Subject: Re: BHA: the book
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 16:50:33 -0400


> Someone more up to it could answer this.  But personally I would (also)
> see these as strategic attempts by actors positioning themselves within
> their respective fields to maximinse their position and the position of
> their approach or theory by such moves as disciplinary imperialism or
> theory recontextualisation and importation.  i.e. either an attempt to
> annex another discipline's object of study, or a search for distinction
> (by introducing an approach from another field).

Karl's point here about the sociology of science is quite valid, pointing
toward some of the social motivations that lie behind certain types of
disciplinary "border crossings."  I would add that there is also a strong
impulse to import ideas from the physical or biological sciences into social
and occasionally cultural analysis, not just to create sub-disciplinary
distinctiveness of the sort Karl mentions, but also (or in other cases) in
order to obtain the cachet or symbolic capital that the "hard sciences"
possess.  It's coattail-riding: saying dumb things works much better if you
can give a scientific ring to them.

As for what Karl calls "disciplinary imperialism," Carrol brings up an
example that comes close to home for me: Butler develops a notion of
"performativity," cobbled together from parts of J.L. Austin and especially
Derrida (who she manages to mangle), and in doing so simultaneously
decontextualizes and colonizes fields long tilled by theater and performance
studies--all without knowing the slightest thing about theatrical
performance herself.  Nor, I suppose, need she: naturally enough, many
people in theater and performance studies have rushed to embrace Butler's
work, in a nice instance of a subordinated discipline attempting to ride on
a dominant discipline's coattails.  (Austin, but the way, had at least tried
to grapple with the relationship between performatives and performance while
borrowing the term, even if he thoroughly botched the job.)

But these questions, important as they are, don't however clarify the
problem that Robert raised about how we distinguish among strata from a
philosophical and/or scientific perspective.  Is it a matter of social
groups carving up fields solely according to the groups' relative power and
strategies?  Are there actual differences, "natural kinds," which force
certain kinds of distinctions (perhaps at the same time leaving others--say,
subdisciplines--more or less up for grabs)?  How do we know that some
distinctions concern different strata, and some don't?  I've offered one
attempt to conceptualize stratification, but surely others of you have
thought about this too.  And I'm unsure of some of the implications or
applications of my own offering.  For instance, how exactly would it
function within social theory: social structures are the condition upon
which agents act, yet agents' actions are the condition on which social
structures exist?  Is this an error, a paradox, a dialectic, a statement of
fact, or what?

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce



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