Culture, Society, and Democracy

The Interpretive Approach

Isaac Reed, Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This volume addresses the key question of the intersection of sociology and politics, and asks what a non-Marxist cultural perspective can offer the Left. Written by leading scholars, it develops new conceptions of social critique, new techniques of interpretive analysis, and new concepts for the sociology of democratic practice. It is a volume for the twenty-first-century, where global and local meet, when critical theory must examine its most fundamental presuppositions.

Chapter 1
Cultural Sociology and the Democratic Imperative

Isaac Reed

What is the link between explaining society and criticizing it? This book is about developing a new answer to this question in the context of social theory strongly committed to democracy and the progressive Left. The answer that it proposes, however, is at considerable odds with the answers that frame most leftist social criticism. We propose that both criticism and explanation should be done “from the inside out”—which is to say, they should focus on the interpretation of meaning. The link between explaining society and criticizing it is thus a strongly hermeneutic one. Here, I want to sketch out what this means, in the generalized terms of contemporary social theory.

Because skepticism toward the status quo is one of the essential responsibilities of critical intellectuals, the trope of irony—“they know not what they do”—has always been an element of progressive criticism. Toward whom this irony is pointed has been a constant question (part of the answer, always, is toward ourselves). But the basis for this irony has not always been conceived as tropological—that is, as an operation of discourse with certain capacities for understanding social life and for communicating this understanding to others. Instead, it has been conceived as based in objective and certain knowledge of social reality. This has led to a certain brand of overcertainty that, conditioned by causal determinism and historical teleology, articulates calls for social change from on high.

The most obvious way in which this is so is in sociological positivism and its accompanying critical figure, the government adviser. In this conception of criticism, the bulk of the work involved lies in the scientific assessment of social life in terms that, because they are quantitative, are neutral, and because they are neutral, are communicable. It is then the responsibility of the government (i.e., the modern state, entrusted with the power to make and enforce laws and to distribute tax revenue) to accept the rational advice of the experts and implement subtle or not-so-subtle changes in society.¹

The capacity of this kind of criticism to create change for the good should not be underestimated. Still, sociologists with a broader theoretical agenda are likely to find it wanting. For one of the most active meanings of the term critical intellectual is the sense that intellectuals have the ability to think beyond the current constellation of government programs—indeed, to think critically about the relationship of intellectuals to the government, and historically about the shifting relationship of governments to their people. Furthermore, in the last forty years, even liberal intellectuals have become skeptical about the social effects of rational, neutral, and expert knowledge, to the point where one can without blinking put these three terms inside scare quotes.

In the twentieth century, there was another place to go for progressive thinkers who wanted a broader perspective, a more dramatic historical narrative, and an expanded critical capacity: Marxism and its epistemological umbrella, historical materialism. From this perspective, the supposed objectivity of positivism (and its liberal adherents) was a mirage, a piece of bourgeois ideology that naturalized the in fact quite constructed and historically contingent categories of capitalist society into a “second nature” (Lukacs 1972). Instead, Marxism proposed to get underneath the surface equations of bourgeois economics and the quasi-guarantees of liberal rights discourse to discover the essential mechanisms of social oppression and historical change—and thus also of social liberation. Then the critic could align her pen with the actions of the revolutionary classes, and both could align their agency with objective historical trends.

This, too, has been an incredibly productive basis for criticism. It forced even the most “literary” intellectuals to take account of society and politics, dismissed naive liberal individualist metaphysics, and denied the naturalization of the given that made positivist research tend toward a sociology of and for the status quo. And though the progressive Left has long since distanced itself from actually existing socialism and given up on the proletariat as the subject-object of history the operations of unveiling and debunking that go by the name of ideology critique remain central to its task. Operations of social power are, particularly in open societies, always accompanied by claims that what is actually operating is equality, the voice of the people, and so on. Criticism of the falsity, partiality, or nefarious effects of these claims remains the central task of debunking. The post-Marxist critical theories that have emerged since the 1960s have elaborated this task into a set of compelling and complex theories of ideology and hegemony (Eagleton 1991; Zizek 1989; Laclau and Mouffe 1985).

