Experimentalism and Sociology: From Crisis to Experience 3030924777, 9783030924775

Citation preview

Tanja Bogusz

Experimentalism and Sociology From Crisis to Experience

Experimentalism and Sociology

Tanja Bogusz

Experimentalism and Sociology From Crisis to Experience

Tanja Bogusz Center for Sustainable Society Research Universität Hamburg Hamburg, Germany

ISBN 978-3-030-92477-5 ISBN 978-3-030-92478-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Klasina Ehlert, née Groen, retired lady wrestler (b. 1921, Amsterdam, d. 2009, Hamburg-St. Pauli). “Experimentalism and Sociology” would never have been written without this real-world role model.

Translated from the German original “Experimentalismus und Soziologie. Von der Krisen- zur Erfahrungswissenschaft”, © Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2018. Translation: Alex Skinner Formal note: This translation necessitated slight changes in language and a number of updated quotations. “I cannot live without experimenting.” —Alexander von Humboldt

Acknowledgements

While my Dutch grandmother was the key inspiration for my enduring curiosity about unruly social constellations and ingenious actors, other good minds, institutions, friends and colleagues helped me to translate this curiosity into what has now become Experimentalism and Sociology. Between this and my last major book project lie more than eleven years of shared experiences, tests and numerous, often quite heterogeneous instances of cooperation. The following institutions supported me with research funds between 2008 and 2015, making a significant contribution to the genesis of the present book: Office Culturel du Gouvernement Français, Thyssen-Stiftung (AZ: 50.08.0.014 and AZ 50.12.0.033), Fondation de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH), DeutschAkademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (GZ: BO 3268/2-1 and AOBJ: 591480) and the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF). I thank the University of Kassel as well as Jonas Müller and Franziska Stauche for supporting the translation of this book into English. For invaluable conversations, insights, invitations and support, I owe a profound debt of gratitude to Stefan Beck{, Petra Beck, Luc Boltanski, Ulrich Bröckling, Florence Brunois, Craig Calhoun, Didier Debaise, Heike Delitz, Philippe Descola, Emmanuel Didier, Arnaud Esquerre, Estelle Ferrarese, Jérémie Gauthier, Nathalie Heinich, Moritz Holtappels, Frédéric Keck, Michi Knecht, Teresa Koloma Beck, Pascale Laborier, Jörn Lamla, Bruno Latour, Henning Laux, Noortje Marres, Tahani Nadim, Jörg Niewöhner, Jelka Plate, Jörg Potthast, Werner Rammert, Martin Reinhart, Hartmut Rosa, Camille Roth, Robert Seyfert, Estrid Sørensen and Patrice Veit. My sincere thanks go to Cori Mackrodt and Shinjini Chatterjee for their unconditional faith in this book project, the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful comments and advice and to Springer Nature Verlag for their outstanding cooperation in bringing the project to fruition. I am thankful to a number of individuals who read parts of the manuscript at various stages of its development and whose suggestions helped me make beneficial revisions: Martin Bauer, Hella Dietz, Matthias Groß, Lucas Hardt, Hans Joas, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Teresa Koloma Beck, Jörn Lamla, Henning Laux, Rolf Lindner, Tahani Nadim and Hartmut Rosa. ix

x

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Jérôme Bourdieu, Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, John Law and Noortje Marres for providing me with photographs and permitting me to use them in the book. I thank my undergraduate and postgraduate students in Jena, Dresden, Berlin, Paris and Kassel for their curiosity and their questions, which taught me to express my ideas with greater clarity and a minimum of jargon. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Philippe Bouchet and his team at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, to the members of the “Our Planet Reviewed—Taking a closer Look on Biodiversity Hotspots” expedition of 2012–2013 to Madang, Papua New Guinea, and particularly to Dave Anan, Elaine Aquila, Ken Ganzik, Cornelia Kalimet, MacLay Lamang, Grace Nugi, Clementine Sesega, Reuben Tabel and Thomas Warren. It was wonderful to get to know you—tenkyu tru!

Contents

1

2

3

Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The Nature of the Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Experimentalism Yesterday and Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey as a Sociologist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental Perspective to Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 A Science of Experience Without a Concept of Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 John Dewey, Originator of Social Scientific Experimentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Looking Back: The History and Goals of the US Pragmatist Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Between Darwin and the First Industrial Revolution . . . . . 2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 “Experience”: Dewey’s Processual Epistemology . . . . . . . 2.3.2 “Testing”: Dewey’s Constructivist Social Theory . . . . . . . 2.3.3 “Co-operation”: Dewey’s Theory of Society . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 What Is Experimentalism? Summary and Initial Hypotheses . . . . Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Reprise: The Two Aspects of Experimentalism—Social Trope and Investigative Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Why Rorty Was Wrong . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Socio-Political Experiential Differences as the Starting Point for Experimental Action: The City, the Country, the Laboratory . . . .

1 4 6 9

.

15

.

15

.

15

.

23

. . . . . . .

27 28 35 37 49 63 78

.

83

. .

83 84

.

88

xi

xii

Contents

3.4

3.5 4

5

The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 “Situating”: The Transformational Moment of Experiential Differences and the Chicago School . . . . . 3.4.2 “Correlating”: The Practice-Theoretical Thesis of Continuity and Bourdieu in Algeria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.3 “Materialising”: The Experimental Translation of Researchers’ Experience or Knorr-Cetina in the Laboratory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interim Conclusion: The Epistemology of Experimentalism . . . . .

Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Heisenberg and the Random Universe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 The Testing Situation as a Stimulus for Experimental Knowledge Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 “Preparing”’: Luhmann’s Theory of the Science of Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 “Trialling”: The Experiment as Event—ANT as Methodological Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 “Modelling”. The Ratification of Relevant Epistemic Issues and the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique . . . . . . . . 4.4 Interim Conclusion: The Social Theory of Experimentalism . . . . .

.

92

.

96

. 107

. 123 . 137 . 143 . 143 . 147 . 150 . 154 . 171 . 197 . 212

Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a Contribution to a Critical Social Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Epistemic Downpours and Fair-Weather Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Co-operation as a Response to Experiential Differences: Entangled Modernity, the Environment and the Public Sphere . . . . 5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and Collaborating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 “Criticising”. The Productivity of the Nature–Culture Difference and Descola’s Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 “Participating”: STS and ANT as Experimentalist Sociologies of Critical Publics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 “Collaborating”: A Marine Biology Expedition with Dewey or “Doing Biodiversity” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Interim Conclusion: The Theory of Society of Experimentalism . . .

217 217 221 225

230 250 270 297

Contents

6

Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline . . . . . . 6.1 Experience Rather than Crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Testing Rather than Positing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Co-operation Rather than Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xiii

. . . . .

305 307 311 313 317

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Postface for my English-Speaking Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

About the Author

Tanja Bogusz, PhD habil. is a sociologist and social anthropologist at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) at Hamburg University, Germany. She has published broadly on French sociology and anthropology (classic and contemporary), pragmatism and practice theories, social sciences of nature and sociological experimentalism. She was appointed as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the Collège de France Paris, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Kassel University, Germany, and as a research fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. She has earned grants for research projects at the crossroads of social theory, human-environmental relations, biodiversity research, and social cohesion (DFG, BMBF, FMSH, DAAD). In 2011–2013 she did an ethnographic inquiry on marine taxonomy at the Natural History Museum in Paris that led to a study of a large international biodiversity expedition in Papua New Guinea. Stemming from her implementation within the expedition, a newly discovered marine species (Joculator boguszae) was named after her.

xv

Chapter 1

Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

Experimentalism is old and is subject to perpetual reinvention. It is emblematic of a range of key contemporary phenomena—scientific curiosity and the pursuit of objectivity, the cultural fascination for unconventional ways of life and the political rhetoric of crisis. Philosopher John Dewey coined the term “democratic experimentalism” as early as 1927. For him, knowledge was rooted in experiences arising from moments of crisis. This book asks what conclusions might we draw about the present era in light of Dewey’s social philosophy? It shows how sociological experimentalism paves the way from a science of crisis to a science of experience, one that views uncertainty as the necessary point of departure for every form of research practice. In the late 1950s in Germany, the experiment cropped up with exceptional frequency in both politics and the media. “No experiments!” was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s plea to an unnerved West German public in 1957. The undesirable experiment the Christian Democrat leader had in mind here was the election of the SPD. Evoking the Cold War backdrop, he claimed that the party’s Eastern Policy (its plans to reshape West Germany’s relationship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) would destabilize the country politically. Adenauer’s injunction cast the experiment as the political enemy of normative postulates promising certainty and stability. Following a period of relative recession, the coefficients skyrocketed again towards the end of the 1980s and have remained invariably high since the 1990s. Thirty-two years on from Adenauer’s campaign slogan the Berlin Wall had fallen, with commentators declaring that the “real socialist experiment” had failed once and for all, while associating the experiment with new uncertainties. In 1986, the disastrous accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union directed attention to the life-threatening consequences of scientific progress and, thus, highlighted experimental configurations of a quite different quality. The unwanted side effects of this disaster cast an alarming light on the limits of knowledge and the unforeseeable effects of ignorance that is inherent in every experiment. Other technological and environmental disasters also hit the headlines, followed—most recently in 2011, after the accident at the nuclear power station in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2_1

1

2

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

Fukushima, Japan—by a short-term reorientation of political, scientific and economic agendas in Germany.1 Complementing the associated debates—geared towards technological disasters—on the laboratory-like character of industrial societies, there was a growing recognition of the warping effects triggered by the experiment in the context of colonial history. Andreas Eckert and Albert Wirz, for example, remark that: “Ultimately, overseas relations served in part as laboratories of modernity in which missionaries, teachers and doctors could engage in ‘experimental’ activities free of the constraints of the European social order, though the results of these experiments often had highly concrete effects on the metropolis.”2 In contrast to its fairly calamitous history, the experiment nowadays is interpreted in consistently positive ways regarding art and culture. One media report after another praises the experimental character of artistic forms of production, while artists rush to emphasise the unfinished, adventurous and risky nature of their work. This, according to the subliminal hypothesis, is ultimately the only way to create something new. Critics of an ‘ossified’ bureaucratic and service-oriented society highlight their practices of symbolic border-crossing, a long-established breach with a rich tradition of its own—what Pierre Bourdieu once called the institutionalization of anomie. Culturalised experimentalism, thus, recalls the initial hypothesis underpinning the concept of culture itself: culture is the human-directed shaping of the environment, that is, a practice which includes all forms of research activity inherently. And depending on how confident the political or economic establishments are feeling, they are also willing to embrace experimental approaches to negotiating political decisions. This applies particularly to the participatory democracy movements, to so-called ‘citizen science’ and to those organisational forms that aspire to improve co-operation within civil society and enable the general public to shape political outcomes better. In analogy to these developments, it seemed to make sense, similar to Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes Weyer in their 1989 essay, which builds on Ulrich Beck’s proclamation of the “risk society” (1986), to refer to “society as a laboratory”. In the early 1960s and, above all, in the 1980s, sociological thought about the threatening aspects of the experiment still reflected the idea of profound alienation between science and society in the modern world. Many sociologists linked the experiment to their discipline in its role as a science of crisis, a critical accompaniment to the aporias of excessive technological optimism. This laboratory situation has, so to speak, only been culturalised within the social sciences since the 1990s: the social sciences have begun to reflect on not only the dangerous aspects but also the productive potential of experimenting and its ability to strengthen the competencies of socio-political actors. The rediscovery of responsible, combative and competent 1

The introduction has been written in 2018. Today, I should add, of course, the emergence of the new Coronavirus, it’s pandemic outspread and worldwide consequences since the beginning of 2020. 2 Eckert, Andreas and Albert Wirz: “Wir nicht, die Anderen auch. Deutschland und der Kolonialismus”, in: Conrad, Sebastian, Shalini Randeria and Regina Römhild (eds.): Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2013, p. 513.

