I've heard of Garfinkel's new developments in his ethnomethodological
work, e.g., radical, relfexive studies o academicf disciplines... but I've
been too tied-up with my dissertation work to have followed up on his latest
works... Anyone fill in the gaps?
Angel
On Thu, 9 Nov 1995, Jay Lemke wrote:
>
> While the themes of our discussions seem to be (hopefully
> productively) unstable at the moment, like several others, I
> think there are some important and useful questions lurking
> somehow just out of focus.
>
> My intuitions (or interests) tell me that Edouard's point about
> getting a more substantial role for the historical dimension of
> culture in our thinking (about anything) should lead us
> somewhere. As Angel (?) said, we need to think about these issues
> not just philosophically, but methodologically. And I sense that
> it is just the _practical_ problems of including 'history' in our
> work that forced Edouard to wonder if 'history' itself is not too
> problematic a notion to rely on without reformulating it.
>
> The 'museums of practice' theme raises some of these questions
> about history: Whose history of Whom we are talking about? How
> does each culture construct a different notion of 'history'
> itself (not just of what happened, but of what is worth paying
> attention to, of how we fit the pieces together: ala museum
> displays or written texts or living continuations of practice;
> whether or not ecologically, etc.) Of course Foucault has given
> us some pretty good beginnings of an analysis of these matters,
> at least for European historiography as itself historically
> specific (esp in _Archeology of Knowledge_, and _Order of
> Things_), but not many people seem to be translating these into
> methodological practice.
>
> One place where some of it is put into practice is in the Latour-
> Law, etc. work of the last decade or so, an empirical sociology
> of knowledge that is actually to me quite parallel to Piaget's
> empirical psychology of knowledge (from genetic epistemology to
> actor-network epistemology!), as was recently mentioned again. I
> do think one can ask of Latour, as also of Bourdieu, whether they
> should really carry their reflexive imperatives more thoroughly
> into their own practice (boring as it may be to outsiders, it may
> be methodologically necessary). Perhaps they have, but not in the
> published literature so far as I know, and not with any startling
> insights or consequences (meaning, I believe, that they have not
> really done it). A reflexive analysis of the ecology (semiotic,
> economic, political, material) of one's own practice is itself a
> kind of historical inquiry, akin to autobiography. When we ask:
> Who's history of whom? perhaps the most ethical place to begin,
> and the most dangerous, but certainly _not_ the required one in
> our own scholarly tradition, is with Our History of Our Own
> Practice.
>
> The substitute for this in our European scholarly tradition is
> Our (usually called _The_) history of our discipline (itself
> shockingly neglected in many fields today in universities, esp.
> in the U.S.), which nowadays, via modernism, always has the
> comforting shape of a story which leads inexorably up into the
> light, and towards us and our present beliefs and agendas. It is
> by now a rather boring, as well as unconvincing sort of story,
> which is why many of us are ready for some sort of post-
> modernism. (I recently re-read and re-taught Phillipe Aries
> really quite excellent _Centuries of Childhood_ and found myself
> acutely embarassed by his uncritical assurance that the attitudes
> of his own day toward all issues clearly represented 'progress'
> over the more 'limited' or even primitive views of a few
> centuries before.)
>
> I think we understand better today the pitfalls of 'evolutionary'
> models of history (or of evolution, for that matter!): being
> retrospective accounts, they tend to pay attention only to what
> turned out to lead to what turned out to happen later, as if
> there was some sort of natural progression or necessity or even
> logic in this, and to ignore all the other things that happened
> and could have happened. There is perhaps no worse case of
> description masquerading as explanation (or if your believe that
> all explanations are simply privileged descriptions, of one that
> conceals the grounds of its claims to privilege). All history is
> written backwards from the perspective of the present moment, but
> it presents itself very differently: as proceeding forwards from
> some remote moment in time. As Foucault points out, in these
> circumstances it becomes problematic even to decide which past
> events lie on 'the same trajectory' as some present ones, to
> formulate criteria of 'antecedence' or 'derivation'.
>
> So here is one methodological suggestion: to begin, explicitly,
> from some point in our own current research and model-making, and
> to work backwards in time, in something of the spirit of a
> Latour-like ecological analysis, to discover and document the
> antecedents (according to principles we must also make explicit,
> considering where possible alternative principles) of how we got
> to where we are now, and which past options we did not take up,
> and whether the reasons of that time for not doing so still seem
> valid to us today. We have the semiotic capacity to re-present to
> ourselves our own past, and so to create a dialectic between this
> past (however reconstructed) and our dynamic present. I suspect
> we may well discover contradictions between our prior and present
> Selves and may well reconsider choices.
>
> Ultimately, of course, it would be nice to extend this approach
> back into the history of our lives, disciplines, institutions,
> cultures, etc., but I wonder if perhaps just a little 'shallow
> archeology' might not turn up some productive surprises (or
> embarassments)? History, after all, begins with yesterday. JAY.
>
> -----------
>
>
> JAY LEMKE.
> City University of New York.
> BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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