an
international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text
and image
Volume 2, November 2005, ISSN
1552-5112
Examining
Reflexivity: An interview with Barry Sandywell
Barry Sandywell and
David Beer
Formulating knowledge as a discursive-social
achievement already entails a bracketing and potential critique of all previous
theories of knowledge which abstract from or repress the fact that the media of
cognition and theorizing lies in the public domain of semio-praxis (and more
specifically the material and intersubjective spheres of available
language-games and the accepted local rules governing such discursive
formations). It follows that all approaches to theory (and practice) that
separate theorizing from its grounds in everyday semio-praxis or fail to
acknowledge that discourse is both the resource and topic of inquiry are
themselves appropriate candidates for reflexive interrogation and critique.
(Sandywell, 1979: 4)
DB Reflexivity
appears to be a central theme in your work. Why do you consider the development
of reflexivity to be of such importance?
BS Perhaps
I can make two general initial responses. First, the word ‘reflexivity' should
be treated with great care as a complex term that enfolds a wide and very
heterogeneous range of experiences, approaches and practices of thinking.
Expressed somewhat crudely it refers to the self-referential or ‘iterative’
aspects of any kind of thinking. This might be illustrated by the idea that all
our expressions, being linguistically and socially mediated, refer back to the
life of society implicit in speech and writing. Thus in making even the most
innocent utterance or statement we are not only trying to communicate some
‘content' or substantive point, but invariably also displaying the form
or structure of the utterance - inviting the other to enter into the
speech act and, occasionally, form of life that legitimates and warrants this
particular mode of speech and communication. To reduce reflexivity to the
self-referential properties of speech or communication would still be
inadequate. It would, for example, lead us away from the materiality and
contextual horizons of reflexive practices. The field of reflexive experience,
however, should not be approached as a fixed continent of objects, but more
like a realm of possibilities to be explored and reclaimed. The notion of ‘iteration’
cannot be confined to mathematical algorithms, computational machines, or
meta-language operations. In fact it is more useful to understand ‘reflexivity’
as a reminder of our material involvement within a larger whole, of being
connected to larger constellations of experience, being involved with others
and exemplifying that involvement in the course and conduct of our own
practices.
Consider the banal existential
claim that we are ‘condemned to meaning', that in our dealings with the world and
others we cannot not mean. In fact this banality contains a very
important clue to reflexivity: that in striving to make sense of things we are
always making sense of others (and other experiences) and also making
sense for others in local contexts (this also implies the historicist
claim that our versions of the real and what passes for reality have a
normative, ethical, and political import). If we take this further, we begin to
move beyond narrowly conceived and ‘epistemic' concepts of reflexivity (reflexivity
as a type of formal reflection upon our methodological and epistemological
assumptions) and move toward more dialogical, ontological, and axiological
conceptions of reflection as possibilities of situated dialogue within the full
concreteness of social existence. At some point in this problematization the
very language of ‘reflection' and ‘self-reflection' has to be questioned - as
itself indebted to unexplicated traditions and practices and perhaps to a very
particular understanding of knowledge and inquiry dominated by subject-object
metaphors or what I have called ‘specular' images of inquiry (Sandywell, 1999).
The rather rigid understanding of reflexivity as self-monitoring or
self-reflection is perhaps only admissable as an image that will get us started
in thinking about knowledge as embedded and embodied in forms of life and
ethicopolitical arrangements (as well as in real material and institutional
organizations), but we need a much more radical and ‘incarnate' view of thought
and inquiry that opens up the implicit ‘ethos' (and therewith ethical and
political relations) that are at issue in different forms of thinking, research
and inquiry. It is this ‘axiological' turn, this movement toward questions of
value and transvaluation, that has been exercising me for a number of years now
- particularly with the implicit models of communality and politics presupposed
by different images of knowledge, inquiry and thought and, taking a more
critical stance, with how we might critique these thought-paradigms and
formulate more adequate models of social inquiry. In this context I have been
recently working on the difference between what I call ‘major ethics' dominated
by stipulative and prescriptive models of communality, politics and ethical
belonging and what I have come to call ‘minor ethics' as the hardly noticed,
life-world matrix of embodied values and social relations implicit in everyday
forms of sociality - I am thinking here of the values of friendship,
tactfulness, concern, compassion, and the like as these are presupposed by
every form of human life - and not merely in the forms of life we call
scientific inquiry, research, or philosophy.
Second, and this is related to
the first point, the phenomenon of reflexivity and self-reflection turns out to
have a complex history in Western European culture. And, furthermore, this
history is a rich source of different conceptions of self, sociality and
ethicopolitical life as these have been imagined and lived by different groups
and communities. We have to imagine the phenomena of reflexivity as a
constellation of rhetorics, practices and institutions that open up human
possibilities. These ‘rhetorics of reflection’ and ‘techniques of reflection’
(and their presupposed politics) need to be made the topic of interdisciplinary
studies in the ‘genealogy' of societies, cultures, and whole civilizations. At
all costs we must avoid reducing the ‘autonomy’ of reflexive practices - I
think for example, of the rich institutional life of rhetoric, art, and literature
here - to some kind of reflex social causes or ideological determination.