Yet a problem remains. Stripped of the socialist utopia, and prone to doubt the universalizing claims of liberal democracies, the operation of ideology critique has had increasing trouble articulating its alternative concept of the good society (see Eliasoph, this volume). A statement to this effect is of course itself contestable, controversial, and perhaps ideological—and points to the intellectual problem of the uses and abuses of utopia in the twenty-first century. Here, however, I want to point out that it was not only a conception of utopia that originally drove ideology critique, but also a specific explanatory schema that made the exploitation of labor and the class struggle the centerpieces of an objective theory of society. And, while the system(s) of oppression that critical sociologists are prone to identify has certainly expanded beyond the exploitation of labor, the epistemic maneuver of basing social critique in objectivist explanation has remained in place. This reliance on an objective theory of society and history has often motivated the Left’s suspicion and rejection of other forms of discourse and interpretation.² And so, though most of our critical theories today have distanced themselves from the idea of a universal science of the social, they have not given up on the sheen of certainty that originally accompanied scientific Marxism, and naturalist social science more generally.

What ultimately connected these two bases—utopia and objective knowledge—for ideology critique? We should know from the philosophical tradition that facts and values are not always so easily sewn together. What assured, for example, that the political practice advised by Marxist interpretations of utopia aligned with the objective position of revolutionary agents in the social structure? In the Marxist synthesis, the glue in this regard was the Hegelian philosophy of history, the “cunning of reason.” The progressive unfolding of historically necessary stages, which in Marxism was conceived as the material dialectic of reason,³ gave the objective analysis of social structure the dynamic direction it needed to connect up to the communist utopia of the future and the positive notions of freedom it entailed. This, in turn, allowed the articulators of this utopia (the critical intellectuals) to identify with, align themselves with, and help mold certain real social actors, structural tendencies, or collective social movements.

It is worth noting that, in a broad sense, liberal positivism had a teleological metanarrative, or philosophy of history, as well: modernization theory. That narrative linked the scientistic approach to society with the utopia of a “modern” society that was, to quote intellectual historian Nils Gilman, “cosmopolitan, mobile, controlling of the environment, secular, welcoming of change, and characterized by a complex division of labor.” Gilman continues:

The certainty that history was on their side pervaded everything the modernization theorists wrote and thought, which helps explain why modernization theory would be so useful to policy makers groping for an explanation of the United States’ place and responsibilities amid the uncertainties of the postwar world. . . . More than just a system for explaining the world in a rational fashion, modernization theory constituted a metalanguage that supplied not only a sense of the “meaning” of postwar geopolitical uncertainties, but also an implicit set of directives for how to effect positive change in that dissilient world. (Gilman 2003, 5)

Of course, the range of positivist social science exceeds the specific theories of modernization that are now so routinely despised; the same could be said of historical materialism and Marxism proper. The point here is that these perspectives on the future good society and how to get there are dependent on certain epistemic presuppositions.

So, there are in fact three points of origin for critical thinking, both liberal and radical: objective explanation (positivism or historical materialism), utopia (socially engineered modernity or socialism), and the narrative that links the two of them together (modernization, dialectical teleology). The latter two—utopias and the master narratives that told us how we were going to arrive there—have been significantly criticized in the last forty years. Cultural sociology, however, is based in a criticism of the first point of origin.

Reason and its Discontents

The utopias imagined by Western intellectuals, and the historical narratives of their advent, came under attack inside the Left in the 1970s and 1980s. Postmodernism and poststructuralism were deeply skeptical toward these claims of “Western reason.” This resulted in a massive reorientation of the Western tradition of democratic thought. David Couzens Hoy (2004) has called this form of discourse post-critique.⁴ In my view, it has two intertwined strands: a suspicion of totalizing and foundational theories and an attempt to think outside of modernity.