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

3

actors has ushered in sociology’s shift from a science of crisis to a science of experience, this shift being the present book’s central concern. Disciplines that study crises and claim to operate from a “critical” vantage point insist that they occupy a position of epistemic exteriority, observing society from a supposedly neutral terrain. This was the role of sociology for a long time. In the age of climate change and biodiversity loss, digitisation and globalisation, persistent civil wars and financial crises, however, natural scientists, engineers, political scientists and economists have knocked sociology off its perch as the premier crisis-focused discipline of modernity. Now, no more than a second-ranking purveyor of cultural criticism and mired in internal debates as it grapples with crises of its own, a sulky sociology is contemplating its social relevance and role. But if it is true that we are living through an ongoing “real-world experiment”,3 then we must inevitably ask what makes the discipline unique. Its culturally critical posture alone is not enough, over the long term, to place the epistemic contributions of the experiment and its productive irritant effects on a firm footing. No one was more aware of this than William James. In his famous 1906 lecture, James identified pragmatism as “a new name for some old ways of thinking”.4 Through this definition—which seems untypically modest by James’s standards— the popular protagonist of the pragmatist movement sought to allay his critics’ fears that pragmatism would attempt to expunge the normative content of an epistemology grounded in the tradition of Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. If his listeners wished to understand the foundations of pragmatism, James recommended that they read a collection of texts entitled Essays in Logical Theory by his younger colleague John Dewey, a man far more restrained than James in style and manner.5 These were the point of departure for what Dewey—by this point an internationally recognised figure—developed into a theory of research in his 1938 book Logic. The Theory of Inquiry. Dewey referred to this theory as “experimentalism”. Taking his lead from physics, he took the notion of the experiment literally as the experience-based and operational transformation of ignorance into knowledge, inspired by the instrumental procedures of the natural scientific experiment. In this view, ignorance, in other words, uncertainty and crisis situations, is the stimulus for problem-solving action rather than a problem. Dewey’s thesis—and this is the point of departure for the present book—is surely of crucial importance to a sociology that, beyond its role as a “crisis science” of modernity, sees itself as a steward of societal self-reflection that also wants to help solve problems. This thesis challenges a sociology that views itself as a “science of experience” with re-engaging with the ignorance that is the prerequisite for the exploration of new knowledge. However, we can grasp the consequences of this thesis for sociology only if we define the experiment not

3

See Groß, Matthias, Holger Hoffmann-Riehm and Wolfgang Krohn: Realexperimente. Ökologische Gestaltungsprozesse in der Wissensgesellschaft, Bielefeld: Transcript 2005. 4 James, William: Pragmatism. A New Name for some old Ways of Thinking, New York etc.: Longmans, Green & Co. 1907. 5 See ibid., p. viii.

4

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

only as a social trope to be observed but concurrently as a tool for generating sociological knowledge. In addition to the transdisciplinary benefits that may be gleaned from such a sociologised experimentalism, this view of the experiment helps us understand sociology from a theory of science perspective or, more generally, to think about “sociology through the prism of the sociology of science”.6 This also enables us to grapple with a classical sociological problem that has been crying out for proper scrutiny since the discipline’s early days.

1.1

The Nature of the Problem

The term “experiment” in both English and German points semantically to the connection between “experience” and “operational action” in the form of trying out or testing. In French, there is just one term, “faire une experience”, which means both “carry out an experiment” and “have an experience”. This duality of doing and undergoing opens up a critical perspective on a sociology once defined by German disciplinary founder Max Weber as the “science of experience” (Erfahrungswissenschaft). In the experiment, as demonstrated by quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, a contemporary of Weber and Dewey, the observation and the associated instruments of investigation help constitute the object of investigation and the research finding that emerges from it. Dewey took up Heisenberg’s hypothesis of the uncertainty principle in order to validate the practical foundation of experience and its contribution to knowledge. Weber’s concept of experience, by way of contrast, comes across as oddly pallid and one-sided. As a “science of experience”, his sociology remained beholden to the Kantian ideal of an exogenous observer position quite alien to practice. This inscribed a theory/empirical knowledge bias into the discipline, one that is still with us and from which German-language sociology particularly has never truly recovered. To the extent that it managed to be a science of experience in the first place, sociology restricted itself to examining actors’ experiences without relating the concept of experience to its own research activity. As a not only diffuse but also, above all, methodologically untapped concept, “experience”, thus, made no impact on sociological research practice. Conversely, this jibes with the discipline’s self-image as a “crisis science”—crises are problems “out there”, “matters of fact” whose sociological constitution requires no reflection whatsoever. This gives rise to three social theoretical problems that are also central to the politics of the discipline. Firstly, the very subject that has shouted its status as “science of experience” from the rooftops has no concept of experience guiding its knowledge production. This

This desideratum corresponds with the project of identifying the “socio-epistemic constellations of sociological knowledge production”; see Sutter, Barbara: “Wissenschaftssoziologie der Soziologie”, in: Maasen, Sabine et al.: Handbuch Wissenschaftssoziologie, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2012, p. 432.

6

1.1 The Nature of the Problem

5

applies both to the level of phenomenal description (experience as a category of observation) and the constitution of objects (the contribution of experience to sociological knowledge). Secondly, the absence of a heuristic concept of experience is extended into the theory/empirical knowledge dichotomy, where it is exacerbated. Thirdly, most scholars, at least in the German-speaking world, still tend to reflect on the broad range of historical and recent efforts to resolve this dichotomy from a theoretical perspective (e.g. by incorporating concepts generated by “theories of practice” into the sociological canon). This approach, however, merely recapitulates the problem by relocating rather than eliminating the epistemological obstacle: theories of practice that function as mere theories about the observation of society deny empirical knowledge qua interpretive procedure an epistemic say in theory building. The result is a form of theoretical development lacking in substance both methodologically and in terms of research practice, one whose dearth of social relevance is lamented in regularly recurring “crisis debates”. On the theoretical side, these debates perform scientificity through an allegedly value-neutral position by engaging in advanced social criticism as far removed as possible from empirical events—unforgiving commentators refer to the rampant growth of “Feuilletonsoziologie”, that is, the kind that appears in newspapers’ culture pages, one devoid of scientific substance. The current disputes within the discipline, meanwhile, do nothing to conceal the fact that sociology has long since ceased to be a privileged observer of social observers. Such meta-observers have proliferated, digitising and globalising themselves and crossing disciplinary boundaries to such an extent that it seems to have become increasingly hard to discern the qualities specific to sociological knowledge. On the other hand, sociological knowledge has diffused into virtually every sphere of everyday social life, though its producers are not always aware of this fact. And just as sociologists are experiencing society, society too is experiencing sociological knowledge. The imperative must now be to liberate this continuity of epistemology, a social theory and theories of society, which goes hand in hand with the concept of experience, from the premises that have typified sociology as a science of crisis, while clarifying the discipline’s epistemological contribution as a science of experience. It is only as a science of experience that sociology will be in a position to maintain its socio-political relevance over the long term alongside the natural and economic sciences. Empirical, experience-based knowledge is that form of knowledge which has made sociology an important bridging discipline, consulted and used today to tackle a broad array of social problems. High time, then, to translate this endeavour into a veritable science of experience. The sociological experimentalism presented here claims to render visible the feedback effects of sociology’s epistemological procedures on the constitution of the objects of investigation generated by sociology itself. Conversely, this sociological experimentalism seeks to elucidate the impact of specific social and sociocultural problems on the formatting of sociological problem-solving strategies. Dewey’s experimentalism states that the quality of experiences generates knowledge when actors produce experiential differences—as in the scientific experiment. This hypothesis has far-reaching consequences for sociological theories of knowledge,

6

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

the social and society. It is a hypothesis of significance to research practice because experiential differences in a globalised world saturated by science and technology have both community-generating and -excluding effects. They produce not only new social collectivities but also wars and conflicts involving both human and non-human actors. How can a sociology in keeping with the times grasp these experiential differences adequately? How can it help resolve the problems they engender? Is sociology content to feed reflexivity into society as the observer of observers? Or is the discipline committed to an emphatically transdisciplinary and interventionist research approach of the kind currently being pursued with outstanding intensity in international science and technology studies (STS)? To put it in a nutshell: does sociology want to be a science of crisis or experience? More than one hundred years ago, US-American pragmatists had already declared the question of how such experimental “contexts of discovery” (Peirce) might be generated and organised on a transdisciplinary basis, that is, both within and outside of academia, to be the core question concerning the human appropriation of the world. It seems to be no coincidence that the renaissance of this philosophy in the social sciences and humanities has occurred in parallel to the rise of culturalised experimentalism. The new interest in the legacy of US-American philosopher John Dewey has played a decisive role here.

1.2

Experimentalism Yesterday and Today

John Dewey was one of the most important figures in the US-American pragmatist movement after Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and—since the establishment of the Chicago Club of Philosophy towards the end of the nineteenth century— alongside George Herbert Mead and Jane Addams. His work, moreover, was the inescapable benchmark for an emerging sociology as a discipline in the United States (US). Albion W. Small, C. Wright Mills, Robert E. Park, W. I. Thomas and Charles Cooley attested to Dewey’s influence on their work and on the development of their professional sociological ethos on several occasions. Considering the ideational and financial influence of US-American sociology on the consolidation phase of European sociology between the two world wars and after,7 it is remarkable that, as yet, Dewey’s work has largely failed to make it into the European canon of sociological classics. As a result of the turmoil in the international social sciences linked with the tropes of the “cultural turn” the “practice turn” and, finally, the “pragmatic turn” and following a lengthy break in its reception between the 1950s and 1990s, Dewey’s thought has met with an increasingly apt response in recent

7

See Fleck, Christian: A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences. Robber Barons, The Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2011, p. 10. Fleck emphasises: “It is not an exaggeration to say that the US has been—and remains—the laboratory for science policies of the twentieth century” (ibid., p. 38).

1.2 Experimentalism Yesterday and Today

7

years. Dewey is being rediscovered and, in some cases, discovered for the first time as a source of inspiration for democratic experimentalism, general and political sociology, the sociology of art and cultural sociology, and for constructivism in both theories of science and social theories. But if pragmatism was a “new name for some old ways of thinking” in James’s time, today we can reverse this bon mot when it comes to Dewey’s experimentalism. As the present book intends to show, what we are dealing with here is “an old name for some new ways of thinking”.8 I present these through a series of test runs that point us towards an emphatically sociological experimentalism with the help of a theoretical apparatus developed in the first chapter of the book. In the spirit of Dewey, this experimentalism opts to construct sociology as a science of experience. Dewey described the history of philosophical epistemology in his book The Quest for Certainty as a history of the negation of experience and practice. Yet, he asserted, the epistemic forms of the natural sciences and the latter’s revolutionary power to transform society made it impossible to uphold this negation. Forms of knowledge that ultimately anchor themselves solely in intellectual and cognitive processes, Dewey stated, are, de facto, a thing of the past. He discerned the dissolution of empirically deficient theories of knowledge and the rise of an intuitively convincing “experimental empiricism” in the writings of Newton, Eddington and his contemporary, Heisenberg. The latter, he conceded, was a “redundant’ term”,9 yet, one that was necessary in order to cast light on the integration of empirical experience and knowledge realised by the scientists and inventors of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Dewey’s engagement with John Stuart Mill’s empirical logic was pervaded by doubts, fed by Darwin’s theory of evolution, about an a priori conception of knowledge. As Dewey saw it, knowledge becomes empirically self-evident as a result of complexity, plurality, unoriginality and a form of experience that proceeds through practice. Dewey defined the experiment in the introduction to his Essays in Logical Theory, praised by James, as follows: “Thinking ends in experiment and experiment is an actual alteration of a physically antecedent situation in those details or respects which called for thought in order to do away with some evil”.10 What does this mean for sociology as a discipline? Without making direct reference to Dewey, the history of science too has underlined the performative character of the experiment as a key element in its knowledge-generating function. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, borrowing from biologist François Jacob, emphasises in his “epistemology of modern experimentation” that experimental systems are “vehicles for materializing questions”,11 just as, according to Rheinberger, they fit better with On this debate, also see Kloppenberg, James: “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?”, in: Journal of American History 83/1 (1998), p. 100–138. 9 Dewey, John (2008): The Quest for Certainty. A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, Carbonale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, p. 90. 10 Dewey, John (1916): “Introduction into the essays of experimental logic”, in: Dewey, John: Essays in Experimental Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago, p. 31. 11 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg: Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press 1997, p. 28. 8

