Like Eugene, I certainly see methodology in some sense as part of the
social conventions, changing with the social dialogue, relational, not
private.
But I think the underlying issue here is that people need to be free to
deviate from social conventions about research or method in order to
provide new possibilities, in order for the dialogue to be able to move on.
Research agendas or methodological approaches do not need to be private to
be free, they only need to be subject to minimally-coercive social control.
Habermas, of course, is famous for his analysis of non-coercive
communication as a dialogical and intellectual-moral ideal. I like his
conclusions, though I don't think they can really be derived quite as
neatly as he makes things seem. The norm of communication is somewhere
between the ideally free and the totally controlled; it varies with
circumstance, social position, historical epoch, and culture. But wherever
it falls in some multi-dimensional space of many features and properties
that matter to us, it is always itself the product of social negotiation,
of a constellation of forces and feedbacks, of how it is functioning, and
for whom, and how well, and by what criteria.
I believe all human societies and institutions need to engage in coercive
control in order to exist (an unpopular view, I know, and not meant to
justify such coercion, just to acknowledge it), but some do so in much less
damaging ways and to lesser degree. In my view a good gauge of the weakness
of control is the rate of change of fairly basic features of the system
(basic as defined at least by the participants, though there can be other
views). The price of institutional stability is coercive control, actual or
threatened, and the velvet glove may be just as stultifying as the iron fist.
It may also be true that more hierarchically organized societies with
greater power and resource differentials between social levels are both
more stable and more controlling, more coercive, whether more cruelly or
not than more horizontal and egalitarian arrangements. But we have rather
little evidence about the latter case. JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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