Anapolethics

by Rommel A. Curaming

To herald the birth of this blogsite, allow me to coin a new word, anapolethics. This anagram combines three words—analytics, politics and ethics. In addition to Southeast Asia, which serves as my empirical base for exploration, these are the main themes that run through the short and long pieces that will come out of this blogsite. 

Let me take neologism a step further. Anapolethics has two components. First, ana(po)lytics or ana(po)lytical which signifies the close entwining of the analytic and the political, as if to say the analytical is political. Second, polethics or polethical which presupposes the ethical dimension of things or acts within the political sphere, if one may grant autonomy to such a sphere.

The political nature of scholarship has long been mooted and it has been the main stuff that fuels much of the poststructuralist, postmodern and postcolonial criticisms. The notion of anapolytics as I use here builds upon, but will endeavour not to rehearse, this long-standing tradition. What I aim to examine and demonstrate in this blogsite is, among others,  how in the micro-level the analytic act may at the same time be a political act. Put differently, I wish to explore the question how it becomes possible to imagine a space beyond the political that the scholarly is supposed to inhabit.  All this may sound inane and hifalutin; I will clarify in due course the origins, full import, justifications and implications of this question.

The politics-ethics nexus is also an age-old question. The self-serving, dirty play for power that has long been associated with real politik, however, has hijacked the otherwise conceptually equal and neutral relationship, and has brought it to the realm of negativity. Analytic (and I should admit, also political) imperatives demand the re-imagining of this relationship back into its primordial—original—state. As I will also clarify in due course, this is necessary to enable the shedding of a number of analytic blinders that conceal the (sometimes insidious) relationship between scholarship, politics and, ultimately, ethics.

In the anagram anapolethics, I deliberately grant ethics the full name simply because I take it as the hinge around which the other two ought to revolve. Whereas analysis and politics are a means, I envision ethics as the end. One may argue that ultimately politics subsumes ethics, for in final analysis, so the argument  goes, it is the political that decides what is ethical. I do not disagree, particularly from a purely analytic standpoint. From a political standpoint, on the other hand, it is one’s subjectivity as analyst that will decide, and I am one among those who elevate ethics as perhaps the highest (and sublime?) form of the political. I recognize the attendant philosophical challenges in this position, which I hope to elucidate and deal with in due time.

The above is more than enough to make this blogsite unpalatable to many people. I recognize these high-flown pronouncements might easily be misconstrued as no more than empty musings of someone who have ample time to spare, which is not true, of course, given my workload. Too academic or pedantic or too philosophical, even pretentious, some might say. One thing I can assure my reader, the target of the whole excise is of fundamental importance to our life as individual: its aim is primarily to contribute towards expanding the sphere of freedom--freedom held back by unlikely sources, which have to be exposed for what they are.

It will be largely academic in flavour, as it reflects what am I, but I will try my best to write in a manner accessible to broad intelligent audiences who may be interested in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, Indonesia and to an extent Malaysia, in addition to those who are keen about the intricacies of knowledge politics and ethics of scholarly practice. Long before, I wanted to be a journalist, one who writes regular columns in opinion page of a widely circulated newspaper. That dream was aborted, about which I will tell more about later. After so much dilly-dallying, it is time, though this blogsite, that I try to approximate, if not re-live, that dream.

With great pleasure, I welcome you to my imaginary world!

Is our analysis constipated?

by Rommel A. Curaming

The long-standing ambivalence of much of the post-positivist and ‘critical’ social sciences to relativism, the backlash against the ‘linguistic turn’ and the back-tracking among the early proponents of postcolonialism/poststructuralism/postmodernism (particularly within Asian Studies) exemplify a range of attitude among scholars—from fear to hostility to vacillation—towards the idea of pushing the logic of the knowledge-power nexus to its conclusion. To the extent that relativism or knowledge/power is recognised and adopted as analytic frame, it is tempered with moderation, or is forced to moderate its temperament. 

This moderation takes several forms. In the case of Mannheim, he confined his relationism to social sciences thereby excluding the natural sciences among the areas of concern of sociology of knowledge. Foucault (1988) did similar thing when he in effect exempted the whole of the natural sciences as object of his knowledge/power analytics. In the case of Barnes (1976) and Bloor (1991), they pushed for the so-called “value-free” relativism. Knorr-Centina (1982) for her part defends her relativist stance by making a distinction between  epistemic and judgmental relativism. Epistemic relativism, what she considers a defensible type of relativism, is committed to the idea that the basis for identifying ‘objective’ reality is “itself grounded in human assumptions and selections which appear to be specific to a particular historical place and time.” Still another good example is McCarthy (1996) who, while recognizing the social situatedness of knowledge, is quick to rescue his appreciation of Levi-Strauss’s contribution to SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge) by saying: “…to insist, after Levi-Strauss, that everything ‘factual’ is discursive does not require that one embrace a nihilism or an agnosticism about the moorings of these discourses…” He justifies this position by noting that “sociologists from Marx to Durkheim to Mannheim have argued (that) there is an institutional bases to ‘cultural production’” (1996). Friedman and Kenney (2005) nail the point when they declare, totally oblivious of its irony, thus: “Although we argue that all history is subjective, this is not to suggest a kind of relativism.”  Such ambivalence constitutes the most fundamental symptom of what I call ‘analytic constipation’.

Analytic constipation refers to the inability or unwillingness to push the logic of analysis to its ultimate conclusion. It arises from the situation when the logical conclusion carries exceedingly controversial philosophical, moral, religious, academic or political implications. Faced with this situation, scholars often hold back within the permissible zone, maintaining critical stance by continuously teasing the limits using, among other means, intellectually inflationary and involutionary practices of complexifying concepts, theories and methods. In the end seldom one can expect that they would be brave enough to break the barriers. In some cases that they do, penalties are heavy including the possibility of being kicked-out of the scholars’ moral community. The case of Feyarabend whose book Against Method, brilliant as it was, infuriated many scholars for its alleged apostasy against science and scientific method, may be a good example. Derrida’s stinging rebuke of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization offers a glimpse of a less heavier, but nonetheless not negligible, penalty for attempts at crossing a ‘holy’ line.

There are a number of factors that help explain this tendency, which will be explored further in other blog entry. At this point, suffice it to note that scholars belong to a community governed by mostly unwritten rules on ‘proper’ behaviour. The socialization process—with the accompanying systems of motivation, reward and punishment—that scholars undergo instil in them not just fear of the consequences of transgression but also inducement for collective enjoyment of reward and voluntary sharing of responsibility to protect and promote the interests of the community. For all the aspirations to objectivity, impartiality, and being apolitical, scholarship is far from being disinterested as it wishes, or pretends, to be. Anyone whose ideas and actions will endanger its collective interests ought to be dealt with ‘properly’. In Bourdieu’s view, scholarship is one of those fields where, via internal dynamics and interaction with other fields, various forms of capital are generated, social positions shaped, and power relations played out. It is, as some scholars aptly put it, politics by other means. 

In my future posts, I will give concrete examples from Southeast Asian Studies of what may be considered as constipated analysis. Abangan ang susunod na kabanata:)