8

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

the role of practitioner than that of observer. The definitions put forward by Dewey and Rheinberger give us a hint of the ambit of a sociological experimentalism that views itself as an active shaper of social transformation. Here, Rheinberger locates the normative aspiration inherent in the experimental style of knowing: “The goal [. . .] must be to assert the primacy of emerging scientific experience, in which conceptual indeterminacy defines what is happening rather than being a deficiency, vis-à-vis the conceptually formulated and consolidated results of such experience. What we need to do is re-evaluate the ‘context of discovery’, to fundamentally re-evaluate scientific practice, a process that has been set inexorably in motion over the past two decades.”12 Rheinberger is not claiming to have formulated a sociological epistemology here. However, the paradigm of “experimental cultures”, informed by sociological research on risk and by STS, has now become established in certain research programmes. These are reformatting a research culture that has its sights set on sociology itself. Following the culturalisation of the experiment, its reimagining as a process that opens up and shapes the environment, the time has clearly come to translate the experiment into sociological research practice. British-Dutch STS researcher Noortje Marres, whose work takes up Dewey’s legacy, emphasises the sociologically specific feature of the experiment beyond the scientific context of the laboratory. She calls this specific feature, drawing on John Stuart Mill, the “living experiment”: “[T]he living experiment presents a notable device of social and cultural research: it provides a format or ‘protocol’ for exploring and testing forms of life which is today widely applied across social life. And because of this, these experiments also present a useful site for sociological research in a more narrow sense: they can be used to explore collective practices of researching social and cultural change, as engaged in by actors who do not necessarily identify themselves as ‘social researchers.’”13 Here, consonant with the ‘pragmatic turn’ of the 1990s, the return of competent and critical actors and the epistemic integration of their experiences are carried out on the level of the observer. However, sociological experimentalism has greater goals in mind, and it differs here from the common pragmatist or practice theoretical approaches: it creates continuity between the experiences of actors and those of research by relating their mutual effects to sociological surveys and the constitution of sociological knowledge. Explaining this continuity is synonymous with the establishment of sociology as a science of experience.

12

Ibid., p. 24. Marres, Noortje: “The Experiment in Living”, in: Lury, Celia and Nina Wakeford (eds.): Inventive Methods. The Happening of the Social, London: Routledge 2012, p. 76.

13

1.3 Structure of the Book

1.3

9

Structure of the Book

One of the main challenges posed by the project undertaken in the present book was to subject Dewey’s experimentalism to a consistent “sociologisation”. This is a task to which his work aspired on a programmatic level but did not flesh out systematically. Dewey’s contemporary reception in sociological analyses only ever accomplishes this task in a very patchy way. Furthermore, studies dedicated to experimentalism are few and far between; Dewey still tends to be read as an educationalist or theorist of democracy, particularly in the German-speaking world. Ultimately, what I have aimed to do is to elaborate experimentalism as a genuine contribution by Dewey to the multifaceted programme of pragmatism in general, while also explaining its specific potential to enhance a theory of sociology in the sense of a theory of science. For these reasons, I have developed and set out an analytical model of experimentalism that draws on Dewey’s theory of research, assessing the benefits of this model to current sociological programmes (test runs I, II and III). I have summed up my findings in the conclusion, supplementing them with a look at future tasks for research. I shed light on why sociological experimentalism leads us from the science of crisis to the science of experience and how it might help us deal with current global political challenges. I have, firstly, tried to sociologise experimentalism step-by-step, with Dewey’s help, in light of its key fields of activity: epistemology, a social theory and theories of society. Dewey’s contributions to philosophical epistemology are undisputed in the literature. Their translation into what I call a theory-of-science theory of sociology— a desideratum identified by such different authors as Pierre Bourdieu and Niklas Luhmann—is, however, yet to be realised. I have pursued this translation in order to narrow down the epistemological preconditions for sociological experimentalism. The priority here is to explain the continuity of practice and knowledge that is crucially important to the continuity of actors’ and research experience and the contributions of both to sociological knowledge. I have assigned three core analytical categories to the three spheres of competence mentioned above: “experience” (epistemology), “testing” (social theory) and “cooperation” (theories of society). Regarding epistemology and the project of reestablishing sociology as a science of experience, it seems intuitively plausible to define “experience” as one of the key epistemological preconditions for sociological research and reasoning. Conversely, when it comes to the spheres of competence proper to a social theory and theories of society, there was a greater need for clarification. It is true that Dewey is now one of the standard reference points within theories of society, which often cite his “democratic experimentalism”. But it seems fair to say that only in exceptional cases has his work been systematically translated into theories of society.14 This applies all the more to the question of Dewey’s 14

I am referring here explicitly to sociology, not to social philosophy, where theories of society inspired by Dewey are much more frequent; see, for instance, Frega, Roberto: Pragmatism and the Wide View on Democracy. London: Palgrave MacMillan 2019, or Zamorra, Justo Zerrano:

10

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

contribution to a social theory. In both cases, then, it made sense to approach these contributions “from behind”, as it were, to a greater extent than in the case of epistemology. In other words, it seemed apt to assess the “Deweyisms” concealed in various social theories and theories of society and—based on these often implicit strands of reception—to determine Dewey’s place within both types of theory. Though Dewey himself tends to refer to testing situations as the key events within the experiment only in passing, from a social scientific perspective, testing is undoubtedly the core prerequisite for the continuity of practice and experience.15 This continuity is important if we are to render the concept of experience comprehensible—which I will be developing as the foundation of sociological experimentalism—as an outcome of the interplay between epistemology, a social theory and theories of society. When it comes to theories of society, I selected the category of co-operation. Dewey had, together with his Chicago colleague James H. Tufts, who published a book on the topic in 1918, contemplated co-operation as a connecting link within society, without explicitly elaborating on this idea. Yet, his magnum opus on the theory of democracy, The Public and its Problems (1927), leaves us in no doubt about the great hopes he placed in social co-operation. Drawing on the work of Richard Sennett, I have brought the concept of co-operation up to date by examining what I call “heterogeneous forms of co-operation”. Again, it was necessary to develop analytical quality criteria regarding these three categories in order to sustain what I have claimed to be their dual role for sociological research practice and theory building. These are “reflexivity” (experience), “revisability” (testing) and “capacity for structuration” (co-operation). In this view, experiences lead to (sociological and everyday) knowledge only if they are characterised by reflexivity. Tests establish continuity between experience and practice if these are open to revision, that is, if they can undergo subsequent changes in light of new tests. This conclusion sounds straightforward but is, in fact, highly controversial. We only need to think of the many debates on the relationship between theory and empirical knowledge and the question of whether, when dealing with sociological theories, we are “merely” verifying theory in light of empirical knowledge—which all too often involves a hidden desire to confirm the theory—or exploring theories with the help of empirical knowledge. This distinction is crucial. It flags up the difference between a science of crisis and a science of experience. Because experiences or experiential differences rest upon or trigger moments of testing, they must be open to revision; otherwise, social transformation would be impossible.

Democratization and Struggles Against Injustice. A Pragmatist Approach to the Epistemic Practices of Social Movements 2021. London: Rowman and Littlefield. One of these sociological exceptions is Jörn Lamla’s theory of consumers’ democracy, which builds directly on Dewey and a number of other authors. See Lamla, Jörn: Verbraucherdemokratie. Politische Soziologie der Konsumgesellschaft, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2013a. 15 See for a fresh account on this topic Marres, Noortje and David Stark: “Put to the test: For a New Sociology of Testing”, in: The British Journal for Sociology 71/3 (2020): 423–443.

1.3 Structure of the Book

11

The precept underpinning co-operation is the capacity for structuration. Once again we can see the legacy of experimentalism’s orientation towards evolutionary theory, simultaneously underlining experimentalism’s non-voluntarist conception of co-operation. If experiential differences and testing situations give rise to co-operation—rather than violence—then this co-operation has relevance to theories of society only if it can be perpetuated. This is consonant with Dewey’s theory-ofdemocracy intuition, which he developed in his debate with well-known commentator Walter Lippmann in the US in the early 1920s: when publics emerge (and the agencies of the state are unable to solve problems effectively), they are fragile, haphazard and contingent and must be stabilized if they are to integrate actors’ political competencies over the long term. Dewey’s conviction, however, in contrast to Lippmann’s assumptions, was that rather than an “expertocracy”, what this required was the commitment of responsible citizens. Despite experiential differences and impediments to co-operation, these citizens are willing to co-operate and anticipate solutions on the basis of these very differences. In completing my examination of Dewey I come to a conclusion about how to proceed in the next part of the book in the form of three working hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that an experimentalism anchored in Dewey’s ideas assumes that we must understand both actors’ action and the action of sociological research as based on experiences and the practices of world appropriation that generate them. This is the epistemological hypothesis. Secondly, this world appropriation is subject to testing situations or generates them. Such situations engender experiential differences (as well as experiential ruptures) for both social actors and in the context of sociological research that affect the strategies actors pursue to solve problems in specific ways. When it comes to sociology, this has consequences not only for the inductive effects on research of empirical irritations but, in a special sense, for theory building as well. This is the social theoretical hypothesis. Thirdly, informed by Dewey’s work, I define co-operation as a process—occurring both in society and in sociological research—of collective problem construction and problem-solving that aims to process experiential differences. Co-operation structures how we deal with uncertainties and generates new forms of sociation. This is the theories-of-society hypothesis. I then carry out three “test runs” in which I recapitulate these hypotheses with the help of those sociological programmes that seem most likely to be congruent with each other. I have given these programmes an experimentalist slant in order to bring out the empiricist character of the preceding heuristic and, as it were, stabilize it based on its methodological structure. I then assign specific modi operandi that establish a relationship of continuity between sociological and actor- related knowledge production to the precepts developed in the first part of the book. These are: “situate, correlate, materialise” (reflexivity), “prepare, trial, model” (revisability) and “criticise, participate, collaborate” (capacity for structuration). I seek to develop a sociological experimentalism that builds on Dewey with the help of the following programmes or thematic foci. In “test run I” I discuss sociological experimentalism in light of the epistemological implications of three programmes that are clearly distinguishable regarding their thematic interests but,

