human affairs will be to provide a wide variety of plausible image of human life for the service of life itself. Humanity ultimately will choose. From as aesthetic perspective, all representations that aspire to membership in the social science must do two things. First , they must be formally – as made objects – recognizable as plausible and responsible rendering of reality; this is the work of a poetic. Second, they must argue for their superiority over other, differing, rendering of things ; this is the work of rhetoric. Any attempt of hide the “made” and the argued basis of our knowledge has lost its claim to cognitive responsibility, in spite of the fact that exactly such an attempt is the ideology of the disciplinary social sciences in the Euro-American tradition. Disciplinarily involves the imaginary appointment of human experience through methodological screens. Any may be said to have a sociological, political, economic, or historical meaning; although no one can point to any point of the event that embodies that meaning; indeed, to point to any part of event would simply raise the issue again by creating another event whose meaning could be further distributed. Disciplines express aspects of social desire (that is, that the past has a meaning, that humanity may be grouped and classified coherently, that power has definable forms, and that scarcity and finitude can be conceptualized), which they reinforce by propagating and enforcing a particular set of anxieties, known as method. The creation of the discipline means framing the conceptual scope of a range of the question that will count as proper, and the marginalization of those that will not. It might appear that this farming would apply to the topics deemed appropriate for study, but in fact the limitation that produces a social science if formal, and applie
"ดูวรรณคดีวิจารณ์": วิทยาศาสตร์สังคมระหว่างข้อเท็จจริงและตัวเลขKans Kellnerสังคมศาสตร์ (ต่อต้าน)A recent visit to a large national bookstore helped place for me the current situation of the social sciences. On the shelf marked “Sociology” was taped a small sign, “See Also Literary Criticism.” This juxtaposition undid a basic pro-position of nineteen-century thought, the splitting of a formal knowledge of human affairs away from the literary and the rhetorical. At the same time it reinforced in an informal but highly pragmatic way the dilemma faced by the social sciences: insofar as they aspire to the status of sciences, the social sciences must work with tools that disavow their conventionality as tools. In so doing, these sciences cease to the social and become incoherent. To be science for the last four centuries has been to separate one’s practice from the give-and-take of social action and historical change the scientific method, however describe, is a challenge to those forms of knowledge (which some philosophers do not see as knowledge at all) that are the result of the conflict and temporary consensus of a society of persons with competing interests. Of course, the sociality of the social sciences has been repressed ever since they took an academic shape a century ago. The goal was a science of, in the sense of “about”, the social, not a science know through its own social forms. At each of the points along the spectrum of the social sciences, the presumed purpose of the endeavor was an improved knowledge of an object in the world; these were discursive objects such as the events of the past, social formations, economic transaction, political forces. No one has ever seen any one of these “things” in the absence of the description that names it within a stipulated frame of meaning; no happening can be, for example, a historical event, or an event at all, in the absence of complex and tacit social agreement about what is historical and what is to be accepted as the structure of historical event, its inside and outside, so to speak. Yet these phenomena survive as objects of study because of an implicit agreement without which the enterprises known as the social sciences in their present forms would collapse. A part of the agreement that made social science possible was to keep tacit and untheorized the meaning that escaped the limits of methodology. For to theorize the grounds of possibility for a social science would surely have the effect of shifting attention away from reality – and the social science in their existing forms have little claim to attention or to resources if they lose their “realism”. in the sense of addressing something that is neither the science itself nor derived from terms implicit in the tools which uses, by acknowledging the depth of their debt to the forms of representation of reality, forms that always threaten to reveal themselves as more than representations, indeed as the actually constituting forces behind any claim to comprehension of the real. Access to the real, then, has depended upon suppression of the tools that seemed to provide that access, above all, of rhetoric and the poetic creation of meaning. To apprehend, for example, the Holocaust as a sociologist would is undoubtedly different from apprehending it as a political scientist, historian, or anthropologist would. But all of these social science are in accord in resisting the suggestion that language and the shifting world of human opinion create the “real” that those disciplines hope to confront and account for. The goal of each has been to produce a version of an event like the Holocaust that will stand as true, independent of the tides of opinion. They must, in short, produce a compelling argument without admitting that it is an argument, a persuasive action at a particular audience for a particular purpose. The so-called modernist understanding of the world that came into existence in the seventeenth century, and crystallized as a way of understanding human events in the nineteenth century, is a stable