methodology and social good

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Thu, 20 Nov 1997 00:09:43 -0500

In catching up the last couple days postings, I was particularly drawn in
to Eugene and Diane's dialogue about the social-political contexts of
academic methods of research and writing.

As academics we do not research as we do and write as we do solely because
we have determined that these forms will produce the most social good. We
are partly unconsciously guided by the sort of habitus that has made us
relatively successful with these forms, and partly we respond to external
institutional constraints that determine what Bourdieu would call the
academic 'markets' within which others, those with the power to do so,
judge the value of what we do and write.

But value in the academic market, and value for social good cannot be the
same. The latter would have to be judged by the standards of people very
different in needs and lifeways, differently positioned and capitalized in
all respects from those who determine value on the academic market.

This is another version of my earlier thesis about the dilemma of making
what academics do best directly useful to those least empowered in our
society; to the extent that academic value rises on its market, the odds of
value in wider markets fall (merely as a function of narrow sampling in a
very heterogeneous population of market criteria, if nothing else -- nod to
quant logic). If we also assume that the interests of academic judges and
either the general population or its least empowered segments are
structurally in opposition (i.e. class conflict), the inverse relation of
value on the two markets should be even stronger.

So I certainly agree with Diane and Eugene's conclusion that what needs to
change to remedy this dilemma is the social function of the academy itself,
or at least the relative mix among its many social functions. Many
academics quayle at the notion that academic research and writing, or a
goodly part of it, should 'serve the people' -- what they probably do not
realize is just how hard it is to figure out how to do this even if you
want to!

It would be much easier however if the larger scale institutional
relations, say of the university to the community, to the economy, to its
political base, shifted, and pulled the criteria of the academic market
with them. But here again is the dilemma of scale: individual actions
inevitably do constitute institutional patterns, but only correlations
among those actions are additive on the larger scale. Collective movements
provide one possible way to scale up, but most correlation is induced not
by conscious choices but by the habitus-shaping correlations already built
into the material contexts of artifacts and their associated practices, the
cumulation of history. Individual divergences may produce local good (and I
don't knock that!), but won't add up to systemic change unless the prior
sedimented correlations are disrupted -- or as someone said, if the eggs
don't get broken, no omelettes are going to get made!

And this presents, to my mind, the Scylla opposite the moral Charybdis of
academic self-entrapment: if you do disrupt the correlations on any
significant scale, you cannot predict, from your own scale, the historical
consequences at the larger scale. This mirror moral dilemma is that
potentially effective action for change puts other people at risk, not just
those who consent, but also those whose involvement in change we cannot
even foresee.

Every analysis of sedimented correlations -- which is what most of us do --
potentially shows which disruptions would be most critical ... and in my
opinion necessary to systemic change ... but none of them can show the
longer-term consequences on which moral determinations are supposed to be
based.

Theoretical revolutionaries have usually persuaded themselves and others of
the inevitability of better times as a result of disrupting present
arrangements; and they have always been deluded in their certainties, and
often enough wrong in their specific expectations. Practical
revolutionaries seem to learn the lessons of unpredictability and adopt a
moral stance that rejects responsibility for the longterm consequences. I
believe theirs is a defensible moral position, but it is also an extremely
dangerous one. Does this lead to a bifurcation: conservatism right up to
the breaking point, and then 'damn the consequences'? I am beginning to
think so. JAY.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------