12

1 Introduction: Experimentalism—An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking

nonetheless, exhibit a number of common features. I am referring to the First Chicago School of Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu’s research on Algeria and the laboratory studies carried out by Karin Knorr-Cetina within a sociology-of-science framework. I discuss the category of “experience” in light of the continuity of researchers and actors’ experiences that these programmes seek to achieve, a form of continuity that deploys ethnography to achieve reflexivity. “Test run II” brings together three programmes that, again, appear to exhibit few common features at first glance: Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation, which incorporates elements of evolutionary theory that parallel Dewey’s theory of research in interesting and, as yet, scarcely examined ways; STS and actor network theory (ANT) as theory-exploring frameworks that ensure revisability for the social sciences through an empirical experimentalism; and the pragmatic sociology of critique and of the justificatory order, a form of sociology that shifts away from the science of crisis by creating social theoretical models of actors’ critical competencies. In all these contexts, I identify the category of “testing” as the event that links sociological and actor-related experiential differences. “Test run III” investigates “co-operation” as a response to the recent global and scientific transformations outlined at the beginning of this introduction. I describe co-operation as a phenomenon that manages uncertainties collectively, processes experiential differences and figures out solutions to problems. The key question here is how society is organised through heterogeneous forms of co-operation, that is, coalitions of socially disparate collectivities. I draw on and, thus, systematise contributions from social ecology and studies of human-nature relationships by engaging with the critical anthropology of nature produced by Philippe Descola, STS research on participation and democracy, and my own ethnographic research in the sociology of science focused on global biodiversity research in the Anthropocene. In the conclusion, “From the Science of Crisis to the Science of Experience”, I identify the lessons to be learned from the three test runs based on my prior translation of Dewey’s theory of research into sociology. This leads me to a trenchant redefinition of a present-focused sociology as a science of experience in the spirit of experimentalism. In sum, this book rests on two hypotheses. The first is that sociology must redefine its social function, interdisciplinary capacities and spectrum of intervention in the context of contemporary processes of transformation in the globalised knowledge society. The second hypothesis is that a number of sociologists are undertaking this redefinition by turning the discipline from a science of crisis into a science of experience, and that they are doing so by embracing what I call “sociological experimentalism”, I derive the latter from Dewey’s theory of research and his varied contributions to epistemology. I build on Dewey’s experimentalism in light of those sociological programmes capable of overcoming many social theories’ distance from empirical reality as well as the relative scepticism of theory characteristic of empirical approaches. In line with this, I comprehend the contribution of theoretical presuppositions to scientific knowledge not in an a priori sense but operationally. Building on this foundation, the sociological experimentalism I establish here

1.3 Structure of the Book

13

underlines the dual character of observation and the constitution of objects, as well as the significance of actors’ competencies and their society-shaping aspects. With the help of experimentalism—this old name for some new ways of thinking—I have developed an empiricist analytical concept, one that blazes a trail away from the science of ‘crisis’ and towards the science of experience. This science of experience responds to contemporary challenges, such as the global ecological crisis and the new conflicts afflicting global society, through a transdisciplinary and collaborative research approach. The present book helps to furnish us with the theoretical foundation so crucial to this project.

Chapter 2

Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey as a Sociologist

2.1 2.1.1

Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental Perspective to Sociology A Science of Experience Without a Concept of Experience

Many introductory books and historical retrospectives link sociology’s emergence as a discipline with the concept of a “science of experience”. This idea dates back to Max Weber and has become an indispensable element in the disciplinary narrative. In this introductory section on the categorical foundations of a social theory of experimentalism, I will show that this narrative has generated a science of experience devoid of a concept of experience, a problem that has been awaiting resolution for almost a century. The discipline of sociology emerged in Europe and the US on the eve of the twentieth century, as industrial modernity boomed and philosophies of knowledge grappled with the tangible consequences of scientific research. These consequences made it virtually impossible to uphold a logical separation between cognitive and practical knowledge. The interpretations produced by empiricist philosophies won over growing numbers of thinkers, particularly in the industrialised nations of the United Kingdom and the US, and even in comparatively agrarian France. By contrast, most German-speaking sociologists were still debating the legacy of idealism in the Hegelian spirit and Kant’s Enlightenment era rationalism, which insisted on the separation of empirical and practical knowledge. Kant had argued explicitly for the axiomatic exclusion of experience from the process of knowing: In the sequel therefore we will understand by a priori cognitions not those that occur independently of this or that experience, but rather those that occur absolutely independently of all experience. Opposed to them are empirical cognitions, or those that are possible only a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2_2

15

16

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . . posteriori, i.e., through experience. Among a priori cognitions, however, those are called pure with which nothing empirical is intermixed.1

The work of German sociologists, particularly Max Weber but also Georg Simmel, Alfred Schütz, Karl Mannheim and Siegfried Kracauer, reflected the neo-Kantian zeitgeist as manifested in sociological thought. This intellectual outlook ascribed an intrinsic epistemic value to ordinary experience, viewing it as a relevant observational category for the new “science of the social”.2 Nonetheless, these thinkers maintained the distinction, rooted in Kantian rationalism, between the empirical and reflexive acquisition of knowledge. With Wilhelm Dilthey, they also acknowledged an epistemological difference between explanatory and “understanding” (verstehend) sciences, in other words, the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other.3 These factors helped mould the early self-image of sociology in Germany. Max Weber, by many regarded as one of the discipline’s founding father, declared sociology a “science of experience”,4 but remained silent about the epistemic content of the concept of experience itself. The more urgent task for Weber was to establish a social science between explanation and understanding, one that, nonetheless, insisted on a strict separation between concept and empirical reality, between theory and experience. Weber adopted the Kantian a priori of theoretical reason without demur, even mobilising it against the “lectern socialism” to which he was so opposed, which explicitly combined scholarship and political intervention.5 To this end, Weber emphasised the much-cited “experiential knowledge” of sociology in opposition to the “value judgment”, but he left his readers in the dark about the concrete meaning of experienced knowledge.6 His intuitive decision to place “experience” between the natural sciences and the humanities, between “explanation” and “understanding”, remained without consequence for the concept of experience itself. His separation of empirical knowledge and theory also left it unclear to what extent research experience could or should make a constitutive contribution to the development of sociology’s objects of investigation. Despite his cautious criticism of the gap between abstract theory and empirical research, Weber paradoxically

1

Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 137. 2 See Šuber, Daniel: “Zum Erfahrungsbegriff in der Soziologie—einige theoriegeschichtliche Anmerkungen”, in: Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert (ed.): 33. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie “Die Natur der Gesellschaft” 2006 in Kassel, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2008, (CD-ROM). 3 See Müller, Hans Peter: Max Weber. Eine Einführung in sein Werk, Cologne, Weimar & Vienna: Böhlau 2007, p. 54f. 4 See Weber, Max: “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy”, in: Weber, Max: The Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York: Free Press 1949, p. 67. Weber calls sociology an “Erfahrungswissenschaft” (science of experience) in the German original. 5 See Schluchter, Wolfgang: Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht, vol. I, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2015, p. 197f. 6 Ibid., p. 160.

2.1 Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental. . .

17

used the constructed nature of theories to argue that their empirical control was irrelevant.7 So, it seems that he found this gap convenient, as evinced by his heroic description of the scientific standpoint in uncertain times of ceaseless cultural change: “But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought.”8 The concept of experience, thus, remained empty theoretically and, above all, methodologically.9 While Georg Simmel had provided a wealth of “thick descriptions” of human beings in modern quotidian contexts, similar to Weber, he did not seek to ground early sociology epistemologically in the concept of experience. However, Simmel, who not only read Bergson but also William James, went so far in his criticism of Kant as to refer to a “relational a priori” closely bound to empirical reality, against a rationality-centred a priori of knowledge. Like Weber, he also affirmed the validity of “experiential knowledge” or “rules of experience” as well as “experiential truths”—whatever he may have meant by that.10 Despite its frequent mention, the concept of experience remained peculiarly opaque in the work of the classic figures of German-speaking sociology.11 Furthermore, if we look back at the ‘foundational milieu’ of sociology as it was linked to the

See Schmid, Michael: “Kultur und Erkenntnis. Kritische Bemerkungen zu Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre”, in: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 4 (2004), p. 553. 8 Weber, Max: “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy”, in: Weber, Max: The Methodology of the Social Sciences, New York: Free Press 1949, p. 127. 9 The writings of Alfred Schütz and his contribution to the phenomenological conceptualisation of the Lebenswelt or life-world are an exception in this regard and exhibit a clearer proximity to AngloAmerican empiricism, probably due to the influence of US-American pragmatism on his work (see Knoblauch, Hubert: Wissenssoziologie, Konstanz: UVK UTB 2005, p. 142). In Relevanz und Handeln 1 particularly, Schütz forges numerous methodological connections with pragmatism, James and Dewey, though it is open to doubt whether Schütz entirely grasped Dewey’s attempt to achieve heuristic continuity between everyday knowledge, the natural sciences and the social sciences, and, if he did, whether he embraced this project (see the editorial appendix in the German version of Schütz, Alfred: Relevanz und Handeln 1. Zur Phänomenologie des Alltagswissen, edited by Elisabeth List, assisted by Cordula Schmeja-Herzog. Konstanz: UVK 2004, p. 51 and p. 353). See also Schütz’ phenomenological definition of “experience”, resonating very much with James and Dewey in Schütz, Alfred: On Phenomenology and Social Relations, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press 1970, p. 318. 10 Simmel, Georg: The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay, New York: The Free Press. 11 This is confirmed if we take a look at contemporary sociological dictionaries and manuals, where one searches in vain for the term “experience” (see, for example, Endruweit, Günter, Gisela Trommsdorf and Nicole Burzan (eds.): Wörterbuch der Soziologie, Konstanz & Munich: UVK & UTB 2014). 7

18

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

concept of experience,12 we find that where experience did become conceptually relevant, it was never more than a loose observational category. This fits with Weber’s bias. If sociology is the experiential science, characterised by the drawing of a clear cognitive and research-practical borderline between concept and empirical knowledge, as well as between factual assessment and value judgment,13 then it is only logical to ascribe experience to one side only. It cannot be both an observational category (empirical reality) and help to constitute sociology’s subject matter (as a theoretical concept). It is one of the key propositions of the present work that an apt sociology of the present must break with Weber’s dictum. This will enable it to produce appropriate theories that are informed by empirical knowledge not only in a descriptive and illustrative sense but also in operational terms, that is, in light of the constructedness of sociological knowledge. In other words, it is high time that sociologists left their observation tower and immersed themselves in the streams of events. The German sociological tradition has shown no great facility for maintaining methodological continuity between the definition of categories and the constitution of empirical objects.14 Norbert Elias was one of the few figures, though ignored for decades, to call for a sociological theory of science that would end the separation between theory and empirical method.15 Otherwise, we are left with the impression that those thinkers who laid the epistemological foundations for sociology in Germany drew inspiration from the Kantian legacy, and later the positivism dispute, without—in contrast to Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu in France—necessarily linking this to the further development of empirical methods. In France, this developmental imperative is traditionally associated with an intensive debate on the formation of sociological categories. It is a debate that can provide us with a valuable basis for writing external descriptions of sociological knowledge acquisition. Turning to the German-speaking world, we might try to find evidence that continuity between the observation of the social and the external description of this observation is more than just an (unwelcome) side effect. We might attempt to look for signs that it represents an important prerequisite for connecting social research to relevant social problems. What we will discover is that this only applies to those sociologies pursuing a form of theory development that revolves around empirical exploration. We will not find these attributes in a social theory. Those social theorists who have claimed for continuity between the design and objectives of a social theory—the main example, in addition to Elias, being Niklas Luhmann—have left it to others to make the relevant methodological inferences. Luhmann’s naturalistic constructivism On the concept of the “foundational sociological milieu”, see Farzin, Sina and Henning Laux: “Was sind Gründungsszenen?”, in: Farzin, Sina and Henning Laux (eds.): Gründungsszenen soziologischer Theorie, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2014, p. 3–11. 13 See Weber, Max: “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics”, in: Weber, Max: Methodology of the social sciences, New York: The Free Press 1949, p. 1–47. 14 This does not apply to Austrian sociologists, who have done a great deal of valuable work in this respect, key examples being Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and Karin Knorr Cetina. 15 Elias, Norbert: What is Sociology? Dublin: University College Dublin Press 2012. 12

2.1 Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental. . .

