Focus Groups in Social Research Book

[very rough remarks, in progress as of 7/12]

To say the least, it's indicative. There's a reflexive (re)turn underway, so far largely unthematized, that separates us, at the beginning of the new century, from the virulent anti-dialecticism of the last one. It exceeds the institutional boundaries of philosophy at the same time that it serves as the engine, again unremarked, of the remarked-upon "return" of philosophy. To the extent that the disciplines philosophy spawned want to survive the transition to the new era, they are compelled, in becoming their own metadisciplines, to return, in part, to the status of philosophy. Today, the latter is the theory of reflexivity, which for good metalogical reasons cannot be, as Socrates already points out in Charmides, a discipline among others.

And here is another symptom and confirmation of the thesis of the reflexive turn from an unexpected quarter. To what does Pierre Bourdieu devote his final course at the Collège de France, his swan song as a lecturer and teacher? "[T]o the subject of science". And since it is always also a scientist, a sociologist, that Bourdieu aims to speak, this means, as his title openly acknowledges, that reflexivity itself must again become a theme. Once again, thought wrestles with the problematic identity of form and content posited and blocked by the act of reflection, this self-nominating, self-delimiting drive.

That this obligation is only partially discharged is understandable. The problem of what the "itself itself" might be, taxes Plato's intellect in Alcibiades and Charmides. (And he didn't have the dead weight of Aristotle's obfuscation of the problem to throw off.) Less understandable is that, seventy years after Godel, neither the full formal difficulty of the problem nor the concrete advances that have been made on it over the last century shine through clearly in Bourdieu's text. It makes the interview I had with the philosophy department's library liaison during the first week of grad school seem like comedic prophecy: "Bourdieu?" "Badiou." "You mean Pierre Bourdieu." "No, I mean Alain Badiou."

In contrast with Badiou - but troublingly very much like Quentin Meillassoux's recent release - the engagement with reflexivity remains frustratingly topical in this text. Perhaps we should have been warned by a second glance at the title: "science of science" is just a first approximation of what reflexivity might be. Perhaps this formula would better still be described as the essential negation of reflexivity, the one thing that we can be sure it isn't. Bourdieu skirts the main theoretical problem, though. He juxtaposes warnings, reminders, cautions, each of which performs a valuable moment, without clarifying the structure of reflexivity itself. This is not a failing because of some neo-Hegelian desire for totalization. It's a failing because without such clarification, we have no way of applying his various pronouncements to various moments of inquiry, that is, of knowing which is appropriate to which moment of inquiry. (E.g. Is this the moment to push on with the march of understanding, or is this the moment to "remember" that the sociologist is embedded in the object s/he objectifies?)

But let me break off the critical generalizing here, and engage instead in a little direct, if fictional, dialogue.

Bourdieu: In raising the problem of knowledge ... I have constantly been thinking of the social sciences, of which I have in the past denied the particularity. I did not do so out of some kind of positivistic scientism, as some may think or pretend to think, but because exaltation of the 'difference' of the social sciences is often no more than a way of decreeing he impossibility of a scientific understanding of their object. I am thinking for example of a book by Adolf Grunbaum (1984) which describes the attempts by some philosophers, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc., to set a priori limits to these sciences. (And this I find absolutely unjustifiable: why postulate that certain things are unknowable, and, moreover, do so a priori, before any experience?)

me: If this is indeed what they do then it is certainly unjustifiable. For one thing, the definiteness of a "certain thing" in the subject of the proposition is already in contradiction with the predicate of unknowability, even disregarding the additional contradiction that would take an unknowable, contra Kant, as an object of possible experience. I have to say that I don't recognize any serious philosophers in this hasty portrait. But I agree that your named opponents are to blame as well. Rather than allowing you a rational-empirical (first-order) science on the model of the "field", they've insisted on an equally hybrid - but still first-order - paradoxical science or non-science. And they are of course to blame if they misanalyze the metalogic of their own critique, taking the referent of the limit of science as a term, rather than a place. The latter tendency can be only illicit quantifier shift regarded metalogically, and culturally - religion.

Something that seems particularly backwards to me -

Bourdieu: [T]he more autonomous a science is, the more, as Bachelard observed, it tends to be nothing less than the site of a permanent revolution, but one which is increasingly devoid of political or religious implications.

me: This purity from social context, on which the truth of the thesis depends, could only be achieved in the case of pure mathematics, and it's precisely there that it's completely false. The purity functions in just the other way, as completely general ontology, as relevance itself. Not having done the work to bridge the gap between symbolisms that makes it look as though it's about "something else" is not the same as having earned the right to speak of incommensurable language games, or with more apparent modesty, of "fields", which inasmuch as they are fields of knowledge, still repeats the error of the Aristotelian epoch: placing the ontological pivot in the middle, between eidos and chora, immobilizing thought.

On a more upbeat note -

Bourdieu: It is worth reflecting on such use of the opposition old/new, which is doubtless one of the obstacles to the progress of science, especially social science: sociology suffers greatly from the fact that the pursuit of distinction at any price, which prevails in certain states of the literary field, encourages an artificial emphasis on differences and prevents or delays the initial accumulation in a common paradigm - everything endlessly restarts from zero - and the establishment of strong, stable models. This is seen in particular in the use made of Kuhn's concept of the paradigm: any sociologist who feels so inclined will declare himself the bearer of a 'new paradigm', a 'new' ultimate theory of the world.

me: Word.

In fine, I would sooner call Bourdieu's lectures a sketch of a "second-order" sociology, than a truly reflexive sociology, one that iterates the ontological commitments of the first-order theory, acknowledging the paradoxes of doing so, but providing no positive apparatus for displacing them. We recognize the situation from what gets called "second-order logic". It's to recognize the necessity of reflection, but to complete the reflection in an imaginary way, without inquiring (as metalogic already does) into what actually happens at the point of reflection (an inquiry, however, which has more to do with pure ontology, i.e., mathematics, than empiricism.)

Update in more accessible language? Basically, PB sees that there's a hole in sociological knowledge corresponding to the categories of sociological investigation. But instead of taking on the conceptual problem of the hole as such, and asking whether, e.g., it points to a different relation of theory and praxis, he ultimately just recommends plugging the hole with more data. His reflexive sociology would have metadata, but not a true metalogic.