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:)