19

reflected on methodological approaches to describe sociological reasoning from the outside. In Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (‘The Science of Society’), he claimed for a methodology that “seeks to transform evidence and experience into problems”.16 In line with his notion of sociology as a socially involved, second-order observer, this included social scientific experiences of both theory and observation. A transformation of evidence and experience into problems—it would be hard to come up with a better summary of John Dewey’s ambitions for both theories of science and theories of society. Closer, in this systematic respect, to the constructivist Luhmann than to the classic disciplinary founders of sociology, the processual concept of experience provides an epistemic foundation for sociology as a “science of experience” in the pragmatist theory of inquiry that Dewey founded. Furthermore, “experience” was more than physically internalised knowledge for Dewey and William James. It was the operational antidote to both Kant’s theoretical a priori and the teleologically imbued “final authority” of the spirit as envisaged by Hegel. Where Weber merely hinted that ‘experiential knowledge’ could build a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities, with sociology in charge of its construction, James already distinguished experiential knowledge from knowledge “about” something.17 In contrast to its role in Weber’s work, the concept of experience here had a very explicit task and function within the politics of theory: it was to resolve the aporias of rationalism and empiricism. Dewey sociologised James’s thesis by declaring “experience” the systematic starting point for reflection and transformation in social contexts, in which people come up with solutions to problems not only cognitively but by taking action. This implies that experience, in the form of sociological research experience, is relevant insofar as it determines research activities of all kinds structurally and contributes to the general reorganisation of social interactions. Experience induces reflexivity and, thus, knowledge. But like the actors observed, experience is subject to constant testing situations in which it must develop qualitative guidelines, even if fundamental differences in experience or experiential ruptures occur. This admittedly sketchy discussion of the concept of experience brings to light an alternative school of sociology, which can do much more than illuminate what experience might mean as an observational category. This school represents a research stance in which, as Robert Park writes in reference to his teachers James and Dewey, “the value of experiment and experience” take precedence over an armchair scholarship far removed from the flow of events.18 Dewey particularly warned philosophy to beware of such rationality-driven hubris, whose fatal consequences for sociology were highlighted by Pierre Bourdieu in his Pascalian 16

Luhmann, Niklas: Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990, p. 427. 17 See James, William: Principles of Psychology I, New York: Dover Publications Inc. 1950, p. 221. I am referring here to the distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description”. 18 See Park, Robert E.: “Methods of Teaching, Impressions and a Verdict”, in Social Forces 20 (1) 1941, p. 40.

20

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

Meditations as follows. Firstly, this attitude entails a failure to realise the reproduction of socially acquired values,19 a process that, on the pretext of value freedom, is viewed as “reasonable reason” in contradistinction to practical reason. Secondly, it involves a specifically occidental morality that reproduces an unreflecting political universalism.20 These problems were intensified rather than resolved by the classic sociological exiling of value judgments from the development of knowledge. The value judgment could now flow into sociological reasoning as covert Eurocentrism, or completely unchecked by other forms of universalism.21 So, while the neo-Kantians Weber and Durkheim22 geared their sociologies towards cognitive rationalism, on the other side of the Atlantic, John Dewey established an epistemological experimentalism whose key reference author was not Kant but Darwin. This experimentalism derived its “theory of inquiry” largely from the empirical methods of the natural sciences.23 It set itself the goal of resolving social, cultural and socio-political crises with the help of a research ethos that involves studying not only the anomies of capitalism but also the day-to-day experimental arrangements at play within it, which facilitate problem-solving action. Dewey’s experimentalism took its lead from the natural sciences without being positivist and rejected the theoretical “heroism” that dramatizes the uncertainties of modernity by embracing a cultural pessimism. “Unlike almost every serious thinker of his time, he was at home in modernity”,24 as Louis Menand remarks of Dewey. In his work, experience, testing and co-operation became the co-ordinates of a sober— but far from agnostic—epistemological, social and societal theory of the modern age, a theory that offered itself as an interlocutor when it came to the collective management of contingency. This constructivist experimentalism laid the

19

Bourdieu, Pierre: Pascalian Meditations, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000, p. 50ff. Bourdieu calls this “scholastic ethnocentrism” (p. 50). 20 Ibid., p. 65f. Here, Bourdieu’s argument must be viewed against the background of his experiences of colonial war and its consequences in northern Algeria; more on this chapter (“test run I”). 21 See Randeria, Shalini: “Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie. Zur Ortsbestimmung der nichtwestlichen Welt in einer zukünftigen Sozialtheorie”, in: Soziale Welt 50/4 (1999), p. 373–382; Beck, Ulrich and Edgar Grande: ‘Beck, Ulrich and Edgar Grande: Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research, in: Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande (eds): “Varieties of Second Modernity: Extra-European and European Experiences and Perspectives” Special Issue: British Journal of Sociology 61(3) 2010: 409–443. 22 For Durkheim’s critique of the purely rationality-focused a priori, however, see Durkheim, Émile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 3ff. 23 Hence, Craig Calhoun’s contention that biology and the theory of evolution were the basis for the emergence of European sociology as a science of the social order and social change is probably accurate regarding France and the United Kingdom. However, it is an inaccurate or only partially accurate description of the German-speaking tradition of sociology. See Calhoun, Craig: “Sociology in America. An Introduction”, in: Calhoun, Craig (ed.): Sociology in America. A History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007, p. 3. 24 Menand, Louis: The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America, New York: Farar, Straus, and Giroux 2002, p. 237.

2.1 Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental. . .

21

foundations for a social science that combined observation and epistemological resource generation, without lapsing into a regressive relativism. Of all the pragmatists, it was Dewey who understood “society as a laboratory”,25 one whose uncertain origin and development must be grasped as conditioned by the environment, and understood in all its processuality and materiality. Pragmatism’s influences on the Chicago School of Sociology, and on various currents in interpretative social research, are now well documented.26 The present book builds on this reception history and examines its consequences for epistemology, a social theory and theories of society. It explores the idea that John Dewey’s experimentalism provides the building blocks for sociology as a science of experience that, similar to pragmatism in general, has generated or, at least, fostered specific sociologies, such as urban studies, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, the theory of the creativity of action or French neopragmatism. But beyond this, my goal is to place Dewey’s experimentalism on the same level as the classic works of sociology, highlighting its crucial significance to present-day currents in sociology and its contribution to a theory (of science) of sociology. Akin to any project of integration or rehabilitation, my undertaking here is guided by specific interests. It presupposes that these present-day currents can be linked to a tradition of thought that lends plausibility to their interpretations. Conversely, it seems reasonable to assume that these currents cannot or do not want to garner this plausibility from the traditional theoretical offerings, which leaves them with an epistemological problem of reception. What I have in mind here are current developments in science and technology studies (STS) and the sociology of science. Over the past 30 years, in addition to making a number of methodological and theoretical innovations in sociological “transformation research”, both these subdisciplines have put forward numerous proposals as to how we might provide an external description of sociological research and reasoning, proposals that are still crying out for epistemological refinement.27 The present work takes up these suggestions and, by integrating Dewey’s experimentalism into the sociological canon, invites us

25

An allusion to the well-known essay by Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes Weyer (“Gesellschaft als Labor”, 1989), to which I will be returning later on. 26 See Joas, Hans: Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1993; Gross, Neil: “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth Century American Sociology”, in: Calhoun, Craig (ed.): Sociology in America, A History, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007, p. 183–224; Strübing, Jörg: “Pragmatismus als epistemische Praxis. Der Beitrag der Grounded Theory zur Theorie-Empirie-Frage”, in: Kalthoff, Herbert, Stefan Hirschauer and Gesa Lindemann (eds.): Theoretische Empirie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008, p. 279–311; Schubert, HansJoachim: “Pragmatismus und Symbolischer Interaktionismus”, in: Kneer, Georg and Markus Schroer: Handbuch Soziologische Theorien, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2009, p. 345–367; Nungesser, Frithjof and Franz Ofner (eds.): Potentiale einer pragmatistischen Sozialtheorie. Beiträge anlässlich des 150. Geburtstags von George Herbert Mead, Sonderband der Österreichischen Zeitschrift für Soziologie (ÖZS). Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2013. 27 See Biagioli, Mario (ed.): The Science Studies Reader, London: Routledge 1999; Maasen, Sabine et al.: Handbuch Wissenschaftssoziologie, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2012.

22

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

to debate how we might illuminate sociology from a theory-of-science perspective.28 Such a sociology-of-science of sociology—not to be confused with the “sociology of knowledge”29—I believe to be necessary for two reasons. The first has to do with theory development. There is a pressing need for present-day sociologists to get to grips with the scholastic errors, identified by Bourdieu, that bedevil the investigation of social change and the normative implications of this research. This is associated with calls for an exploratory rather than a priori form of theoretical development, which has to respond to the social problems of a fragmented world society as thrown up by globalisation, the extinction of species and climate change, as well as new wars. However, such a theory must also be capable of integrating the growing need for socio-political participation.30 Secondly, an external, theory-ofscience account of the development of sociological knowledge is vital because, in the context of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research projects, such knowledge does more than produce reflexivity regarding the management of social problems. It also requires reflexivity regarding sociology’s own role and contribution if the discipline wants to remain relevant in the future alongside the interpretations proffered by the natural, cultural and economic sciences. Neither the much-cited classics nor the critical theories provide us with a robust toolkit for mastering these changes; attempts to do so by drawing on these traditions fail regularly. As Luc Boltanski demonstrated in his lectures, published as On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, both cling to an exogenous description of the world, as if sociological knowledge were acquired independently of its conditions of production and reception.31 By contrast, the categories of experience, testing and co-operation, which I elaborate in what follows in light of Dewey’s experimentalism, always function simultaneously as exogenous observational categories and endogenous resources for generating sociological knowledge. We can, thus, outline and road-test a

28

A step already proposed by Norbert Elias. See Elias, Norbert: What is Sociology? Dublin: University College Dublin Press 2012, p. 36–40. 29 See Heintz, Bettina: “Wissenschaft im Kontext. Neuere Entwicklungstendenzen der Wissenschaftssoziologie”, in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 45/3 (1993), p. 528–552. 30 The idea behind calls for an anti-universalism is as follows. Even the seemingly most general ethical principles, such as freedom of the press, may come up against testing situations that change their universal validity on a situational and contextual basis. In the first instance, we should view such scenarios as social testing situations, rather than as an ‘attack on human rights’, in other words, normatively and prescriptively. Such moral framing is either an example of the impossibility of exiling the value judgement or of a lack of scientificity. This problem became particularly apparent in the political and sociology-internal disputes in France after the Paris attacks of 7 January 2015 and we will, unfortunately, probably have to face it again in the future. 31 Boltanski refers in this context to “simple” and “complex exteriority’” See Boltanski, Luc: On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, London: Polity Press, p. 6ff. For an attempt to address this issue directly, see Bogusz, Tanja: “Why (not) Pragmatism?” In: Susen, Simon and Bryan S. Turner (eds.): The Spirit of Luc Boltanski. Essays on the “Pragmatic Sociology of Critique”. London, New York & Delhi: Anthem Press 2014, p. 129–152.

2.1 Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental. . .

23

sociological experimentalism as an experiential science that engages actively with contemporary social and everyday problems. This extends the field of sociology potentially into contexts of discovery that, to quote French disciplinary founder Durkheim, place the sociologist in the same mental state as “physicists, chemists and physiologists when they venture into an as yet unexplored area of their scientific field”. Therefore, according to Durkheim, as “the sociologist penetrates into the social world he should be conscious that he is penetrating into the unknown. He must feel himself in the presence of facts governed by laws as unsuspected as those of life before the science of biology was evolved. He must hold himself ready to make discoveries which will surprise and disconcert him.”32 Durkheim’s contemporary John Dewey had very precise ideas about how we might reach such a state through empirical reflection upon social uncertainties. How this came about, and just what it means, is the subject of this first part of the present book.

