Discourses on Liberation

An Anatomy of Critical Theory

Kyung-Man Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Kyung-Man Kim offers a comprehensive inventory of the obstacles the most powerful and influential thinkers of our time tried to overcome, the questions they asked without finding good answers, and the questions they've overlooked or avoided. No one concerned with the ethical impact of knowledge and the role it may play in winning the case of human freedom can neglect Kyung-Man Kim's analysis." -Zygmut Bauman "This is a powerful book, compelling for every reader who wants to know how current sociological theory can be used to change, not just interpret, the social world. Kyung-man Kim offers masterful readings of the main theoretical formations of the last century." -Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois "A lucid exposition and critique of Bourdieu, Giddens, and Habermas, and of the phenomenological ethnographies of Garfinkel and the ethnomethodologists who provided their starting point. Kim, who has honed his skills in his acute contributions to the hyper-reflexive sociology of scientific knowledge, now successfully takes on the big game of the emancipatory theory world. -Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania What binds the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Jurgen Habermas? Although these and other contemporary theorists offered major critiques of society, they stopped short of plausible proposals to achieve the liberation of individuals and societies. Kyung-Man Kim offers a new reading of contemporary critical theorists and explains how, by reading them together, we may find a practical basis for progressive social change.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Rethinking Theory and Practice

Since the 1960s . . . both philosophy and science are back in the intellectual postures of the last generation before Descartes. In natural science, the imperial dominion of physics over all other fields has come to an end: ecologists and anthropologists can now look astronomers and physicists straight in their eye. In philosophy, Descartes’ formalist wish—to refute the skepticism of the Renaissance humanists, by substituting the abstract demands of logical certainty for their concrete reliance on human experience—is now seen to have led the enterprise of philosophy into a dead end. Scientifically and philosophically, that is, we are freed from the exclusively theoretical agenda of rationalism, and can take up again the practical issues sidelined by Descartes’ coup d’état some 300 years ago.

Stephen Toulmin (1990: 168)

IT IS NOW MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS SINCE ÉMILE DURKHEIM BROUGHT his readers’ attention to the extremely complex intellectual division of labor among academic disciplines. Durkheim (1893/1964:364) noted that just as the rapid transformation of society and the increasing division of labor resulted in a state of anomie, a state of deregulation and normlessness, so too, in the intellectual domain, the rapid differentiation of academic disciplines put us into a labyrinth in which a sense of integrative unity among specialties was lost.

After a hundred years since the time of Durkheim, we sadly observe that the situation is not improved but much more aggravated. Even when we confine our interest to the field of social theory, we can readily discern a huge gap that sets each theory group apart from one another. Thus, authors like Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu, Rorty, Giddens, and their followers all disagree as to what counts as important issues in contemporary society and how they might be approached and solved.

Amid this chaotic struggle of disparate knowledge communities, we can, however, discern a strand of thought that slowly emerged through the 1960s. According to Stephen Toulmin (1990), after coming full circle, we finally find ourselves again in the situation of 300 years ago when an aversion to the ideal language and universal standards was the order of the day; instead of holding on to what Toulmin called the “myth of the clean slate” in which all kinds of human activities ranging from the understanding of the natural order to the understanding of practical activities of men are believed to be reducible to a single, clearly measurable standard of rationality which tolerates no ambiguity and contingency, we now again confront head-on the unavoidable contingencies and uncertainties inherent even in our scientific practice.

Culminating in the logical positivist movement that began early in the twentieth century and stretched up through the 1960s, the myth of the clean slate drove philosophers and social scientists to search for the ideal language that could substitute for mundane, ordinary language. In such an endeavor, all rhetorical components of language are regarded as mere ornaments that must be eliminated for the attainment of verified knowledge (Nelson et al. 1987). During this period, many social theorists thought that only when stripped of all the ornamental, and concrete elements, could language do what it was supposed to do, i.e., to denote or represent what was objectively given to human perception. The history of logical positivism was the history of such a struggle to purify language in such a way that the correspondence between a system of signs and the external world is ensured. It is believed that a system of signs or a system of theory, when such a purification process is correctly performed, can unproblematically capture what is objectively given to our sensory experience. As is well known, however, various attempts to reduce theoretical terms to the empirical bedrock failed. It turned out that the complete reduction of theoretical terms to pure experience was impossible because a unique operational definition of a theoretical term was unobtainable (see Suppe 1974 for a review).

A clear sign of the reversion to the Renaissance humanists’ vision of human understanding is visible in the recent revival of interest in the concrete human practice which defies easy theoretical abstraction, and hence has been deliberately downplayed since the time of Descartes and the Enlightenment. Under the banner of interpretive social science, many social theorists argue that truth should no longer be regarded as a simple translation or a decodation of what is captured in a hardened and callous linguistic mold, but as an active achievement of the social agents, fragile and volatile enough to be reconstructed in the process of social interaction. It thus entails a view in which the function of language is conceived to be performative rather than denotative. Closely related to such a reemphasis on the performative aspect of language is the opposition to the ideal of the universal, transcendental, and permanent language (Louch 1966; Searle 1998; Denzin 2001; Seidman 1992; Lemert 1992). Instead of searching for such an unobtainable ideal, the interpretive social scientists begin to explore the concrete human practice in the various fields of cultural production. Focusing on the elucidation of the ways in which linguistic actions are performed in a wide variety of concretely situated circumstances, the interpretive social scientists attempt to show how the actors skillfully deploy speech acts to create and maintain the shared symbolic reality.