Reductionism in all shapes and forms is at base a refusal to engage in
reflexive thinking. Some of my earlier writings have been devoted to
investigations of the genesis of different rhetorics and discourses of
reflection as these have been actualized in earlier phases of Western thought
and culture. I would refer you to the three volumes, collected under the
generic heading of Logological Investigations (Sandywell1996a, 1996b,
& 1996c), that attempt to carry out this kind of ‘archaeology' of reflexive
experience.
DB Does
the development of reflexivity in sociology offer any particular routes for the
future development of the discipline?
BS I
have always seen sociology as a critical theory of society. If sociology is to
fulfil its promise and remain true to its original motivation as a critical
‘science of the social’ carried out with an explicit consciousness of its own
historical origins and social, political and cultural ‘situation’ then there
can be no genuine alternative to a reflexive sociology. In a sense the word
‘reflexivity’ is also a synonym for ‘critical’ or ‘self-critical’ discourse.
Sociology has to be reflexive or not exist at all. If there is such a thing as
‘the sociological imagination’ it must be located in the reflexive potential
of sociological praxis. Of course, the history of both classical and
contemporary social theory is littered with unreflexive paradigms that
completely misunderstand the demands placed upon the idea of sociology as a
critical discourse of the social that must be constructed in social
terms (here the legacy of positivism and ‘natural science’ models of knowledge
still function to deform the possibilities of sociological research and theorizing).
Thus while I accept that positivistic, empiricist and other unreflexive models
of inquiry are now wholly discredited, it still remains uncertain as to whether
we will see a flourishing of alternative reflexive frameworks. To accomplish
this practically the current sociological establishment would literally have to
countenance a re-education of their most basic ways of thinking and discourses.
To some extent this has been a process that contemporary sociology has been
forced to undertake in recognizing the claims of more radical accounts of human
experience and social life, stemming from what is misleadingly called
‘continental philosophy’ (and, it should be said, from recent developments
within the sciences themselves - here I am thinking of the paradigm shift
toward models of complexity and new ways of conteptualizing systems and change
in non-linear, dynamic, and non-determinist concepts). Thus while the ‘theory
wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s have faded into memory, the aftermath for
sociology is essentially one of catching up and acquiring some of the basic
techniques and ‘methodologies’ associated with phenomenology, hermeneutics,
Critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, complexity theory, and so
on. The field of theoretical sociology risks stagnation if this learning
process is shortcircuited by false oppositions and dichotomies - one of the
most pervasive being the idea of a chasm that separates the modernist project
of the classics - typically identified with the triune ‘founding fathers’ Marx,
Weber and Durkheim - and the apparent disintegration of this project at the
hands of so-called postmodernists. One effect of this situation upon creative
theorizing and teaching is the safe ‘opt-out’ of further uncritical thinking,
avoiding the ‘labour of the negative’, the long-march through some of the major
dialogues and philosophical conversations of late modernity. We are also
subject to conceptual inertia and the dead-weight of earlier ‘socialization’
practices - these act as blinkers that block the possibilities of new forms of
thinking and theorizing. Sadly this has been the case with the challenge posed
by heterodox forms of ‘postmodern’ thought. However, if sociology can liberate
itself from both its positivistic past and the new ‘dualisms’ it has itself
constructed in lieu of more radical rethinking and open itself to a genuine
encounter with what is ‘other’ in its own tradition and in alternative
theoretical traditions there is still a chance for major innovations in
speculative sociological thought.
DB The
work of Walter Benjamin seems to have had a particularly profound influence on
your work. Would you say that he has been the most influential figure with
regard to your studies in reflexivity? Is your position a development of his own
explorations of critique and reflexive historicity?
BS Benjamin
is certainly one influence. But by no means the most important or crucial in
gaining access to the range and depth of the problematic of reflexivity in
modern social thought and philosophy. Benjamin, as you know, is usually
regarded as a cultural critic, a figure associated with, if not a member of,
the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Beyond such allegiances, however, he
is the source of a very different conception of critical analysis, one that
foregoes all systems and dogmatic theorizing in order to attend to the concrete
constellations of phenomena themselves in their dense ‘materiality’. In this
attitude he has affinities with Nietzsche's critique of system building and
Husserl's original phenomenological project to ‘return to the things
themselves' (Zu den Sachen selbst) by way of various kinds of bracketing
technique that attempt to exclude naturalistic and dogmatic frames that
obstruct our insight into phenomena and thereby into the occluded richness of
concrete, historical experience. Benjamin's image of constellation is also a
device, or perhaps a strategy, for suspending unreflexive theorizing with
regard to historical and cultural phenomena, or as I would phrase this, a
reflexive technique designed to return research to the complexities of the
concrete. In this respect he is also the source of ‘negative dialectics' and,
as you know, had a major influence upon Theodor Adorno. Adorno's lifelong
attack upon what he called ‘identity-thinking' is one product of this respect
for the incomplete, unfinished, open-character of events and processes. The
advantage of this strategy is also its main danger. In an exemplary work like
the Arcades Project (2002), Benjamin tries to recover the genesis and
dialectics of mid-nineteenth century capitalism and urban experience by
recomposing its movements and tendencies from cultural fragments and quotidian
detritus. The result is a massive work of montage and bricollage that remains,
and perhaps had to remain, unfinished. The danger here, however, is that we
lose the wider context, the ‘movements' and long-term structural ‘tendencies'
in the blizzard of fragments, citations, and quotations. In sum, we fail to see
the wood for the trees. The anti-systemic perspective itself then becomes a
dogmatic commitment, a criticism that Habermas and other second generation
To return to my own
investigations of Western modes of thought and systems of reflection: I also
wanted to reconstruct practices and institutions of reflection from the
fragments and scattered remains of powerful traditions - inevitably having to
return to the ancient Greeks to understand some of the deeper motivations of
modernity; I attempted to ‘bracket' dominant interpretations of this evidence
(the ‘Greek miracle', Greek philosophy as a discovery without context,
explanation or determination, and so on), but I also wanted to contextualize
these forms of reflexivity more systematically in explicitly social, political
and cultural terms. For the purposes of this project, the constellation
methodology of Benjamin could only provide a starting point. We need a much
more cultural, genetic or genealogical hermeneutic of whole forms of life and
the place of thought and reflection in those forms of life (a theme I try to
work out methodologically in the final chapter of the first volume of Logological
Investigations (1996a)).