2.1.2

John Dewey, Originator of Social Scientific Experimentalism

We might think it symptomatic that John Dewey was born in the year of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a book that thoroughly revolutionised not only the life sciences but an entire epistemological paradigm. John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, in October 1859, and Darwin published his book in London just a month or so later. The breakthrough of evolutionary theory achieved by Darwin was to impact Dewey’s work with some delay but all the more powerfully for that. Darwin’s empirically-backed theory prompted Dewey to not only abandon his early Hegelianism but establish a constructivist naturalism that seeks to trace systematic links between all forms of scientific and practical knowledge. Basing himself on Darwin’s ideas about the development of nature, Dewey was later to refer to this project as “experimentalism”.33 Dewey’s rise from humble beginnings to become the leading North American philosopher of his day reads like a history of the US as characterised by colonisation, the settler state, civil war, Reconstruction, the first and second industrial revolutions, progressivism, the New Deal and two world wars.34 Dewey belonged to the generation of young men who were still children at the time of the Civil War and who both

32

Durkheim, Émile: The Rules of Sociological Method, New York: Free Press 1982, p. 37. See Dewey, John: “From Absolutism to Experimentalism.” In George P. Adams and Wm. Pepperell Montague (eds). Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements. Russell and Russell 1930, p. 13–27. Source: https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1930.html, accessed on 12 August 2021. 34 See Westbrook, Robert B.: John Dewey and American Democracy, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1991; Menand, The Metaphysical Club. 33

24

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

witnessed the establishment of the first public universities in the US and actively helped to create them. After attending school and university in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and continuing his studies at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University, he worked as a lecturer in Michigan and Minnesota. In 1894, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Chicago, founded just 4 years earlier. His time in Chicago saw both his rapid rise within American academia and the establishment of a pragmatism committed to civil society. Dewey (together with his friends and colleagues George H. Mead, Alfred N. Whitehead, James H. Tufts and Jane Addams) inspired and shaped this movement at the “Chicago Philosophy Club”, at “Hull House”, and through his diverse forms of political engagement. He and his wife Alice Dewey set up the Laboratory School, later known as the Dewey School, at Chicago University. Due to a conflict with the university leadership, Dewey left Chicago in 1904 for Columbia University in New York, where he taught until his retirement in 1930.35 In 1921, he joined the League for Industrial Democracy and campaigned for democratic socialism. He played a key role in the founding of the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1919,36 the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 and the Social Science Research Council.37 Over the course of his life, Dewey wrote and published articles, books, op-eds and reviews, the latter particularly in the well-known journals The Dial, The New Republic, The Nation, Common Sense and Plan Age. His efforts to ensure fair trials for the anarchists Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vancetti in Massachusetts in the 1920s, and his support for Leon Trotsky in Moscow in 1937 hit the headlines across the world. He was involved in various newspaper projects, such as the Thought News; the latter failed, but was typical of Dewey’s interest in the interface between science, philosophy and the public sphere. Dewey was not only an advocate of ‘democratic experimentalism’, but sought to advance it himself. He was one of the most prominent intellectuals of his time. Dewey died on 1 June 1952, at the age of 92, just 8 years short of a century. His oeuvre was fittingly prodigious. It is almost impossible to grasp it in its entirety and in the context of such a long and productive life. Without further ado, I consider Dewey’s most important books to be Studies in Logical Theory (1903), Democracy and Education (1916), Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and Its Problems (1927), The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Experience and Education (1938), Freedom and Culture (1939) and Theory of Valuation (1939). Many of his scholarly articles, journalistic writings and political texts also attracted broad attention and were subject to intense public debate, including “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888), “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy” (1909),

35

Post Dewey’s death, a chair in philosophy at Columbia University was named after him. It has been held latest by Philipp Kitcher. 36 The John Dewey chair at the New School was held by Arjun Appadurai (2004–2008). 37 See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 277f.

2.1 Experience, Test, Co-operate: On the Relevance of the Experimental. . .

25

“Introduction” to Essays in Experimental Logig (1916), “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917), “The League of Nations and Economic Freedom” (1918), “A New Social Science” (1918), “Education as Politics” (1922) and “The Economic Basis of the New Society” (1939). Those who write about Dewey usually pursue two strategies in an attempt to tame this organon of writings and topics. Introductory texts either limit themselves to providing a general overview or focus on discipline-specific topics, such as democracy theory, psychology, philosophy of science, education, art theory, social anthropology and, of course, philosophy. Such a division is understandable in logistical terms, though it runs counter to Dewey’s status as probably one of the last great universal scholars of the Western twentieth century. He developed and championed a philosophy that foregrounded “people’s problems”. Rather than proclaiming truths, Dewey’s goal was to create truth-finding tools. He involved himself more than any other member of his generation in contemporary conflicts, uprisings, wars and debates, and, thus, played a role in the often dramatic changes they impelled— mostly with a deft touch but sometimes driven by grave misjudgements. He made mistakes, as evinced in his attitudes toward US involvement in the two world wars. In favour of entering the First World War, his later regrets prompted him to reject US participation in the Second. He campaigned for a fair trial for Trotsky in the midst of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s but was, nevertheless, unable to evade his government’s hysterical anti-communism. As Richard Bernstein notes, Dewey was “a thoroughly engaged public intellectual. [. . .] Dewey had the rare ability to reach beyond the academy, to speak to a wide audience of citizens and to the concerns of everyday people.”38 At times, in the heat of political battle, his methodological astuteness abandoned him,39 but he was usually ready to change course if prompted by new insights. While William James outshone him with his impressive demeanour and quick wit, Dewey not only outdid James as the best-known representative of US pragmatism, but was also the originator of social scientific experimentalism. While Dewey’s work was multifaceted, it was permeated by a stable set of basic themes, sometimes creating the impression that even those who have only read “a little” Dewey already know “the whole” Dewey. This has not always been considered a strength of his impressive intellectual output. The claim that Dewey made no relevant contribution to the social sciences has held up for a long time, perhaps, in part, because even the US sociological tradition, which owes so much to him and to pragmatism, makes little systematic reference to either—in sharp contrast to its German counterpart, with its Weber, and the French, with its Durkheim. Perhaps the pertinacious intellectual pluralism of the US as an immigrant nation makes overly personal canonisation appear outlandish. In any case, an increasing number

Bernstein, Richard J.: “John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy”, in: Bernstein, Richard J.: The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity 2010, p. 88. 39 Robert Westbrook sums up Dewey’s style of debate in this vein, contending that he could take criticism and was not slow to dish it out. See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 379. 38

26

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

of commentators now view Dewey not only as the “most American” of all philosophers—which, despite all the present-day political tensions, is not meant as an insult—but also as the père fondateur of a number of concepts and intellectual currents that have been crucial to the social sciences since the 1990s: experimental democracy, communitarianism, “public sociology”, the sociology of recognition, of justification and of international relations, research on inequality and participation within the scholarship on work and the economy, environmental sociology, studies of violence, and constructivist research on science, technology and risk—all take inspiration from Dewey as a pioneering thinker. In fact, Dewey developed no explicit social theory or theory of society. Yet, in many of his writings, he highlighted the epistemological connection between philosophy and the social sciences, and, to an even greater extent, the links between the theory of society and the natural sciences. His work provides pointers to a “logical theory as subject falling within the domain of social inquiry”,40 and present-day scholars are building on these insights. It was, above all, Dewey’s studies in the philosophy of science, meanwhile, that formed the key methodological reference point for pragmatism and his experimentalism.41 Even in his early Hegelian phase, he devoted himself to “science as orderly experience”.42 His essay “A New Social Science” appeared in 1918,43 and he explained how the experimental method could be applied in the social sciences in Logic in 1938.44 Nevertheless, outside philosophy, Dewey was primarily perceived as a theorist of democracy and an educationalist. Similar to pragmatism as a whole—to whose programme Dewey committed himself, eventually being regarded as its leading representative—his oeuvre suffered numerous problems of reception.45 This can be attributed within German-speaking 40 Dewey, John: “Philosophy”, in Dewey, John The later Works (1925–1953), Vol. 5. Edited by Jo Anne Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1981, p. 161–177, here p. 166. 41 Further evidence of this comes from William James’ preface to his lectures on pragmatism of 1907: “The pragmatic movement, so-called—I do not like the name, but apparently it is too late to change it—seems to have rather suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. [. . .] In America, John Dewey’s ‘Studies in Logical Theory’ are the foundation.” James, William: Pragmatism, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press 1975, p. 5. James’ enthusiasm is also documented in a letter he wrote to his friend and colleague, the German-British empiricist Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, in which he refers to Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory: “Splendid stuff, and Dewey is a hero”, quoted in Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 77. 42 See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 18. 43 Dewey, John: “A New Social Science”, in: John Dewey, The Middle Works 11 1899–1924 (1918–1919), edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1977, p. 87–92. 44 Dewey, John: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 12: Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1986, p. 481f. 45 See again Joas, Hans: Pragmatism and Social Theory. We now have a solid set of secondary literature on the failures of reception. On the essentials, see, once again, Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy. On the problematic reception of Logic in particular, see Burke, F. Thomas, D. Micah Hester and Robert Talisse (eds.): “Editors’ Introduction”, in: Burke, F. Thomas, D. Micah Hester and Robert Talisse: Dewey’s Logical Theory. New Studies and Interpretations, Nashville: Vanderbildt University Press 2002, p. xi–iv. Exemplarily, the subtitle

2.2 Looking Back: The History and Goals of the US Pragmatist Movement

27

sociology, firstly, to Dewey’s incompatibility with Weber’s paradigm, mentioned at the start of this chapter, when it came to the difference between theory and empirical knowledge, as well as the debate on values. The second key factor was the reception of Dewey’s work by the first Frankfurt school, with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno particularly denouncing Dewey’s writings, quite maliciously, from an ideological perspective. While few now condemn pragmatism in political terms,46 epistemological problems have, so far, played no significant role in the sociological debate on Dewey. What we need to do, then, is clarify the extent to which Dewey’s pragmatist theory of inquiry provides the basis for what I call sociological experimentalism. My contention is that we ought to read Dewey’s theory of inquiry on an equal footing with the ideas promulgated by the classic sociological figures, as outlined at the beginning of this chapter. I, thus, set out the categorical elements that provide us with the foundation for a sociological experimentalism based on Dewey. Before determining and defining Dewey’s distinct contribution, however, I will first shed light on the movement that guided and informed his thinking so fundamentally, namely US-American pragmatism.

2.2

Looking Back: The History and Goals of the US Pragmatist Movement

The starting point of the following analysis is that the second, enduring renaissance of US pragmatism is linked to two types of problems, both of which plagued its protagonists at the end of the nineteenth century—just as much as they did the disciplinary founders of sociology. The ground-breaking consequences of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution47 and the industrial revolution posed an epistemological change and a problem of research practice for both the pragmatists and the first sociologists. Given the development of science and technology, how might one remedy the shortcomings of both epistemological rationalism and particularist empiricism? And how might one adequately comprehend and respond to the problems thrown up by social change? Émile Durkheim, the French founder of what was probably the first chair ever to bear the term “sociology” in its title, knew that pragmatism and sociology shared a “sense of life and action”; they were “children of

“Theory of Inquiry” suggests the proximity between Dewey’s ideas and Popperian positivism (Popper’s epistemological magnum opus bore the same title), though Dewey clearly distanced himself from it. See Dewey, Logic, p. 512. 46 Representative of many authors, see Hartmann, Martin: “Vertiefung der Erfahrung. John Dewey in der deutschsprachigen Rezeption”, in: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 34/3 (2009): 415–440. 47 Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favourite Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th edition; with additions and corrections. London: John Murray 1872.