The first aspect, the distrust of totality, is also the source of “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard 1984) and the severe skepticism about the possibility of progress. It turns the discourse of critical rationalism in on itself, as the big theories of reason, truth, and human action that were so long the fount of critique—Kant, Marx, Freud—are interrogated for their duplicity and complicity with social power. As a result, post-critique concludes, social criticism must be fragmentary and partial in its sources (e.g., the new social movements) and self-limiting in its aims (e.g., its avoidance of prescriptive utopias). In this model, critique works at the interstices of power/knowledge. Armed with the insights of Foucault, the deconstructive methods of Derrida, and concepts like hybridity (Bhabha 1994) and agonistic politics (Mouffe 2000), critical intellectuals are to reappropriate certain forms of speech and social space from the control of capital, the state, or hegemonic discourse, and carefully avoid making claims to rationality that are claims to cultural superiority in disguise.

But the turn to post-critique is not only a turning-in. The radical critique of Western reason’s utopias and narratives also derives concepts and perspectives from the experience of colonized peoples and the anticolonial liberation movements. Postcolonial theory inverts the anthropological gaze of the West, proposing as a method an anthropology of modernity, where the utopias and narratives of “Western reason” are examined as a critical anthropologist would regard a “strange” society’s myths. Western societies that claim to have achieved objectivity in scientific knowledge, democracy in collective will formation, and progress in bringing “civilization” to other parts of the globe are looked at askance, with the guiding sense that these stories are most likely tools with which the powerful dominate others, internal or external.⁵

The narratives and utopias of the enlightenment have their defenders. Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and others have insisted, pace the postmodern turn, that the possibilities for radical critique, democratic inclusion, and global justice ultimately rest on a universal concept of reason (Habermas 1987a, 1987b, 1992, 1998; Benhabib 1992, 1996, 2002; see the debate in Benhabib et al. 1995). In the spirit of the dialogic model they insist on, this school of critical theory has deeply revised and refashioned the central concepts of the Enlightenment and modernity. Rejecting a unitary subject and simple evolutionism, post-Habermasian critical theory has instead developed a nuanced sense of the validity claims inherent in human speech, and a historical understanding of the democratic potential of law and the public sphere.

The result of all of this, then, is in an ongoing debate about what can and should animate the normative theory of the progressive Left. This is often glossed as an argument between “Habermas” and “Foucault,” or between the Enlightenment and its discontents, despite Foucault’s call to avoid what he called the “blackmail of the enlightenment”⁶ (Foucault 1984, 42–43). As a result, the possibility of progress (narrative) and the utility of the imaginative (utopia) have become central topics of intellectual debate.

Yet the project of radical criticism today has not fully interrogated or reformed the first basis for its critical stance: the mechanistic explanation of social behavior and historical change. Generally, in these discussions, the objective structures of oppression are known and assumed by all (well, all on the left . . .), and the question that remains is how to theorize their resistance. This assumption is the ongoing basis for the missing interpretive revolution in the sociological side of social criticism. The problem is not so much the recognition or misrecognition of oppression and inequality but their naturalistic explanation.

Where does this naturalism come from? The semiautonomous and interdisciplinary discourse of critical theory has certainly done enough to distance itself from positivist social science. I suggest that it is the result of a certain view of modernity, inherited from Weber—or, more precisely, from certain readings of Weber. Many sociologists recognize in Foucault an extension of Weber’s work on rationalization (e.g., Gorski 2003), while Habermas, of course, built his sociological edifice explicitly on an interpretation of exactly the same part of Weber’s work (Habermas 1985). On both sides of the Habermas-Foucault debate, modernity is disenchantment, and thus the workings of the social in modernity are the workings of rational strategy, determinant mechanisms, and other processes that can be theorized through a variety of naturalistic metaphors. What is to be explained, in modern societies and the contemporary world system, is exactly that which excludes, avoids, or denies meaning: the colonization of the lifeworld, the normalization of populations, and so on.

Yet a different interpretation of Weber (Geertz 2000; Alexander 1989) would suggest that, even inside modernity (and beyond), actors are caught up in “webs of significance” (Geertz 2000, 5). If this is so, the explanation of social actio...