One of the important consequences of such an emphasis on the local, particular, historical, and rhetorical aspects of human practice is the outburst of the protest against the role played by theory in the transformation of social practice. In the orthodox social science tradition represented by such theorists as Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, it was simply assumed that laymen were not capable of objectively perceiving the situation in which they were historically embedded, and hence needed the assistance of theoretical social scientists, who knew a lot more than they did about the real modus operandi of the social world, to correct their fallacious beliefs. And naturally such a superior cognitive capacity of the theorists is assumed to be the raison d’être of the social sciences. Had the social scientists lost this superior position, it was tacitly assumed, social scientific knowledge would have degenerated into mere commonsense knowledge. In this orthodox social science tradition, therefore, only theorists were assumed to be capable of seeing through the underlying reality which laymen, lacking a clairvoyant insight to see the whole, are not able to penetrate. According to these scholars, being able to grasp the operation of the whole society and being more farsighted, only theorists can say authoritative things about why people do what they do, and how their behavior can be corrected.

For example, Marx contended that while the proletarian, in exchanging his or her labor power for wage, thought that he or she was making a free and independent contract with the owner of capital, he or she could not recognize that the contract he or she was making was in fact determined and forced. According to Marx, failing to perceive the broader causal matrix in which such a contract is being made, the proletarian, in making the contract, actually contributes to the perpetuation of the exploitative capitalistic system. In a similar vein, Durkheim, too, argued that a social theorist must break the habit of thinking in terms of the empirical categories that he shares with the layman since these empirical categories

have been formed in the course of history; they are a product of human experience, which is, however, confused and unorganized. They are not due to some transcendental insight into reality but result from all sorts of impressions and emotions accumulated according to circumstances, without order and without methodical interpretation.

(1938: 33) [Italics added]

Only through “patient and luminous analyses of reason,” Durkheim continues, can a social theorist bring a definite order to the chaotic, inferior, and confused perceptions of the layman.

The post-Wittgensteinian, hermeneutic and phenomenology-inspired sociologists, however, raised serious objections to the traditional conception of the relationship of theory to the lay practice. In place of unreflexive social agents who are simply assumed to have only an inaccurate understanding of the causal matrix that impinges on their actions, these sociologists put the knowledgeable and reflexive agents who know a lot about what’s going on among themselves and about—to use Wittgenstein’s phrase—“how to go on” in a series of changing situations. In contrast to Durkheim, who believed that the lay perception of reality is chaotic and without order, these theorists claim to have shown that the life-world of lay social actors displays an enormous amount of order that facilitates the maintenance of the shared social reality. According to Alfred Schutz (1971), one of the early advocates of interpretive social science, such an order is made available through the typifications of other people’s motives and situations that transform what would otherwise be a chaotic flux of impressions into an ordered and meaningful totality. And the discovery of the social order in the life-world of the social actors falsifies the positivist’s contention that “the everyday world is meaningless unless categorized by the social scientists” (O’Neill 1995: 171).

For Harold Garfinkel (1952, 1967), the founder of ethnomethodology, the discovery of the social order in the everyday practice of lay individuals poses another serious problem for the positivistic theorists, since the lay individuals, who have been regarded as having only an irrational and inaccurate understanding of their own practice, nevertheless can continue to act successfully and effectively in a wide variety of situations. In order to dispose of such an anomaly, Garfinkel argues, positivist theorists invoke various social mechanisms, ranging from the Freudian defense mechanism, through the functionality of the various mythical beliefs enjoyed by the actors, to the “various structural arrangements and operations . . . whereby the members knowingly or not protect each other from the actual consequences of their errors” (Garfinkel 1952: 115–118). According to Heritage:

[T]hey [the various social mechanisms] are systematically required as “secondary elaborations” in defense of the privileged status of social scientists’ empirical judgments. And, in turn, preoccupations with the “problem of error” and its resolution tends to deflect attention away from the systematic study of the actors’ actual knowledge, the properties of their judgments, their procedures for assessing outcomes, etc.

(Heritage 1984: 68)

Indeed, at least part of the reason for social scientists’ aversion to ethnomethodological studies of the production of local order is that such studies might humble the sociological ambition to criticize and correct the practical beliefs of lay individuals (O’Neill 1995: 171).

