Our more concrete object of critique was the subsumptive character of the dominant mode of social and political theorizing. Subsumption in the field of method is evident when mainstream social scientists either deduce explanation from higher order laws or generalizations — the so-called deductive-nomological form of explanation — or deduce predictions which are subjected to exhaustive tests — the so-called hypothetico-deductive form of validation. Empirical objects are thus subsumed under the theoretical concepts, and do not modify or transform the latter, thus giving rise to what Althusser calls ‘a relation of exteriority’ between theoretical categories and empirical phenomena ( citing Althusser Reading Capital: 49) (210)
Category: Logics of Critical Explanation
Foucault’s doublet
In Foucault’s formulation, the social sciences are strongly marked by the modern episteme’s empirical-transcendental doublet, which for him stems from the epistemologically ambiguous figure of ‘Man’, who is both the subject and object of knowledge.
Causal Mechanisms
After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causallity is its subject independence. The causal process is unaffected by what any of us think about it or do in relation to it. Take the law of gravitation … we as subjects can act in light of such causal lasws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise. The functioning of comparable processes … in the social sciences, however, is parasitic upon human practices, in the sense that they are constitutively sustained and mediated by the discursive activity of subjects. … the functioning of causal laws does not require the passage through the subject: the content of causal laws is not parasitic upon the subjects’ self-interpretations. This is why we prefer the term ‘logic’ to ‘mechanism’.
The term logic better avoids the connotations of subject independence that talk of causal laws and mechanisms suggest. At the same time, it allows us to maintain the central insight which prompted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subject: logics are thus meant to capture the subject-dependent aspect of social processes, as well as aspects which are not reducible to the empirical context. (97)
Retroductive explanation
Identifying the relevant social, political, fantasmatic logics
identify a domain of objects and practices in need of analysis and critique, before then providing a genealogical accounting that explains their political and ideological emergence.
This involves the task of retroductively identifying the assemblage of social logics that are currently being installed at UK universitites
- logic of competition (actors as rivals)
- logic of atomisation (independent entities, isolated)
- logic of hierarchy (top down mode of governance)
- logic of instrumentalization (exchange over use value)
Reification
Subsumption relies on the idea that the very process of explanation is exterior to the explanation itself, an assumption which we have sought to undermine. From a postructuralist point of view, therefore, we can reconceptualize laws, mechanisms, and empirical generalizations, as a function of reification, or what we called in Chapter 3, abstract essences. The term reification simply signals the effect of bypasssing the contextualized self-interpretations of actors. By contrast, reactivation involves a process of de-reification, in which abstract essences are linked to the contexts and self-interpretations relevant to the problem at hand. Understanding such theoretical concepts and empirical generalizations as a function of degrees of reification or sedimentation, of course, differs substantially from the way mechanisms and laws are usually understood in the literature, namely, as representing differences in subsumptive scope (188).
3 moments in overall logic of critical explanation
Three interlocking moments:
- Problematization of empirical phenomena
- Retroductive explanation of these phenomena
- Persuasion of — and Intervention into — the relevant community and practices of scholars and lay-actors. (19)
Problematization
An object of study is constructed. This means that a range of disparate empirical phenomena have to be constituted as a problem, and the problem has to be located at the approaprate level of abstraction and complexity.
Often this begins by problematizing another’s problematization, that is, one problematizes the way in which the Harper Government in Canada has problematized the issue of copyright reform, in particular the notion of intellectual rights in the era of digitalized information.
Critique of causal mechanisms
Now it is clear that those who stress the role of causal mechanisms also go beyond the field of self-interpretations. For example, though Elster stresses the indeterminacy of their triggering and interaction, he uses mechanisms to provide a causal connection between phenomena and events. But he brackets the ontological conditions of possibility of these mechanisms, and underplays their organic and dynamic relation to self-interpretations and their contexts … Elster short-circuits the passage through the subject by conceiving mechanisms as a set of ‘abstract essences’ or free standing ‘tools’ that are not tied to any ontology, and which can be applied to different contexts without modification (159).
For us by contrast, logics are always linked to a particular field of self-interpretations. Social logics, in particular, provide access to the practices under investigation, enabling us to grasp the point of a practice or institution, as well as the rules and structures that organize them … Social logics require therefore a ‘passage through the self-interpretations of subjects’, and they provide a bridge between description/characterization and explanation/critique.