DB In
'Monsters in Cyberspace' you suggest that 'we need a more concrete,
historically embedded phenomenology of the Internet (and other forms of
computer-mediated technology) as contested cultural formations restructuring
the practices of everyday life.' (Sandywell, 2006). This, you point out, can
offer a direction that overcomes the absence of 'important interactional
phenomena' from dystopian and utopian visions of the Internet. Do you see this
as creating some form of third-way between utopian and dystopian visions, or is
that a type of structural image that you would wish to avoid? Are utopia and
dystopian visions to be abandoned as phantasmagoria in order for us to re-carve
this 'concrete' and 'historically embedded phenomenology'?
BS This
is a very complex (and complicated) question (or series of questions) that
deserves a much more detailed response than I can offer here. As a beginning I
might say something about the utopian moment in social thought and, more
particularly, in recent accounts of the Information Revolution and Cyberspace.
In general I should say that I am temperamentally opposed to dichotomic
thinking or schematizations of experience that break problems into ‘either/or’
terms. A lot of what I have written in the past was designed to deconstruct
such polarities (subject/object, empirical/theoretical, nature/culture, and so
forth). In relation to a development such as the Internet it was perhaps
inevitable that social theory should be either ‘for’ or ‘against’ this new
social technology - either the Internet and World Wide Web is a revolutionary,
democratizing force that would generalize enlightenment values and political
practices on a global scale, or it would extend the hegemony of global economic
and political power based upon multinational corporations and the pax
Americana. Both of these models are
deficient and unsupportable as either historical or critical appraisals of the
impact of the new electronic media and digitalization processes in contemporary
life. More consequentially, both paradigms occlude the complex dialectic of
freedom and regulation that have occurred in the actual uses and appropriation
of such technologies. Looking back at earlier information technologies it is
clear that issues of long-term social and cultural ‘impact’ are difficult to
predict, but they are wholly unintelligible when viewed in linear, causal, or
deterministic terms. This kind of thinking - often called technological
determinism - is another example of unreflexive discourse. Thinking that
technology does this and that, changes human beings, shapes practices and
institutions, and so on is not without its problems. It typically covers up the
‘openness’ and contingency of historical situations and the ways in which
different individuals, groups and communities actually use and incorporate new
techniques and technologies in their everyday lives. This is also a consequence
of extremely restricted models of historical effectivity and concrete
dialectical thinking when trying to analyze social change. Needless to say the
‘utopian’ dimensions of social life also tend to get frozen out of these
schemas. To cut a long story short, my sense of non-synchronic historicity,
historical openness, and material life suggests that what is needed here is a
much more complex understandings of sociohistorical life, of the kind that is
perhaps opened out by a suitably reconstructed and wide-ranging hermeneutic
phenomenology of everyday life. If we can still use the term ‘phenomenology’ it
would have to be radically transformed in the direction of explicit reflexive
awareness. In fact the internal critique of phenomenology with its Cartesian
commitment to intuitive self-evidence would have to go, and a greater awareness
of the rhetorical and linguistic ‘constitution’ of ‘the phenomena’ would have
to be established. This is the path from phenomenology to logology, from an
obsession with immediacy and immanence, to an understanding of the formative
power of the word and logos.
In recent papers (for example
‘E-Topia as Cosmopolis or Citadel. On the Democratizing and De-democratizing Logics
of the Internet, or, Towards a Critique of the New Technological Fetishism’
(2002), ‘Memories of Nature in Bakhtin
and Benjamin’ (1999), ‘Metacritique of Information’ (2003), ‘The Myth of
Everyday Life: Toward a Heterology of the Ordinary’ (2004a), and ‘Monsters in
Cyberspace: Cyberphobia and Cultural Panic in the Information Age’ (2006)) I
have indicated some of the directions in which we might pursue such a
‘historically embedded phenomenology’. I am currently working upon the
development of a much more systematic and reflexively grounded social theory of
information technologies.
DB Often
the construction of typologies, or maps (of fields), appears as a theme in your
work. Do you see the construction and analysis of theoretical positions and
technological discourse as playing an important part in the development of a
concrete foundation for reflexive sociology?