Schutz also argues that the theoretical constructs used by theorists to analyze the life-world of social agents are not, as Durkheim argues, derived from the theorists’ exclusive access to some transcendental reality. Rather, he contends that, just as the life-world of the lay social agents is ordered through the typifications of each other’s motives and situations, so too the theoretical constructs used by social scientists are the result of the social scientists’ typification and interpretation of the already interpreted world of the social agents. And it is in this sense that Schutz calls the latter the second-order construct. Schutz adds that social actors are torn out of their biographical situations and created by social scientists according to the stock of knowledge relevant only to their scientific problems:

Strictly speaking, they [models of actors] do not have any biography or any history, and the situation into which they are placed is not a situation defined by them but defined by their creator, the social scientist. He has created these puppets or homunculi to manipulate them for his purpose. A merely specious consciousness is imputed to them by the scientist.... But the puppet and his artificial consciousness is not subject to the ontological conditions of human beings. The homunculus was not born, he does not grow up, and he will not die.... He is not free in the sense that his acting could transgress the limits his creator, the social scientist, has predetermined. He cannot, therefore, have other conflicts of interests and motives than those the social scientist has imputed to him.

(Schutz 1971: 41)

Thus, for Schutz, the social order allegedly discovered by the social scientists is not the transcendental and disembodied order that is independent of the social scientists’ interpretation of the life-world of the social agents, but an order created and imposed on the world of the agents by the social scientists. And, the creation of the second-order conceptual construct can be achieved only at the cost of reducing the meaningful world of the agents to the preconceived theoretical categories of the social theorists.

Schutz thus tells us that the object or the subject matter of social science is not the social world of agents itself but the social world as conceptualized by social scientists. More precisely, social scientists do not take as their object of inquiry the social world of agents itself but the sense of the social world constituted within the structure of relevance peculiar to the sociological community to which they belong. Now, once a social scientific theory is constructed, it begins to take on a life of its own and becomes subject to the methods of verification and falsification developed within the sociological community. In the concluding remark in his paper about the relation between common sense and science, Schutz thus writes:

The relationship between the social scientist and the puppet he has created reflects to a certain extent an age-old problem of theology and metaphysics, that of the relationship between God and his creatures. The puppet exists and acts merely by the grace of the scientist; it cannot act otherwise than according to the purpose which the scientist’s wisdom has determined it to carry out. Nevertheless, it is supposed to act as if it were not determined but could determine itself. A total harmony has been pre-established between the determined consciousness bestowed upon the puppet and the pre-constituted environment within which it is supposed to act freely, to make rational choices and decisions. This harmony is possible only because both, the puppet and its reduced environment, are the creations of the scientist. And by keeping to the principles which guided him, the scientist succeeds, indeed, in discovering within the universe, thus created, the perfect harmony established by himself.

(Schutz 1971: 47)

This remark seems to indicate the huge gulf that sets the world of ordinary actors apart from that of the theorist. But, Schutz complicates the situation by introducing the “postulate of adequacy” that makes his argument regarding the relationship between theory and practice less than perfectly clear. The postulate of adequacy stipulates that social scientific concepts must be constructed in such a way that they can be eventually traced back to lay concepts, and can be understood by lay actors.

By arguing so, Schutz attempts to reconnect the two worlds that he once separated from one another. What is such a reconnection—or a hermeneutic mediation—supposed to mean? If it means that the construction of social scientific concepts must start with lay concepts, the postulate of adequacy is hardly illuminating. On the other hand, if it means that every social-scientific concept must be constructed in such a way that it can be translated into lay language, it is difficult to see why Schutz stresses that scientific concepts, in contrast to the commonsense construct, are constructed according to the criteria and interests that have nothing to do with the practical concerns of lay individuals. Indeed, as has been pointed out by many scholars, Schutz’s clarification of the postulate of adequacy is minimal and unsatisfactory (O’Neill 1995: 169; Giddens 1993: 32; Habermas 1984: 123) and even inconsistent (Thomason 1982: 55).

As I shall attempt to show in the following chapters, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Jürgen Habermas have been grappling, albeit in different ways, with the problem Alfred Schutz left for us, that is, the “hermeneutic mediation” of the two distinct “forms of life,” one scholarly and the other practical. Bourdieu, Giddens, and Habermas all argue that, in one way or another, such a hermeneutic mediation must involve a process in which the critical reconstruction of lay practice helps lay actors to liberate themselves from the social forces that are beyond their recognition.

United against a common foe that conceives social science as a “social physics” in which a set of allegedly objective categories are imposed from without to render the otherwise meaningless and chaotic world of the lay actors intelligible, Bourdieu, Giddens, and Habermas all argue that, rather than being chaotic and disorderly, the world of the social actors rests on the social order that is reflexively maintained through their social interaction. But they go one step further and argue that acknowledging the existence of ample social order in lay practice does not necessarily mean that sociologists must content themselves with the mere description of the practical reasoning and beliefs of the actors; rather, they all believe that, by seizing upon the methodical ways in which the phenomenological experience of the actors is constituted through their social interaction, social theorists can obtain a critical understanding of the lay people’s production of social order. Which means that, in contrast to the positivists’ critique of the lay world as lacking a discernible order, Bourdieu’s, Giddens’s, and Habermas’s critiques of the lay world are directed against the methods—i.e., the ethnomethods, as the ethnomethodologists call it—deployed by the social agents to create and maintain a meticulous social order.

For these authors, a particular system of speech acts which is constitutive of the actors’ social order is not simply a practical means to get things done; rather, it also directs our attention to the violence and power served by the use of...