28

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

the same era”.48 No wonder, then, that Durkheim chose US pragmatism as a sparring partner in his inaugural lectures. After all, pragmatism was “almost the only current theory of truth”49—at least, the only one Durkheim thought worthy of the name. While Durkheim placed “the social” between rationalism and empiricism in an attempt to grasp processes of social structuration and social differentiation under conditions of modernity, William James established the epistemological link between rationalism and empiricism with an empirically rich concept of experience.50

2.2.1

Between Darwin and the First Industrial Revolution

Pragmatism not only found its home in the US from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. It was also there that it spread most widely beyond the academic world. Peirce, James, Mead and Dewey came from a transdisciplinary milieu. They were interdisciplinary philosophers who refused to limit themselves to philosophy, developing their philosophical problems with the help of and in light of mathematics (Peirce), psychology and literature (James), social reform (Mead) and education (Dewey). When US universities were becoming firmly established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pragmatists were public intellectuals and an integral part of US intellectual life. The thematic range of pragmatism is evident in its representatives’ diverse foci. In addition to their contributions to the aforementioned, very young disciplines of psychology and education, as well as philosophy, they helped reinvent the social sciences, the philosophy of science, economics, political theory, art theory, and the theory of democracy and participation. They made a lasting impact on the social sciences and humanities in the US.51 This broad school of thought impelled the search for practice-centred points of connection between the natural sciences, socio-political engagement and philosophical epistemology. At the same time, pragmatism was probably the most influential and controversial movement among the then competing philosophical schools. The pragmatist movement originated in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and the US, primarily among philosophers of the empiricist camp who, in view of the findings of Darwin and the natural sciences, began to contest the interpretive 48

Durkheim, Émile: Pragmatism and Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983, p. 1. 49 Ibid. 50 For more on Durkheim’s critique of pragmatism, see Joas, Hans: “Durkheim and Pragmatism: The Psychology of Consciousness and the Social Constitution of Categories”, in: Joas, Hans: Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993, p. 55–78. 51 See again the groundbreaking works of philosopher and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois on the culture and live conditions of black Americans: Du Bois, W.E.B.: The Negro. Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania Press 1915; The Souls of the Black Folks. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.

2.2 Looking Back: The History and Goals of the US Pragmatist Movement

29

sovereignty of an all-embracing Kantian rationalism.52 In the US of the mid-nineteenth century, pragmatism responded to a period of upheaval in virtually every sphere of the emerging American democracy. Louis Menand traces the genesis of this school of thought, whose key protagonists were Civil War veterans, writers, lawyers and philosophers, in his outstanding book The Metaphysical Club. The Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is regarded as the birthplace of pragmatism. It was headed by philosopher and staunch Socratic Chauncey Wright, a critic of Herbert Spencer and admirer of Darwin. Wright, who influenced Peirce and James’s thinking fundamentally, as they themselves attested,53 was convinced that Darwin’s theory of the origin, development and variety of species had shown that it was absurd to think in terms of eternally fixed principles.54 Menand sums up Wright’s stance: “Wright was, in short, one of the few nineteenth-century Darwinians who thought like Darwin—one of the few evolutionists who did not associate evolutionary change with progress.”55 For Wright and those of like mind, the

52

Though the pragmatists attained their pre-eminent position in the debate partly because of their critique of empiricism. See Dickstein, Morris: “Pragmatism Then and Now” in Dickstein, Morris (ed.): The Revival of Pragmatism. New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, Durham & London: Duke University Press 1999, p. 2. 53 Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 210. 54 See Voss, Julia: Charles Darwin zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius 2008, p. 98. The intellectual exchange between Wright and Darwin is evident, among other things, in a number of references by Darwin to Wright in On the Origin of Species. Darwin states there that a certain body size provides protection against predators and has feeding benefits, as in the case of the giraffe: “Nor must we overlook the fact, that increased bulk would act as a protection against almost all beasts of prey excepting the lion; and against this animal, its tall neck—and the taller the better—would, as Mr. Chauncey Wright has remarked, serve as a watch-tower.” Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species, p. 178. 55 This was presumably partly due to the influence of the highly gifted young philosopher Peirce. In his pragmatism lectures of 1903, Peirce related that: “Indeed, from the moment that the Idea of Evolution took possession of the minds of men the pure Corpuscular philosophy together with nominalism had had their doom pronounced. I grew up in Cambridge and was about 21 when The Origin of Species appeared. There was then living here a thinker who left no remains from which one could now gather what an educative influence his was upon the minds of all of us who enjoyed his intimacy,—Mr. Chauncey Wright.” Peirce, Charles S.: Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism, edited and Introduced by Patricia Ann Turrisi. Albany: State University of New York Press 1997, p. 164. Peirce describes Wright as a fervent champion of the theories of C. Wright Mills and recalls a discussion with him on the impossibility of reconciling the theories of John Stuart Mill and Darwin: “I was away surveying in the wilds of Louisiana when Darwin’s great work appeared, and though I learned by letters of the immense sensation it had created, I did not return until early in the following summer [1860] when I found Wright all enthusiasm for Darwin whose doctrines appeared to him as a sort of supplement to those of Mill. [. . .] [I remarked] that these ideas of development had more vitality by far than any of his other favourite conceptions and that though they might at that moment be in his mind like a little vine clinging to the tree of Associationalism, yet after a time that vine would inevitably kill the tree. He asked me why I said that and I replied that the reason was that Mill’s doctrine was nothing but a metaphysical point of view to which Darwin’s, which was nourished by positive observation, must be deadly. [. . .] What the true definition of Pragmatism may be, I find it very hard to say; but in my nature it is a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts.” Ibid., p. 164.

30

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

associated renunciation of causal relationships in favour of a slowly and steadily processing, self-propelling dynamic governing the transformation of biological and organic life had turned not only religious essentialisms but also the entire classical philosophy of knowledge upside down. Wright expressed this epistemological shock as follows: Everything out of the mind is a product, the result of some process. Nothing is exempt from change. Worlds are formed and dissipated. Races of organic beings grow up like their constituent individual members, and disappear like these. Nothing shows a trace of an original, immutable nature, except the unchangeable laws of change. These point to no beginning and to no end of time, nor to any bounds of space. All indications to the contrary in the results of physical research are clearly traceable to imperfections in our present knowledge of all the laws of change, and to that disposition to cosmological speculations which still prevails even in science.56

We can discern two of the key foundation stones for Dewey’s experimentalism in Wright’s ideas and the debates in the Metaphysical Club: the refusal to derive knowledge from cognitively conceived ultimate justifications, and the emphasis on a ceaseless learning process that, like life itself, is subject to constant and ultimately unpredictable transformations. The Metaphysical Club, in which James and Peirce were active, and later the Chicago Philosophical Club, where Dewey and Mead discussed their ideas, were the scenes of passionate arguments about the consequences of the scientific and political upheavals of modernity. The antifoundationalist critique of a teleological metaphysics, on the one hand, and of an empiricist determinism, on the other, fuelled debates on how best to understand the transformation of the sciences and the new social changes. The problem of philosophy, as Dewey particularly never tired of emphasising, lay in its insistence on metaphysically based “ultimate certainties”. It was in light of these that philosophy sought to assert its epistemological dominance as the natural sciences became ever more important within society over the course of the industrial revolution. The philosophy of pragmatism, meanwhile, worked on the basic assumption that all processes of knowing, be they of a philosophical, everyday or scientific nature, are not based on a knowing consciousness separate from a given problem but on experiences that human beings make practical use of in light of their value in tackling problems. This epistemological impulse was nourished by a naturalism that the pragmatists took from their reading of Darwin and by their ensuing efforts to distance themselves from the philosophical interpretations of their time, which were oriented towards the search for ultimate justifications. The pragmatists, especially Peirce, were among the first to contend that semantically consistent conclusions about the real require empirical verification if they are to be considered valid. Peirce’s “evolutionary cosmology”57 laid the foundation for the integration of an empirical corollary of semantic interpretive concepts, not only when it came to

56

Chauncey Wright, quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 210f. Hampe, Michael: Kleine Geschichte des Naturgesetzbegriffes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2007, p. 92. 57

2.2 Looking Back: The History and Goals of the US Pragmatist Movement

31

theories of language and signs but also in light of these concepts’ likely practical effects.58 Within this milieu, it was William James who laid the ground for Dewey’s experimentalism. In marked contrast to Kant, James made the concept of experience a crucial precondition for knowledge. By addressing questions about the meaning and purpose of philosophical reflection, he succeeded in making pragmatism one of the most scintillating and internationally debated philosophies at the turn of the twentieth century.59 In his lectures, James discussed these issues in light of the contrast and tension between Kantian rationalism and empiricism, coming down on the side of an empiricist stance. He transformed Peirce’s thesis of the functional and social relevance of philosophical statements into an experimentalist theory of truth. In his famous essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” (1904), James, thus, dropped the idea that there is such a thing, embracing a concept of experience that jibes closely with the ideas of the evolutionary thinker Chauncey Wright: For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. [. . .] There is [. . .] no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing.60

John Dewey built on James’s concept of experience by deriving his concept of knowledge from the experimental research of the natural sciences. W.E.B. Du Bois, who became one of the most influential African American former student’s of James, translated James’s experiential approach on the problem of racism, as well as on the creative forces to escape from it. Meanwhile, George H. Mead, taking up James’s concept of experience and Dewey’s experimentalism, emphasised the facts of social co-operation and interaction, which were to become so important to Dewey’s theory of democracy and, later, both to US interactionism and to ethnomethodology. Mead also emphasised Darwin’s signal contribution in this context: “It has been legitimately said that there is not any goal presented in biological evolution, that the theory of evolution is part of a mechanical theory of nature.”61 In line with this, Mead fashioned the pragmatic theory of truth into an experimental endeavour:

Hence, in Peirce’s work the pragmatic maxim is: “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have: then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle and Method, p. 111. 59 See: Baciocchi, Stéphane and Jean-Louis Fabiani: “Das verlorene Argument in Durkheims Pragmatismus-Vorlesung (1895–1955). Kritisches zu Methode und Wahrheit”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz (eds.): Émile Durkheim. Soziologie, Ethnologie, Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2013, p. 433–471. 60 James, William: “Does Consciousness Exist?”, in James, William: Essays in Radical Empiricism, New York: Longman Green and Co. 1912, p. 1–38, here p. 3–4. 61 Mead, George H.: Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1972, p. 251. 58

32

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . . Now I take it that the most distinctive mark of the Pragmatic movement is the frank acceptance of actual ongoing experience, experimentally controlled, as the standpoint from which to interpret the past and anticipate the future. So far as I can see this acceptance must recognize as ruled out any absolute order within which is to be placed a final concatenation of events past, present, and future. [. . .] The problem, then, which Pragmatism faces is the maintenance of values by methods, in the place of structure.62

Mead’s urgent appeal for reflection on methodological issues was also central to both Dewey’s epistemological ideas and his theory of democracy, as he emphasised in The Public and its Problems (1927): “What is needed to direct and make fruitful social inquiry is a method which proceeds on the basis of the interrelations of observable acts and their results.”63 At issue here was not so much an empirical method as understood within empirical social research but rather a heuristic of knowledge. The pragmatism of Mead and Dewey sought such a heuristic in a philosophical theory of action inspired by the theory of evolution, psychology and pedagogy, a theory of action that declared the uncertainties of human action the basis of its creative and transformative capacities—a notion notably elaborated in Hans Joas’s The Creativity of Action (1992). Dewey regarded knowledge of nature as a criterion for the human appropriation of the world, as he elucidated in a 1939 reply to his critics on the significance of the experimental method: If in this connection I have emphasized physical knowledge, it is not [. . .] because the latter is the only kind of knowledge, but because its comparative maturity as a form of knowledge exemplifies so conspicuously the necessary place and function of experimentation; whereas, in contrast, beliefs in moral and social subjects are still reached and framed with minimum regard for experimental method.64

