Category: retroduction

Excitable Speech

Vicki Kirby. JB: Live Theory. 2006. Continuum

Language is not a mere instrument or tool in this account, a technology used to different effects by a sovereign subject who controls it. The complication here is that if we ourselves are an effect of language then the complexity of its ontology resonates with our own constitution (88).

There is a life a discourse that exceeds the subject’s own temporality (92).

In Excitable Speech Butler specifically interrogates the act of hate speech because although great suffering can be attributed to these injurious acts she disputes the juridical model of power which informs campaigns to stop it. … Butler’s point here is that ‘the sovereign conceit’ which installs a causal equivalence between the speaker’s intention to wound, the actual representation of hate and the impact felt by the victim shows little appreciation of the problematic nature of communication. Further to this, this style of analysis inadvertently constitutes the victim of hate speech as a powerless object of the act, a passive recipient of injury whose incapacity renders them totally vulnerable. Lacking agency, the subject’s only hope of protection is that the state will exercise its power to prohibit and police such acts (94).

From Butler’s 1999 interview with Vicki Bell:

I think there are all kinds of reasons to stop a person when they speak such things [racist and homophobic speech]… I think that’s important. But I think a politics that begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it’s spoken. What would it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question? (Butler and Bell 1999, 166)

… her intention is to destabilize correspondence theories of language and to complicate what is actually meant by this notion of ‘discursive constitution’.

An important consideration for Butler is that the outcome of language is always threatened by incoherence, contingency and ambiguity, for it involves an intricate web of dispersed causality where the presumed integrity of authorship and authority, meaning and intention, are ‘spoken through’ by convention. This means that discursive convention is not a static structure but one which ‘suffer[s] destructuration through being reiterated, repeated, and rearticulated’. With this in mind, Butler asks, ‘[m]ight the speech act of hate speech be understood as less efficacious, more prone to innovation and subversion, if we were to take into account the temporal life of the “structure” it is said to enunciate? (Butler from Excitable, quoted in Kirby 2006, 95)

illocutionary act (performative utterance) language that performs an action as it is said.
“speech acts that in saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying”. The illocutionary speech act is itself the deed that it effects

“I bet” when said to a casino employee, or “I do” when said in a marriage ceremony to a future spouse, respectively constitute the fact of bettting and marrying. The actual practice of language can here be described as truth producing.

… if I am a heterosexual man standing in front of a registrar in a Register Office and I utter the words ‘I do’ in answer to the question, ‘Do you take this woman to be your wife?’, then I am actually performing the action by making the utterance: statements like these are called performative utterances or illocutionary acts. ‘To name the ship is to say (in the appropriate circumstances) the words “I name &c.” When I say, before the registrar or altar &c., “I do”, I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it’ (Austin 1955: 6) (Salih 2002. p 88).

perlocutionary act (constative utterance) language that describes the world
“speech acts that produce certain effects as their consequence; by saying something, a certain effect follows.” The perlocutionary merely leads to certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself.

In Bodies That Matter Butler once again draws from these lectures on linguistics, How To Do Things With Words. Austin distinguishes between two types of utterances, those that describe or report on something, and those that, in saying, actually perform what is being said.

Austin calls constative utterances, might be the statement, ‘It’s a sunny day’, or ‘I went shopping’ (Austin also calls these perlocutionary acts); by saying ‘I went shopping’, I am not doing it, I am merely reporting an occurrence.

Laclau and Mouffe’s new theoretical grammar

… it is important to stress the way in which Laclau and Mouffe sought to construct the problem they encountered in terms of a ‘crisis of Marxism’, which had then to be resolved in a particular way.

… In sum, Laclau and Mouffe proposed a new theoretical grammar that was rooted in a particular ontological standpoint, which they used to render intelligible a series of recalcitrant empirical phenomena and strategic dilemmas confronting a particular intellectual tradition. In so doing, the logic of their approach partakes of a retroductive form of reasoning. But why should we accept their new theoretical grammar. What are the criteria for its acceptance? It is clear that in developing their new approach Laclau and Mouffe did not rely upon the standard positivist model of testing a set of falsifiable hypotheses against all empirical evidence so as to demonstrate their validity. As against positivism, with its rigid separation of discovery and testing, the answer as to why we could or should accept their intervention depends, first, upon a range of criteria, which are internal to the production of their theoretical approach itself and, second, upon a nexus of persuasive practices, and theoretical and strategic interventions, which are designed to convince a range of relevant communities of both their validity and strategic importance.

