Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method

After the Aesthetic Turn

Michael Shapiro, Michael J. Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415783552
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136235467
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This groundbreaking and innovative text addresses the deep ontological and epistemological commitments that underpin conventional positivist methods and then demonstrates how "method" can be understood in much broader and more interesting ways.

Drawing on a broad range of philosophical and methodological theory as well as a wide variety of artistic sources from fine art to cinema and from literature to the blues, leading contemporary thinker Michael Shapiro shows the reader how a more open understanding of the concept of method is rewarding and enlightening. His notion of 'writing-as-method' is enacted throughout the text and offers a stimulating alternative for students to positivist social science methods.

This is essential reading for all students and faculty with an interest in post-positivist methods.

1 Philosophy, method and the arts

Prelude: the Kantian revolution

Considered in terms of their main tendencies, political science and political studies remain in a pre-Kantian epistemological slumber. Presuming that the world is responsible for what is perceived, they have slept through Kant’s (self-described) Copernican Revolution, a change in the way to raise questions about the experience of the object world. Within a pre-Kantian philosophical framing, experience is engendered by that which appears, as opposed to that which lies behind appearance (“the intelligible essence”).¹ To simplify at the outset, “appearances” constitute the data for empirical/explanatory analysis and “the intelligible essence” references the object of some versions of hermeneutic/interpretive analysis. What Kant contributed is a shift that enfranchises post-empiricist and post-hermeneutic modes of inquiry: “phenomenon will no longer at all be appearance.”² Kantian epistemological orientations privilege the conditions of possibility for something to appear, an innovation in the philosophy of experience that puts critical pressure on the way that political inquiries have construed issues of method. Heeding that innovation in the midst of the “behavioral revolution” in political science in the mid-twentieth century, the political theorist Sheldon Wolin addressed himself to the implications of Kant’s philosophy. Seeking to redeem the “tradition” of political theory, Wolin indicted the behaviorist trend in political science for its “methodism,” for exhausting the space of political education with a preoccupation with methodological techniques, to the neglect of a historically informed and politically engaged knowledge.³ Invoking the Kantian revolution in philosophy, Wolin asserted that “method” [in the sense in which empiricists construct it] “is not a thing for all worlds. It presupposes a certain answer to a Kantian type question, what must the world be like for the methodist’s knowledge to be possible?”⁴

Although Wolin does not elaborate on this brief but pregnant Kantian aside, his provocation is well attuned to the Kantian contribution. Without going into elaborate detail on Kant’s first critique: in overturning traditional philosophy’s focus on the extent to which what appears can be reliably observed, Kant substitutes a productive mode of consciousness for mere passive perception and rejects a search for the essence or thing in itself behind the appearance. He introduces a subject who is no longer subjected to the object. Philosophically, it is a phenomenological rather than an empiricist subject, one which retains a receptive sensibility but also has an active understanding that legislates and reflects; a subject responsible for constituting the conditions under which things can appear as things. Consequently, within the Kantian philosophical frame, inquiry into how one has the world requires elucidation of the structures and dynamics of subjectivity. Moreover, rather than a concern with relationships among existing objects of knowledge (an explanatory syntax), Kant’s philosophical revolution, as it has been elaborated in a variety of post-Kantian perspectives, encourages inquiry into the forces that have brought such objects and their interrelations to one’s attention.⁵

Certainly Kant-inspired post-Kantian philosophy has yielded compelling alternatives to the consciousness-privileging Kantian subject. Among the most significant are the subject’s involvement in the world and thus the “how” rather than the “what” of subjectivity (the perspective of Martin Heidegger); the subject’s lack of unity – its conflicting multiplicities, rendered as the “which one” rather than the what or how of subjectivity (a philosophical trajectory running from Friedrich Nietzsche to Gilles Deleuze); and the subject who emerges as epiphenomenal to discursive practices, one located in the discursive formations within which alternative subjectivities are possible (the perspective of Michel Foucault). And while Kantian philosophy presumes the conditions of possibility for a common sense (a sensus communis) and enframes that common sense within a juridical figuration, critical post-Kantian philosophy–especially as exemplified by Deleuze, Lyotard and Rancière–emphasizes dissensus and discord (drawing on Kant’s reluctant discovery in his “analytic of the sublime” that the sublime evokes “pain, opposition, constraint, and discord,” which makes it difficult to achieve the “subjective necessity” that legislates in favor of common sense).⁶ Nevertheless, the Kantian legacy, with its focus on the conditions of possibility for the emergence of what is perceived, encourages a recognition of multiplicity, of alternative worlds (containing differently implicated subjects) within which things can emerge as objects of knowledge.