BS In
looking back at some of my earlier work (and earlier teaching practices) you
will see that I am certainly not opposed to the development of simplifying
heuristics (or, as I have in the past described this kind of thinking, as
‘diagrammatics’ or strategic thinking). These kinds of typologies are the
social science equivalent of idealized narratives or fables (I recall that
Weber used the term ‘utopia’ in describing his own heuristic use of
ideal-types). In principle I have no objection to such diagrammatic
formulations although I would distrust them where they move from heuristic
supports of thinking to the substance of thought. Conceptual maps should never
be confused with the concrete places and spaces of social life. Another
opportunity for reflexivity, of course, is the investigation of the way in
which many forms of theory and theoretical positions (including discourses on
technology, social change, political theory, and the like) incorporate such
models in the construction and prosecution of their terminologies and
discourses. This would form an important topic for a logological theory of
theory construction exploring the different kinds of preferences research
programmes display in their preferred thought schemas, models, ideal types,
rhetorical schemas, and the like. It may well be that such visual aids to
research and teaching will receive a new lease of life with the impact of visual
studies and visual media as these are currently restructuring the social
sciences. The choice of underlying
conceptual schemas and figurative images - leading metaphors, if you will - is
often fundamentally important in understanding the implicit self-image of
inquiry and self-conception of the social presupposed by research. Here I would
encourage my students to take the theme of ‘map making’ seriously as both a
metaphor for a certain kind of knowledge and a useful way of thinking about the
way human beings as everyday agents go about making sense of reality at the
level of lifeworld praxis. As always the concrete realms of praxis operate as
the inescapable horizon for all other investigative practices and cultures of
inquiry.
DB The
study of everyday life lends itself well to the construction of a reflexive
sociology. However, for you this level of reflexivity appears to be
insufficient (Sandywell, 2004a & 2004b). You suggest that we should push
these reflexive boundaries even further by removing the conceptual constraints
of the discourse - or more accurately, rhetoric - of everyday life. How far can
these barriers be moved? Can we both construct concrete and historically
embedded phenomenologies of technology in everyday praxis while simultaneously
attempting to reflexively abandon the everyday? This appears to be a case of
both rigidity (in the construction of a concrete phenomenology and sets of
typologies) and fluidity (in the constant questioning of discourse and
conceptual frameworks), is this mobility at the centre of your studies in
reflexivity?
BS Again
there are a number of difficult questions enfolded here. I think the theme of
‘everyday praxis’ and its specific range of immanent reflexivities is the point
of intersection of a number of closely related issues. As I noted above,
‘reflexivity’ has many different senses and this polysemy is certainly not
unique to professional discourse. It can be found in the complex layers of
reflexivity at work in everyday life practices, not to mention the
self-problematizing practices of art, literature and aesthetic reflection. We
have only recently acquired a grammar that is sufficiently subtle and complex
to handle some of the delicate issues raised by the communicative constitution
of everyday interaction and lifeworld relationships (here I would be happy to
draw upon recent rhetorical theory, discourse analysis, conversation analysis,
text theory, and other theoretical languages as evidence of the kind of
complexity we are dealing with). The resurgence of interest in the reflexive
possibilities of art and aesthetics as concrete languages of experience - here
I am thinking of literary and artistic self-problematizing techniques - would
be another important example. Another issue is the task of instituting
dialogues with everyday praxis without reifying ‘the everyday’ as if it was a
substantial ‘domain’ or ‘region’ of society, a kind of irreducible ‘layer’ upon
which other social systems and macro-phenomena were to be constructed. Like the
Marxist ‘map’ of base and superstructure, this is one of the most misleading
images in the whole canon of soclological thought. This takes us to a third
theme, everydayness is more like an inescapable medium or ‘dimension’ of
sociality, something that is concretely negotiated and appropriated in and as
the organisational practices of social life. This is why I stress the dangers
of replacing a discredited ontology or metaphysics of the social by a more
insidious ‘metaphysics of the everyday’ (Sandywell, 2004a). What we have to be
open to in our post-metaphysical age is a radically material understanding of
the dialectics of concrete experience that we struggle to recover and construct
through the resources of reflexive discourse.
DB In
'Beyond Metaphysics and Nihilism' you are concerned with mapping out the
direction of a reflexive sociology (Sandywell, 2004b: 486). You use reflexive
sociology to offer a way forward that avoids the pitfalls of metaphysical and
postmodern forms of sociology. It appears that this direction requires the
sociologist to rethink embedded or reified theoretical understandings and
concepts, to accept neither universal/transcendental nor nihilistic answers, to
demonstrate awareness of context and position (of the self and the other), and
finally to reconstitute the details of not only the object of study but also
the theory surrounding (or constructing) the object of study. This requires the
sociologist to carefully reflect upon the intricate and disjointed details of
everyday life. Or as you put it, 'on the other side of metaphysics and nihilism
we need to return to the richness and complexity of the ordinary.' (Sandywell,
2004b: 490). I hope that this is an acceptably over-simplified summary of your
position and approach. When we return to the richness and complexity of the
ordinary should we also keep sociological theory in view? Can sociology be a
part of the ordinary, and therefore can we study its richness and complexity?