The internal criteria we can mobilize to evaluate their theoretical solution comprise the degree to which the new approach is able to render intelligible the anomalous phenomena that arose within the existing paradigms in a a way that was more plausible than rival attempts to resolve the crisis of Marxism; the consistency of its ontological presuppositions and theoretical claims; the fecundity of the research programme in identifying and addressing new possibilities of theoretical endeavour and empirical research; and the cogency and effectiveness of the critiqus developed in its name, coupled with the new ethical and political possibilities the new approach makes possible. In all these respects, it is our view that Laclau and Mouffe’s approach does indeed consitutte a valid project of theory construction, which successfully addresses many of the anomalies they confronted, thus disclosing new possibilities for research and intervention. IN fact, this book can be read a sattamept to make good this claim (43).

Retroductive explanation

Our main critical argument is that it is problematic to model social processes on natural processes in this way — whether as universal laws, causal generalizations, or robust empirical correlations — because it leads to rather narrow conceptions of testing and explanation, in which the element of prediction is elevated at the expense of contextual and ontological factors.  In short, our target is the law-like conception of explanation and testing that the causal law paradigm elevates to the status of an ideal. (19)

As against inductive and deductive modes of reasoning, we argue more positively that retroductive reasoning provides us with a general form or logic of explanation in the social sciences.

More specifically, we challenge the compartmentalizing tendencies of positivist social science investigation — a logic of scientific discovery followed by exhaustive empirical testing and explanation — and propose instead one overarching logic of investigation comprising three interlocking moments: the problematization of empirical phenomena; the retroductive explanation of these phenomena; and the persuasion of — and intervention into — the relevant community and practices of scholars and lay-actors. (19)

Problematization

Problematization

Changing face of higher education in the UK: Problematize the different way it has been problematized by key social actors.

In this general context, an apparent puzzle has emerged concerning the lack of meaningful resistance by academics to the new regime of audit practices … Why are higher education audit reforms frequently not abandoned or activetly resisted by academics?  … Why are these reforms often allowed to intensify further, becoming even more deeply institutionalized and sedimented. 170

An object of study is constructed.  This means that a range of disparate empirical phenomena have to constituted as a problem, and the problem has to be located at an appropriate level of abstraction and complexity.  Thus our approach shares a family resemblance with Foucault’s practice of problematization, which in his view synthesized the archaeological and genealogical methods of analysis.

… problematization constitutes the first of three moments in the overall logic of critical explanation.  The second moment entails the furnishing of a retroductive explanation that addresses key features which emerge out of our initial problematization.

1. Identifying relevant social (What), political (Why)  and fantasmatic (How) logics.  We must thus start by characterizing the practices under investigation … this involves the task of retroductively identifying the assemblage of social logics that are currently being installed in UK universitites.  There are 4 such social logics:

4 social logics informing the practices of the new regime:1. competition, 2. atomisation, 3. hierarchy, 4. instrumentalization.  Which when articulated together enable us to characterize the emergent regime of audit practices (171).

2. The important point to keep in mind here is how, for us, the identification and operation of social logics requires some reference to — or passage through — the self-interpretation of subjects.

3.  Having established what the logics structuring the various audit practices in higher education are, we can also ask why and how they came about and continue to be sustained.  This turns our attention to the operation of political and fantasmatic logics

deductive-nomological, hypothetico-deductive

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)

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)

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)

Post-positivism

For GH the context of discovery and context of justification is blurred

GH focus on the centrality of self-interpretations in the social world, context, and the relevance of the ontological presuppostions that are brought to bear when the self-interpretations of the actors and the data itself needs to be interpreted.

Of course, how far we go in deferring to the self-interpretations of the actors in generating or accepting a proto-explanation will be a function of the specific ontology (e.g. hermeneutical, critical realist, poststructuralist) underpinning one’s approach. What is essential here is that the minimal hermeneutical insight be taken seriously, in the sense that our explanations ought to be properly contextualized in relation to the self-interpretations of the subjects themselves. (37).

Critical Realists

The critical realist intervention is helpful because it goes some way towards suggesting why retroductive reasoning is central to how we should think about social science explanation. Nevertheless, there are two qualifications we need to make. First … the critical realist position … restricts the scope of contingency to the multiple interactive possibilities among the plurality of generative mechanisms, which in turn points to a residual positivism. In our account, however, contingency ‘goes all the way down‘ so to speak. It is not just the complexity of the interactions between various mechanisms that concerns us, but the intrinsic contingency of the mechanistic structures themselves. Second … (Bhaskar’s argument moving from positivism to post-positivism is basically confused) 33.