The most perspicuous post-Kantian effects discernible in inquiry treat historically emerging modes of subjectivity rather than assume a timeless, universal subject, conceived as a structure of apprehension. For example, in an application of Kantian philosophy in an architectural treatise, Irwin Panofsky shows how the subject fashioned in the emerging scholastic thought world was materialized in the design of the Gothic cathedral (beginning in the twelfth century). In the former “mental habit,” realized in the Romanesque cathedral, faith was insulated from reason in a design that enacted in stone an ontological divide between the reasoning/experiencing faculties and spirituality. In contrast, the Gothic cathedral constituted a realization of “aesthetic subjectivism,” materialized as a series of homologous spaces within which a subject with vision could gain clarity about the interrelations of reflective thought and spirituality as that subject moved through the cathedral’s spaces.⁷ Similarly, to consider a more recent historical subject, Michel Foucault suggests that Édouard Manet bears significant responsibility for the emergence of the “modern viewer.”⁸ Manet’s canvases, he observes, “played with the place of the viewer”⁹ in such a way that, in contrast with a world of fixed or immobile subjects, the spectator became “an individual exiled from his certainties regarding his place in the world.”¹⁰ Jonathan Crary offers a similar insight into Manet’s disturbances to the formerly stable viewing subject. In an analysis of Manet’s The Balcony (1868), he suggests that, “Manet’s painting takes us outside the stable circuit of visuality to an arrangement in which neither eye nor objects in the world can be understood in terms of fixed positions and identities.”¹¹

With these post-Kantian challenges as background – the implications of which I elaborate and illustrate throughout this chapter – I want first to review the pre-Kantian methodological protocols of social science by revisiting my graduate school methodological training, which summoned instructional materials predicated on the assumption that we are in a unified, subjectively shared world within which inquiry’s objects are those already residing in familiar political discourses. One implication of that assumption is that one has to heed only technical issues of measurement, reliability and validity and then test explanatory models to make inferences about relations among politically relevant objects. As a discourse of inquiry, the empiricist, pre-Kantian orientation prescribes a causal grammatical syntax that contains no problematic dimensions of subjectivity. As I will suggest, there are alternative, more politically attuned, grammars of inquiry.

The grammar of problems and the political assets of inquiry

In the mid-1960s, I was enrolled in a course designed to edify beginning political science PhD students about social science methods. One of the texts in the course, the multi-authored Research Methods in Social Relations by Claire Selltiz et al., provided a basic narrative of the research process, introducing that process with a list of the “major steps in research”:

1. A statement of purpose is made in the form of formulating the problem;
2. A description of the study design is given;
3. The methods of data collection are specified;
4. The results are presented;
5. Frequently, there follows a section on conclusions and interpretation .¹²

In retrospect, two aspects of the text’s instructions are especially striking: its distribution of coverage and its assumption about the reading/evaluating constituency of the research. Both issues emerge in beginning sections. The “formulating the problem” discussion is a bit less than five pages and is exemplified in the sentence, “The formulation of the topic into a research problem is the first step in a scientific inquiry and, as such, should be influenced primarily by the requirements of scientific procedure.”

Thereafter, the text devotes the rest of its 587 pages to steps 2 through 5, with most of its emphasis on step 3, “methods of data collection.” As was the case with most of the methods approaches in social science in the mid-twentieth century, research design and causal inference occupied the bulk of the text’s terrain of inquiry (and with few exceptions, “political research” methods books continue this tradition of coverage¹³). There is no attention to the historical context of inquiry, for example the methodological concern with why particular problems emerge at particular historical moments. Thus for example, Selltiz et al. don’t acknowledge that their research agenda has been produced in the midst of what Paul Gilroy aptly terms “the color-line century.”¹⁴ Arguably, the twentieth century is a period of the hardening of a racial-spatial order in the U.S., especially as it is manifested in urban space. As Robert Crooks suggests, the violence that took place on America’s western frontier (an inter-nation frontier) during the nineteenth century, shifted to urban frontiers – in his terms, a “transformation of the frontier from a moving western boundary into a relatively fixed partitioning of urban space ... a racial frontier.”¹⁵ However, the racial and ethnic fault-lines within social orders, which affect the differential assets deployed for alternative constituencies or assemblages by different formulations of research problems, are not noted by Selltiz et al. as relevant to the “formulation of the research problem.”