BS I
notice that the mapping image re-occurs again! Where you use ‘map’ I would tend
to use ‘rhetoric’ or ‘language’. Every map, from a logological perspective, is
in reality a preferred way of construing or prefiguring experience. We
certainly need ‘maps’ to orient
ourselves in the strange labyrinths opened by a reflexive theory of everyday
life. I am thinking here of the fact that ‘everyday life’ is a kind of
zombie-concept or ‘dummy variable’ with as many variants as there are ‘theories
of everyday life’. I am more interested in the diverse ways and means by which
agents embedded in their everday lives go about constructing heuristics and
pragmatic performances that actively constitute ‘fields’ and ‘worlds’ of
meaningful possibilities. ‘Everydayness’ is to some extent made up by actors in
the course of their activities. This is also the sense in which I would expand
the concept of praxis within critical theory and speak about reflexive
semio-praxis, indicating by this term, the heterogeneous forms of knowledgeable
action through which we make sense of life in and as those ‘signifying
practices’. The image of the ‘richness’ , ‘heterogeneity’, and ‘rhetoricality’
of ordinary life is also something I would stress. Here I think we
underestimate the ‘otherness’ of ordinary life, the extraordinary density of
our transactional involvements with others, and the difficulties posed by even
the most elementary understanding of such basic activities as
speaking-together, sustaining friendship solidarities, cooperating, reading,
understanding and interpreting experience. Modernist practices of
self-reflexivity as ways of resisting naive realism, unmediated understandings
of language and textuality also come to mind. To this end I believe we should
try to develop accounts of ‘otherness’ or alterity that are sufficiently rich
to be able to capture some of the more manifest features of ordinary life. But
I have no doubts that overcoming the millennia-long condescension toward doxa,
the ordinary and the everyday will be the work of generations of scholars.
Incidentally, the first volume of Logological Investigations (1996a)
concludes with a chapter that is devoted to a mapping of the various
possibilities of what I call ‘dialogical reflexivity’ in contemporary
intellectual culture.
DB In
'The Myth of Everyday Life' (2004a) you argue for the removal of the gloss that
is everyday life. 'We need to abandon the false security of everyday life to
reveal the complex play of decentered, heterological lifeworlds... (Sandywell,
2004a: 175). It appears that you consider everyday life to be a theoretical
constraint that fences off the intricacy, detail, and complexity of praxis.
This suggests that you see the development of everyday life as a theoretical
concept as being problematic, and, possibly, reinforcing the myths detailed in
Steven Crook's paper 'Minotaurs and Other Monsters: 'Everyday Life' in Recent
Social Theory' (Crook, 1998). Would you describe your essay as a critique of
the study of everyday life? Is this an example of reflexivity-in-action? Do you
see the rejection of the concept of the everyday as being important, or is this
merely an attempt to prevent the reification of the everyday by illuminating
the problems that this approach contains and the myths it perpetuates?
BS Again,
I can only rephrase my observations about the primacy of praxis in social
inquiry. For me it it is almost definitionally the case that theorizing has a
demystifying purpose, that it questions taken-for-granted positions and
assumptions, it is suspicious of received ideas and acutely aware of the
ideological presuppositions of many of the forms of cultural expression.
Perhaps you will allow me to cite an earlier, unpublished research paper that
has the title ‘Theses on Reflexivity’ (1979) and dates back to the 1970s. The
first three propositions of this document read:
(1) All theory is produced in
and by praxis; (2) What was hitherto called ‘social theory’ needs to be
reformulated and respecified as the artful, methodic, reflexive production of
specific discursive practices thermatizing the domain of social relations,
practices, and institutions. Considered as social practices the characteristic
properties of social theorizing also mediate the field of concrete human
existence and its manifold orders of experience; and (3) If all theory is a
form of ‘doing’, a specific form of human conduct, the materialities,
objectivitities, referentialities, and criterial practices of theoretical
praxis are primarily constituted and sustained in and through social relations,
practices, technologies and institutions - more especially the practical
experiences, everyday speech-acts, and language-games of socially embodied and
embedded practitioners in a given investigative community. Here the context,
situation and practical horizon of activities need to be approached as
constitutive properties of organised practices. (Sandywell, 1979: 1)
I perhaps would phrase this
differently today, but the problematics of praxis as the irreducible lifeworld
of reflection and inquiry remains valid. The idea of ‘reflexivity-in-action’ is
also another expression for the kind of praxis that investigates first-order
praxes and carries this through respectfully, that is, through reflexive
dialogue with the ‘target praxes’. Again, in the same document, I try,
schematically to be sure, to set out the implications of this recursivity for
any kind of recovery of praxis in and through theoretical practice. The
relevant section reads:
The discourses of social theory
(including what was traditionally called ‘philosophy’ and meta-theory) like the
discourses of myth, religion, ‘official discourse’, ideological discourses, and
so forth, have hitherto routinely repressed the social, discursive, and
ideological conditions of their material production – implicitly or explicitly
they remain silent about their own status as a specific and distinctive
practice within a more encompassing field of practices. This process can be
described as the occlusion of reflexivity, the active dissimulation and
even repression of their own rules, procedures, suppositions and
presuppositions as field-specific operations. Such routine field-occlusion
strategies tends to further reify and naturalize these practices, to make them
appear as if they were necessary, unavoidable, and in extremis, facts
of nature; the effect of this naturalization is to elide their own
situated, conditional, and reflexive character as particular social
constructions, in other words, to repress their contingent, contextual,
praxical and field characteristics. By reversing this process of occlusion, by
turning toward the genesis and possibility-conditions of a practice, we
encounter a characteristic feature shared by all reflexive studies: to
continually ‘problematize’ occlusion processes by forcibly returning topics,
thematics and problematizations to their ground in specific orders of
signifying practice. In this sense we can say that reflexive investigations do
not so much display an interest in phenomena but rather in
investigations into the grounds of the possibility of phenomena, or more
simply expressed, the techniques and strategies of socially accomplished
phenomenality. (Sandywell, 1979: 4)
DB The
seeming collapse of, or movement away from postmodern theory (see Beer &
Gane, 2004) has presented social and cultural theory with a problem. We can no
longer return to the comfort of metaphysics and the collapse of legitimacy has
left us in an arid conceptual landscape. In 'The Myth of Everyday life' (2004a)
you present the reader with a possible solution to this problem: 'The task of
thinking after postmodernism is to imagine more constructive projects of
alterity studies, to invent new kinds of heterology in response to the
mutations of the globalized experience.' (Sandywell, 2004a: 175). Are you
suggesting that we should move toward constructing sets of small-scale
empirical case studies in which the appropriation of specific technologies is
captured in specific contexts? In other words, should the analyst turn her/his
attention to praxis? Is this where the 'richness of the ordinary' can be
found?