In any fully-fledged critical explanation of a phenomenon, political and fantasmatic logics have to be articulated with a range of social logics together with the empirical contexts they inform and within which they function. The entire logic of explanation thus requires the passage through self-interpretations (160).
Critique of hermeneutics
[A] hermeneutical inquiry not only pushes the study of society beyond the given facts and behaviour to the meaning an interpretation of facts, but it also moves beyond self-interpretations to the study of rules and interpretations of self-interpretations. Hermeneuticists thus seek to render the implicit explicit and to interpret self-interpretations, yielding contextualized self-interpretations. ..
Notwithstanding the advantages of the hermeneutical perspective, our use of logics goes further than this, for the latter not only focus our attention on the rules or gramnmar that enable us to characterize and even criticize a phenomenon, but they also allow us to disclose the structures and conditions that make those rules possible. They (the logics) ‘go beyond’ contextualized self-interpretations because they speak to the latter’s contingent constitution and sedimentation, focusing attention on the way their ‘ignoble origins’ are generally forgotten or covered over as the practices and their self-understanding are then lived out. (citing Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil :177) (158-9)
Modalities of subjectivity
Althusser’s model of ‘interpellation’, in which individuals are constituted or ‘hailed’ as subjects by recognizing certain signifiers and discourses as addressed to them, seems to presuppose an already constituted subject, which is able to ‘recognize’, ‘desire’, ‘know’, and so forth (cite Paul Hirst 1979) … After all, for Althusser, ‘individuals are always-already subjects’, whose ‘places’ in the existing social structures have been determined and fixed beforehand (cite Althusser 1971)
By contrast, … the category of the subject … is marked by a fundamental misrecognition that can never be transcended. The subject is thus no more than a void in the symbolic order whose identity and character is determined only by its identifications and mode of enjoyment (cite Zizek 1989).
questions of ethics (and ideology) centre on the subject’s particular mode of enjoyment. They address issues that arise from the different modalities of subjectivity in relation to the ultimate contingency of social existence.
How does a subject relate to the contingency of social life that is disclosed in dislocatory events? How does it identify anew? How does it translate its ‘radical investments’ into social and political practices? How does a subject relate to its identifications and consequently to its own contingency?
It is perhaps worth emphasizing here that these modes of subjectivity should not be understood in cognitivist or intellectualist terms. In other words, what we are trying to capture here with the categories of ideology and ethics has nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that someone can apprehend and even consciously affirm a particular ontological schema rooted in the racial contingency of social relations. This is because modes of subjectivity are also modes of enjoyment. and modes of enjoyment are always embodied in material practices, and thus not completely reducible to conscious apprehension. It is with this in mind that one should approach the question of subjectivity and identification. For example, does the mode of identification privilege the moment of closure and concealment (ideological dimension), or does it keep open the contingency of social relations (ethical dimension)? (119-120).
Political and Social dimensions
Both the political and social dimensions of social reality presuppose an intimate connection to the radical contingency of social relations, for both are understood in relation to a particular ontical manifestation of this radical contingency, namely, the public contestation of a social norm. Insofar as public contestation does not arise or is eschewed, we say that the social dimension is foregrounded. Insofar as this public contestation is initiated or affirmed through action, we may say that the political dimension comes to the fore. … the boundary between the social and political is not fixed, but in a state of constant flux (117).
Middle range theorizing
We can now revisit our model of practices and regimes by relating them to the ontological dimensions of social reality in a more systematic fashion. We must engage dimensions of social reality in a more systematic fashion. We must engage, therefore, in what might be termed a more middle-range style of theorizing, which involves the use of our ontological categories to redescribe ontical entities like practices and regimes. For instance, practices can be understood in terms of the way different dimensions of social relations —comprising the social, political, ideological, and ethical dimensions — are foregrounded or backgrounded, how they are articulated, and so on. We claim that this provides us with significant analytical purchase to describe and explain the socio-political world in a non-topographical fashion (120).
It is important to stress that in this to and fro movement between the ontological and ontical levels, which after all is constitutive of the logic of middle range theorizing, such typolgies are empirical and contingent. … our account of regimes and our account of practices as a function of four ontological dimensions relies on a set of sociological and normative assumptions. (127).
This suggests that we need to develop a language with which to characterize and critically explain the existence, maintenance, and transformation of concrete practices and regimes that is sensitive to our four ontological dimensions, and which makes explicit the normative aspects of our critical explanations.