I choose the word, “asset,” because less than a decade after being exposed to Research Methods in Social Relations, I encountered Michel Foucault’s most method-oriented work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and have since been especially attentive to his remarks about the value of statements, where he writes, “To analyze a discursive formation is ... to weigh the value of statements. A value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by the presence of a secret content; but which characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange.” Foucault goes on to suggest that statements should be regarded as “assets” and to note that to interrogate statements is not to seek to discover either the fidelity of what they are about (the empiricist focus on representation) or their intelligibility when their silent context is disclosed (a hermeneutic focus on disclosure), but to note the way they pose “the question of power” because the statement is “an asset that ... poses the question of power [and is thus] ... by nature, the object of a struggle, a political struggle.”¹⁶

In contrast to Selltiz et al.’s exclusively technical approach to inquiry – where the only judgments solicited are from a scientifically oriented research constituency – Foucault’s remarks on discursive formations offer a way to articulate inquiry into historico-political encounters with concrete “assemblages” (entities constructed through very specific historical processes:¹⁷ with something at stake in the way inquiries approach explanation, interpretation or critique. To give Foucault’s suggestion that discursive formations deploy assets a concrete historical example (one that resonates with Gilroy’s expression, “the color-line century”), I offer a brief illustration supplied by Clyde Woods in his analysis of the racial partialities in the history of social science. Investigating an “arrested development” in the Mississippi Delta, which resulted from economic policies during the New Deal period in American politics, Woods contrasts “plantation bloc explanation” with “blues epistemology.” He points out that the plantation system has persisted not only as an exploitive agricultural capitalism but also as an ontology and way of knowing.

Woods’ analysis emphasizes the way the plantation perspective has been articulated through social science explanation, as a “world view,” one in which “the planter [is] the heroic master of a natural ethnic, class, gender and environ mental hierarchy.” The “plantation movement in social science,” inaugurated in the late nineteenth century, developed a model of the “Negro problem,” wherein “racial friction,” based on (allegedly) natural antipathies, stood in the way of the economic and political progress that agricultural capitalism promises.¹⁸ To that social science-assisted epistemological framing, Woods juxtaposes “blues epistemology,” which articulates a history of African American practices of knowing and assembling that contest the ontological and epistemological hegemony of the plantation bloc. As he puts it, blues epistemology serves as a resource for the “constant reestablishment of collective sensibility in the face of constant attacks by the plantation bloc and its allies.” It reaffirms “the historical commitment to social and personal investigation, description, and criticism present in the blues.”¹⁹ He points out that, while the blues developed “as a theory of African American aesthetics” and as a form of social criticism, “social science remained unscathed.”²⁰ They have been collusive with “the planters’ mythical ethno-regional system of explanation.”²¹

Doubtless for those attuned to the familiar social research paradigms, the political register of blues is hard to discern. What may appear to some as mere entertainment – for example Bessie Smith’s song “Crazy Blues” (1920) – registers itself among much of the African American assemblage as “an insurrectionary social text ... contributing to an evolving discourse on black revolutionary violence in the broadest sense ... black violence as a way of resisting white violence and unsettling a repressive social order.”²² Although racial antagonisms and the bases of white hegemony have receded significantly since Bessie Smith was lyrically addressing herself to racial divisions, fault-lines with historical depth remain. Thus to appreciate the force of Woods’ contrast between “plantation bloc explanation” and “blues epistemology,” is to recognize that the “social” component of “socio-spatial relations” contains sharp divisions, based on (among other things) differences in the historical trajectories of arrival into social space of different historical groups, especially as coerced versus voluntary labor. Those modes of arrival have had a lasting legacy with respect to the value of social k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Philosophy, method, and the arts
• 2 The moralized economy in hard times
• 3 The blues subject: counter-memory, genre, and space
• 4 Zones of justice: a philo-poetic engagement
• 5 For an anti-fascist aesthetics
• 6 The micro-politics of justice: language, sense, and space
• 7 A continuing violent cartography: from Guadalupe Hidalgo to contemporary border crossings
• 8 The presence of war: "Here and Elsewhere"
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index