BS I
agree fundamentally with the pretext of your question. The concept of
semiopraxis that I have been developing in both published works and unpublished
writings necessitates a fusion of what used to be called ‘theory’ and
‘practice’. In complete agreement with certain traditions of radical
hermeneutics I agree that ‘practice’ cannot be understood as an ‘application’
of theory. In a paradoxical sense ‘practice’ is already a theorization (for
example, in our obsessive imposition of specular, ‘theoretic’ images upon
experience). This standpoint, incidentally, is a good example of a thoughtless
and unreflexive understanding of the dialectical relationships between
knowledgeable practices and theoretical work. Those involved in theoretical reading
and writing need not be told that this involves an enormous expenditure of
energy and that if pursued resolutely can impinge significantly upon some very
basic material relations! It is little better to think in terms of ‘theory’
emanating from practice or theory being the codification of practice. All of
these stop-gap formulations are simply too embedded in the modern conception of
‘practicality’ (or technicality for that matter) to be fruitful alternatives to
instrumental thinking. Against these reductive conceptions I wish to maintain a
concrete understanding of reflexive praxis as a heterogeneous field of
concerted, knowledgeable, sense-making experience. Forms of reflexivity are
quite obviously historically and institutionally bound. This, of course,
applies to reflexive sociology, that could not be imagined outside of a complex
set of historical and social contexts. The very heterogeneity and differential
character of this field makes detailed ethnographies of concerted practices
absolutely fundamental for reflexive sociology. And here I would instantly
qualify this statement by saying that such concrete studies are not the sole
prerogative of sociology - and that work committed to this kind of ‘thick
description’ can be found in other disciplines and traditions, from cultural
anthropology, to history, aesthetics and literary theory. The implication of
these developments is to point to interdisciplinary collaboration or, better,
to transdisciplinary programmes of inquiry as the future for critical social
theory.
DB In
'Memories of Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin' (Sandywell, 1999) you talk of the
'textualisation' of nature and the displacement of 'nature' by
'nature/culture'. Are we required to rethink nature in terms of our everyday interaction
with technology? Are technology and nature interwoven and indistinguishable
texts? And is the textualisation of nature and technology at the centre of the
displacement of nature but nature/culture? And as a further question: What part
can nature play in developing the study of reflexivity, do you share Adorno's
views on nature's ability to illuminate and regenerate thought and practice?
BS ‘Text’
of course is an inadequate term in understanding the dialectics of nature and
culture. If it is not interpreted metaphorically - in the sense of interweaving
or intertwining -it all too readily suggests a too ‘cerebral’, or at least
linguistic and discursive model of the kind of phenomena at issue here. But if
we understand ‘text’ along the lines of Derrida’s ‘general text’ we might be
able to take a step in the right direction. Here ‘textuality’ is a metaphor for
the work of anonymous traces, complex inscriptions, and discourse formations
that cross boundaries and problematize the unfinalizable differences of
concrete experience. Textuality becomes all but synonymous with the
sociologist’s ‘institutionality’. In what ways are social technologies ‘text’
based? We should not abandon this unusual conjunction too easily. The thought
that many technologies are actually about information or new ways of processing
meaning is immensely important. But here again we need to think in field terms.
Techniques and technologies are always field-relative and bound up with complex
social, political and cultural relations. Here the older Greek term ‘techne’
is more appropriate, with its suggestion that technai implies a habitus
of embodied skills, craft-like training and socialization, and materializations
of operative knowledge. Technai also implies a fundamental reflexivity among
the possessors and performers of the relevant ‘art’ (think of medicine rather
than engineering as a paradigmatic embodied technology). At all costs we have
to avoid the conjunctive thinking exemplified by such clichés as ‘technology and
society’, ‘nature and culture’, ‘individual and society’, and the
like. In recent years I have been developing work in the field of complexity
theory (chaos, apoiesis, and self-regulation paradigms for example) that
have been explored and popularized in post-determinist natural science. One of
the fundamental themes in this area is the idea that we cannot ‘naturalize’ our
frameworks by simply ‘bringing back nature’, if by ‘nature’ we are still locked
into the Galilean-Newtonian models of mechanical systems. The re-engagement
with the problem of nature has itself to undergo thoroughgoing criticism and
reconstruction, emphasising self-regulating complexity, emergence, process,
and, more generally non-linear dynamics. It would be highly desirable to be
able to draw upon a fully reflexive phenomenology of nature - a cultural
phenomenology that would enable us to explore the rhetorics of ‘nature’ and
‘naturalness’ and the varied constructions of ‘natural phenomena’ as these have
been articulated in literary, artistic, ideological, and philosophical
discourses. This too is a long-term project for a community of reflexive
scholars!