three-part structure comprising the observer, the thing observed, and the tool of observation. Each part of this triple structure is presumed to be an actual thing, separable from the others and possessing its own jaentity. The world and the things in the world are fixed things, and not dependent on either the tools used to observe and represent them or on the observer. The world exists apart from any perception of it. As with the telescope (eye-instrument-world ) or the sea journey (port of departure-ship-destination), the model conjoins observant reason with the existent would via a mediating signifying system that dose not interfere with either reason or the world. It is essentially identical with them both because it works the way they do (Reiss 1982:31). In other words cogita ergo sum. The signifying system, language, will present the world to us in increasing detail, and will interpret it properly for us through its very form (Reiss 1987:41). If this is taken to be the structure of the world, the discreteness and individuality of the mind of the observer is generated by the structure; the observer (or the subject) is what experiences the world, and thus knows it. From this, of course, follows the ethics that places the individual at the center of a system of rights and responsibilities that define humanity itself. The thing observed is the world “out there,” defined by its thing hood. The existence of things is no more problematic than the existence of individual minds that experience them. In this scheme, the world has joints at which it may be cut in pieces, just as the human individual exists as a namable, ethical, and experiential entity. There is nothing particularly modern about the conjoining of the observer and the thing observed. What is new in this structure is the central position of something that is neither observer nor observed, namely the tool of observation itself. The epitome of the structure is the image of Galileo gazing at the heavens through his telescope. It is the telescope that is new, modern, but also modern is the truth that is placed in what the telescope reveals. Metaphorically, the telescope stands here for the word, particularly the conceptual word, which may also be reviewed as a modern invention. For the older notion of the word, as arbitrary sign equivalent to a thing, has given way to the modern word, a telescope that will afford a vision of the object. The modern word is not a manmade world, but it is knowable (Reiss 1982:54). The social science took their parent shape at the end of the nineteenth century when the fascination with history and a relativism bred by that fascination brought about the division into a naturalistic historicism, where a rational plan governs the whole. The former view leads to a sociology, the latter to philosophies like Marxism. A third attitude toward human events, however, recognized both of these – indeed, any approach to the thing itself, actual human experience – as ideological. This third approach was an aesthetic social vision, and it took as its focus of the study not the events themselves but rather their representations. Aesthetic historicism believes, for example, that history is a function of historiography. The aesthetic standpoint calls into question the purpose of history, and of the human sciences generally, because it maintains that they cannot deliver on their promises. The truth of human affairs is what human being have made. It is thus a created, never a found, thing, fashioned from the changing material of life. Vico ([1725] 1984) had presented a version of this sensibiloity in opposition to the positivism of Enaghtenment thought. His idea was that human creations must serve human needs , and these included representations of human affairs. If a version of human actions was oppressive, frustrating to hopes and initiative, it must be overcome. This overcoming will always be in the form of an alternative rival version. In a sense, then, the goal of the science of human affairs will be to provide a wide variety of plausible image of human life for the service of life itself. Humanity ultimately will choose. From as aesthetic perspective, all representations that aspire to membership in the social science must do two things. First , they must be formally – as made objects – recognizable as plausible and responsible rendering of reality; this is the work of a poetic. Second, they must argue for their superiority over other, differing, rendering of things ; this is the work of rhetoric. Any attempt of hide the “made” and the argued basis of our knowledge has lost its claim to cognitive responsibility, in spite of the fact that exactly such an attempt is the ideology of the disciplinary social sciences in the Euro-American tradition. Disciplinarily involves the imaginary appointment of human experience through methodological screens. Any may be said to have a sociological, political, economic, or historical meaning; although no one can point to any point of the event that embodies that meaning; indeed, to point to any part of event would simply raise the issue again by creating another event whose meaning could be further distributed. Disciplines express aspects of social desire (that is, that the past has a meaning, that humanity may be grouped and classified coherently, that power has definable forms, and that scarcity and finitude can be conceptualized), which they reinforce by propagating and enforcing a particular set of anxieties, known as method. The creation of the discipline means framing the conceptual scope of a range of the question that will count as proper, and the marginalization of those that will not. It might appear that this farming would apply to the topics deemed appropriate for study, but in fact the limitation that produces a social science if formal, and applie
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