DB Clearly
critique is of importance in your work. Do you see reflexivity as being central
to effective critique? Can reflexivity provide an angle for further critical
inquiry? Is critique or reflexivity withering (Sandywell, 2003:115)?
BS In
my terminology, critique is one of the constitutive features or key aspects of
reflexive sociology. Since some of the basic terms and vocabularies of critique
are themselves subject to criticism (consider the language games of
‘subjectivity’, subject/object, consciousness, repression, domination, and so
on). I have for more than two decades now spoken of critique in the idiom of
‘logological research’. By this strange term I refer in particular to
discourses that take an explicit interest not only in their specific phenomenal
topics, but in the conditions of the possibility of phenomenality, and in the
way in which these discourses themselves ‘constitute’ and ‘objectify’ the
phenomena they study. But I would not wish to stipulate a ‘canon’ or
‘methodology’ for such logological investigations. As I noted more than a
decade ago, it would be a fateful mistake to be constrained by prescriptive
rules or stipulative methodologies. Indeed the very idea of ‘academic’
privilege needs to be questioned: ‘Logological studies are not the sole
prerogative of academic disciplines. In place of the traditional idea of
method, we place the plural and heterogeneous field of critical dialogue,
interpretation, and rhetorical self-understanding: each a study must invent its
own hermeneutic techniques specific to the texts, experiences, practices,
categories of existence and conditions at hand’ (Sandywell, 1996a: 425). All of
this comes down to a disclaimer and an incitement. First the disclaimer:
‘[There] are no eternal methods just as there are no timeless questions,
formalisms, or impersonal resolutions of human problems’ (Sandywell, 1996a:
425). The incitement:
the commitment to self-reflection means that every interpretation, conceptual vocabulary, framework of thought and critical model must be in principle open to inquiry and subject to dialogical norms of criticism and self-revision. Each act of reflection - like each tradition of self-reflection - is in principle subject to further trials of reflexivity. In this way only reflexive investigations can help loosen the cold hand of closure and totality in our lives and imaginations. But to point this out is only to recall that the findings of logological investigations apply in principle to logological research. (Sandywell,1996a: 425-6)
Forgive me for this act of
blatant self-quotation!
DB What
role can digital technologies, and particularly the Internet, play in
developing critique or reflexivity? Does the Internet offer an opportunity for,
and an acceleration of, critique? Do you think this will further critique or
increase its quantity while diminishing its effectiveness?
BS We
can certainly imagine the Internet and the new media technologies as possible
incitements for critical reflection and self-recovery. Ideally, the world of
hypertext should add to the growing repertoire of reflexive practices. We might
expect new kinds of dialogue, novel forms of writing and collaboration, new
cycles of self-reflection, new problematics and research programmes. We already
have solid empirical evidence of the ways in which digitalization has
problematized traditional philosophical questions and solutions, how
speculations about cyberspace and virtual reality have precipitated innovative
responses to traditional theoretical puzzles. I would thus, in my more
optimistic moments, see the new technolgoies as augmenting and extending the
reflexive imagination. Again the key issue here is whether we can democratize
these new systems and incorporate them into the practices of everyday life. My
final thought here is that the ‘dealienation of our social worlds is not a
discrete achievement of any one individual, discipline, or community, but the
task of a whole culture’ (Sandywell, 1996a: 426). I see my own work as
contributing to and prefiguring such a cultural renaissance.
DB You
have suggested that reflexivity must be 'historically specified and critically
explicated' (Sandywell, 2004b: 491) in order to overcome the problems of
non-reflexive inquiry. Can reflexivity exist without this historical or
critical framework? In other words, are there scales or types of reflexive
inquiry that need to be mapped out?
BS I
would support your idea of ‘triangulating’ reflexive sociology with the
concerns of critical theory and history understood as a concrete recovery and
reconstruction of past lifeworlds. Critical historiography, in fact, has been a
constant support for my work in reflexive sociology. And here I am in
particular thinking of the kind of history concerned with the recovery of
everyday life in its dense materiality. Conventional sociological methodology
has a lot to learn about the tasks of hermeneutic recovery and understanding
from the work of Annales historians, the study of mentalités,
everyday life historiography and related developments associated with the study
of material life, ‘people’s history’, and the like. This is also another reason
why the future of ‘everyday life studies’ has to enter into a serious dialogue
with the type of dialectical history carried out by thinkers like Benjamin,
Adorno, and others. Exemplary work in this area can be found in the writings of
such figures as Siegfried Kracauer, Norbert Elias, Michel de Certeau, Manuel De
Landa, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler.
DB Is
renewal (see Sandywell, 1998b) an inevitable consequence of reflexive inquiry?
Does reflexive inquiry cause both crisis and renewal? Does renewal come out of
the crisis created by reflexivity?
BS I
would like to think of reflexive interrogations as both a cause and effect of
crisis. But that thought lends itself to delusions of grandeur or what, in the
history of philosophy, was called ‘idealism’. More seriously, I view crises as
both a negative and a positive occasion. Crises are typically junctures or
‘turning points’ in thought and social life where the assumptions guiding
previous experience are transmuted into questionable forms, where the limits of
existing praxis become thematic and occasion other possibilities and
alternatives. In this sense previous conceptions of knowledge have been
insufficiently aware of the crisis-bound nature of conceptual change and
innovation. Of course not every crisis results in renewal. We also risk
regression, disintegration and ruination (incidentally the history of the
erosion and ruination of creative practices of reflection, the loss of
innovative forms of inquiry and cultural creativity, is an underdeveloped field
of reflexive research). In the history of critical social thought and
philosophy, however, my guess would be that the dynamic continuity of critical
theorizing in the European tradition will not end with the current forms of
social or political thought. Rather, that we are going through a period of creative
mutation in which radically new forms of thought and practice will emerge. The
greatest challenge today is one of fully understanding the collapse of earlier,
metaphysical mind-sets and imagining and then materially inventing alternative
forms of thinking and inquiry. I might remind you that my own ‘diagnosis’ of
the situation of modern critical thought is a response to what I called ‘the
crisis of Western reason’ (Sandywell, 1996a). The last chapter of this work is
a sketch of alternative paths that might lead beyond this crisis, paths that I
group under the heading of ‘dialogical reflexivity’ (Sandywell, 1996a, chapter
12). I am convinced that the project of ‘logological thinking’, that is, of
discursive thinking concerned with the origins, grounds and consequences of
discursive praxis will continue to be one of the main sites of critical thought
in the future.
Bibliography
of relevant writings by Barry Sandywell
Sandywell, B. et. al. (1975) Problems
of Reflexivity and Dialectics in Sociological Inquiry: Language, Theorising Difference.
Sandywell,
B. et. al. (1976) Writing Sociology.
Sandywell, B. (1979) ‘Theses on
Reflexive Inquiry’, University of
Sandywell, B. (1995) ‘Forget
Baudrillard', Theory, Culture and Society, 12(4): 125-152
Sandywell, B. (1996a) Logological
Investigations, Volume 1, Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason.
Sandywell, B. (1996b) Logological
Investigations, Volume 2, The Beginnings of European Theorizing:
Reflexivity in the Archaic Age.
Sandywell, B. (1996c) Logological
Investigations, Volume 3, Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of
Philosophical Discourse c. 600-450 BC.
Sandywell, B. (1998a) ‘The Shock
of the Old: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Contributions to the Theory of Temporality and
Alterity’, in Mayerfeld Bell, M. and Gardiner, M. (eds), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences.
Sandywell, B. (1998b) ‘Crisis or
Renewal?: On Using the Legacy of
Sociological Theory’, Sociology , 32(3): 607-12.
Sandywell, B. (1999) ‘Memories of
Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin’, in
Brandist, C. and Tihanov, G. (eds), Materializing
Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory.
Sandywell,
B. & Heywood,
Sandywell,
B. (1999) ‘Specular Grammar: the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity’, in Sandywell,
B. and Heywood,
Sandywell, B. (2000) ‘The Agonistic Ethic and the Spirit of
Inquiry: On the Greek Origins of Theorizing’, in Kusch, M. (ed), The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge.
Hand, M. & Sandywell, B.
(2002) ‘E-Topia as Cosmopolis or Citadel. On the Democratizing and
De-democratizing Logics of the Internet, or, Towards a Critique of the New
Technological Fetishism’, in Theory, Culture and Society,
Sandywell, B. (2002) ‘Memories of
Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin’, in Gardiner, M. (ed), Mikhail Bakhtin. Sage
Masters in Modern Social Thought (Volume 4).
Sandywell, B. (2003)
‘Metacritique of Information’, Theory, Culture and Society,
Sandywell, B. (2004a) ‘The Myth of
Everyday Life: Toward a Heterology of the Ordinary’, in
Sandywell, B. (2004b) ‘Beyond Metaphysics and Nihilism’, in
Sandywell, B. (2004) ‘Beyond
Metaphysics and Nihilism: In Memoriam, Steve Crook, Sociologist and Teacher
(1950-2002)’, The Australian Sociological Association Web site
(TASAweb), http://www.tasa.org.au/awards.scm.html (published October 2004, accessed April 2005)
Sandywell, B. & Beer, D.
(2005) ‘Stylistic Morphing: notes on the digitalisation of contemporary music
culture’, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media,
11(4): forthcoming.
Sandywell, B. (2006) ‘Monsters in
Cyberspace: Cyberphobia and Cultural Panic in the Information Age’, Information,
Communication & Society, 9(1), forthcoming.
Other
references
Beer, D. & Gane, N. (2004) ‘Back to the future of social theory: An
interview with Nicholas Gane’, Sociological Research Online, 9(4):
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/9/4/beer.html.
Benjamin, W. (2002) The
Crook, S. (1998) ‘Minotaurs and Other Monsters: ‘Everyday Life’ in
Recent Social Theory’, Sociology, 32 (3), pp523-540.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern
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Volume 2, November 2005, ISSN 1552-5112