Few took this criticism as seriously as Dewey’s former student Robert E. Park. The founder of the Chicago School of Sociology urged his students to “Go into the district, get the feeling, get acquainted with people.”65 Park was here expressing the contemporary imperative for a science of experience. Chicago may have been a particularly favourable setting for the development of this science, as well as the philosophy of pragmatism: the social upheavals triggered by accelerating capitalist mass production were particularly palpable in this rapidly growing metropolis.66 Historian of science Rebecca Lemov describes the social climate in Chicago at the time: At the start of the twentieth century, the city of Chicago teemed with slums, pickpockets, foreigners, money and enterprise, all of which influenced the type of science that was conducted there. When Max Weber visited around this time, he felt that the city was like a

Mead, George H.: “A Pragmatic Theory of Truth”, in: Mead, George H.: Studies in the Nature of Truth, Berkeley: University of California Press 1929, p. 65–88, here p. 87f. 63 Dewey, John: The Public and Its Problems, Athens: Swallow Press & Ohio University Press 1954, p. 36. 64 Dewey, John: “Experience, Knowledge and Value. A Rejoinder”, in: Dewey, John The later Works (1925–1953), Vol. 14. Edited by Jo Anne Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1988, p. 12. 65 Quoted in Lindner, Rolf: The Reportage of Urban Culture. Robert Park and the Chicago School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 80ff. 66 I take an in-depth look at the First Chicago School of Sociology in this chapter (“test run I”). 62

2.2 Looking Back: The History and Goals of the US Pragmatist Movement

33

human body with the skin pulled off, entrails working for all to see. An early course catalogue for the University of Chicago put a more dignified spin on it: Chicago was “one of the most complete social laboratories of the world.” The work of its scientists made it feel like a laboratory within a laboratory. All was within the domain of experiment. The work of the multidisciplinary Chicago School of Pragmatism was unique in the world. [. . .] Nothing was settled.67

Within a few years, swathes of the city had morphed into large, colourful immigrant districts. New professions emerged and society became tremendously mobile as journalism, the labour movement, criminality, poverty and exclusionary practices collided. However, at the same time, an unprecedented variety of charitable institutions were founded that focused public attention on political demands for worker co-management, educational equality and social participation. Lemov notes: From the start, Chicago social scientists sought to make contact with the ‘real’ in their amazing city. Or perhaps it was the other way around, for Chicago had a way of coming at you, as John Dewey observed: ‘Every conceivable thing solicits you; [. . .] things [. . .] simply stick themselves at you, instead of leaving you to think about them.’ There was a strong tradition of reform-mindedness among the faculty, who were also members of various special park commissions, civic federations, and settlement houses.68

Participant observation became the creed of a sociology that recruited its practitioners from journalism and the fringes of respectable society, a field that had no qualms about embracing the uncontrollable and the uncertain, as characteristic, for example, of research in Chicago’s red-light milieu. In retrospective remarks on James and Dewey’s importance to his research and thinking, Park noted: One thing I now recall as characteristic of Dewey’s method of teaching is that his students always seemed to have had the notion that he and they were somehow engaged in a common enterprise. With him learning was always, so it seemed, an adventure; an adventure which was taking us beyond the limits of safe and certified knowledge into the realm of the problematic and unknown. [. . .] Dewey and James were pragmatists. What I learned from them was the value of experiment and experience as distinguished from exposition and of research as opposed to scholasticism as a method of education in the social as well as in the physical sciences.69

Park’s comments reveal the experimentalist aspect of pragmatic philosophy, an aspect whose potential to enrich a social theory has so far gone largely untapped. The thrust of his remarks is consonant with the critique of scholastic knowledge produced by Pierre Bourdieu many decades later. The Chicago Club of Philosophy was, thus, the wellspring of a social science that sought to reduce the distance between the general population, academics and public institutions.

67

Lemov, Rebecca: World as Laboratory. Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men, New York: Hill & Wang 2005, p. 18. 68 Ibid., p. 59f. 69 Park, Robert E., “Methods of Teaching, Impressions and a Verdict”, in Social Forces 20 (1) 1941: 39–40. On the importance of Dewey and James to his thinking, see also Park, Robert E.: The Crowd, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press 1972, p. 3f.

34

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

In summary, the philosophy of pragmatism may be defined as an enduringly successful attempt to come to apt epistemological conclusions in light of contemporary scientific and technological innovations, the goal being to help enhance, concretely and continuously, the socio-political conditions of production and participation. Pragmatism’s epistemological impulses were fed by an anti-essentialist naturalism and a critique of the dominant philosophical interpretations of the time, which were based on the search for ultimate justifications. Pragmatists sought to draw on the experimental investigative procedures of the natural sciences in order to redefine the social constitution of knowledge and understanding.70 Their epistemological project was, from the outset, congruent with that of sociology, as Durkheim emphasised in his lectures on pragmatism of 1913. But does all this make Dewey a sociologist? I provide a detailed account of Dewey’s experimentalism to explore this question in what follows. I flesh out the hypothesis, formulated at the start of this chapter, that Dewey’s theory of inquiry aims consistently to fuse observational categories and resources for the development of (sociological) knowledge into a shared conceptual framework. Dewey thereby intended to render obsolete any fundamental distinction, within research practice, between epistemological and practical reasoning. This enables us to eliminate the traditional one-sidedness sketched out above with reference to the concept of experience in the work of Kant and Weber. By sociologising Dewey, I aim to provide the conceptual prerequisites for a sociology of social transformation geared towards experimentalism. This sociology studies social transformation through the lens of experience, testing and co-operation, while simultaneously viewing itself as a science of experience that subjects itself to testing situations. The latter it seeks to master co-operatively with other actors. I develop my argument in three steps. The first step is to clarify Dewey’s contribution to sociological epistemology. The key category here is “experience”, which I conceptualise as both an observational category and a research experience. In the second step, I elaborate Dewey’s constructivist social theory. The core category here is “testing”, which I define as a precondition for both social change and social scientific discovery. Finally, in the third step, I profile Dewey’s experimentalism (as it relates to his theory of democracy) as a theory of society in which “co-operation” is both an observational category and a resource for generating sociological knowledge. Finally, I formulate additional working hypotheses that reference the three “test runs” through which, over the course of the present book, I confront Dewey’s sociology with relevant present-day sociological theories.

70

On the longtime lacking reception of the contribution of contemporary pragmatist Afro-American philosopher W.E.B Du Bois to these issues, see Morris, Aldon D.: “Sociology of Race and W.E.B DuBois: The Path not taken”, in: Calhoun, Craig (ed.): Sociology in America. A History, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007, p. 503–534 and Du Bois himself, especially: Du Bois, W.E.B: The Negro. Philadelphia. The University of Pennsylvania Press 1915; The Souls of the Black Folks. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

2.3

35

Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

Why should we comprehend Dewey’s logical experimentalism as sociology? The answer has begun to emerge in the passages above. Dewey is relevant to the present day because he addressed the radical social transformations of his time by means of a social philosophy that grasped the potentialities of change in terms of their practical consequences. I work on the assumption that Dewey, thus, founded a theory of social change based on three analytical criteria that are sociologically relevant again today: reflexivity, revisability and a capacity for structuration. This speaks to the fact that social transformation meant, as it still does, the unsettling of acquired habits. Three key points should be borne in mind. The first is that Dewey made this uncertainty the anthropological basis for reflexivity. The second is that while transformations occur in specific places, they are contingent and unpredictable. Dewey transposed them into the scientific laboratory and subjected them to an epistemological test arrangement in which the testing situation becomes the key framework for new discoveries. This allowed him to conceptualise revisability71 not as a problem but as a practical field of opportunity. The third crucial insight here is that transformations raise questions about the legitimacy of traditional forms of social differentiation. They point out the limits of social cohesion and highlight the potential political consequences of the unsettling of collective structures. Dewey, therefore, conceived of political participation and co-operation as social-theoretical ‘anchor points’ that might facilitate social stabilization. He did not envisage participation and co-operation in ideal terms but as the practical prerequisites for social coexistence. The category of co-operation was not meant as a guarantee of an imagined sociopolitical order, but was instead intended to ensure that democratic experimentalism had a processual capacity for structuration. Epistemology, the social theory and the theory of society—these are the three fields that inform Dewey’s sociological legacy. Sociologists have only occasionally considered these three aspects so far in their reception of Dewey, and without linking them together. My first hypothesis is that we can only define Dewey’s pragmatism as sociology if we clarify the methodological connection between the three components of this triumvirate. However, this connection, to cite my second thesis, can only be plausibly established if we foreground Dewey’s theory of inquiry, in other words, what he termed “experimentalism”. Only here did he provide a methodology applicable within social research, one that allows us to comprehend the resolutely exploratory character of his theory building systematically. Neither his theory of democracy—the main focus of his sociological reception so far—nor his pedagogy could achieve this. The reception of his theory of democracy fails to consider that Dewey wanted to do more than propose yet another means of observing society. As his theory of inquiry shows, he also sought to highlight that the way in which we observe society co-determines the analytical scope of both our objects of investigation and of research itself. Pedagogy, meanwhile, underestimates the operational 71

I owe the term to Teresa Koloma Beck.

36

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

Table 2.1 Dewey’s experimentalism as sociology: Categorical foundations Field Epistemology

Category Experience

Social theory

Testing

Theory of society

Co-operation

Principle Reflexivity Modi operandi: Situate, correlate, materialise Revisability Modi operandi: Prepare, trial, model Capacity for structuration Modi operandi: Criticise, participate, collaborate

epistemic value that Dewey attached to scientific methods of explanation, as well as their heuristic transferability to social scientific investigation. Briefly, we can only grasp the full social scientific import of both Dewey’s theory of democracy and his pedagogy if we grasp not just the fact that he brought the laboratory into society but the specific way in which he did so. The following overview summarises my proposed conceptualisation of Dewey’s experimentalism as sociology (Table 2.1). This proposal differs in a number of ways from Dewey’s own conceptualisation of experimental knowledge. A reworking of this kind is necessary to differentiate the sociologically relevant sub-areas of experimentalism better, including the empirical research principles associated with them, and to adapt these subfields to current research modalities. After all, Dewey was concerned with nothing less than the entirety of human problems. In order to concentrate on a meaningful subset of these problems which can help us construct an empirically rich theory of social transformation in keeping with present-day realities, we need to subject individual components of his oeuvre to a critical reading, reassembling them and tailoring them to the specific epistemological interests of present-day sociology. Dewey, as it happens, regarded such refashionings of his work with equanimity: “My best wishes as well as my hopes are with those who engage in the profoundly important work of bringing logical theory into accord with scientific practice, no matter how much their conclusions may differ in detail from those presented in this book.”72 The division of Dewey’s experimentalism into the fields of epistemology, the social theory and the theory of society reflects a distinction between their respective contributions to both category formation and research practice. In Dewey’s own holistic reading, however, his epistemology cannot be separated from his social theory, nor can his theory of society be separated from his epistemology, and such a division would, in fact, contradict the character of his model. It is, however, vital to resolve the problem that today, when both field-specific compartmentalization and inter- and transdisciplinarity have become so dominant, it is hard to integrate Dewey’s style of thinking into contemporary scholarship, an indispensable task for a theoretical import of such stature. My goal, then, is by no means to subvert the

72

Dewey, Logic, p. 5.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

37

interdependence between the fields on which Dewey worked or between the categories he assigned to these fields. Instead, I enhance the contours of these fields in order to tap, to the maximum possible extent, the sociological potential of Dewey’s thought. The categorical choices I make here reflect Dewey’s foregrounding of methodology, a move of great relevance to present-day international sociology as well. In the present book, this primacy of methodology means focusing on the heuristic of the experiment. It involves teasing out the experiment’s epistemological, sociotheoretical and theory-of-society components. This procedure enables us to confront the experiment, as conceptualised by Dewey, with relevant present-day social theories, in order to test out its contemporary significance and determine its analytical scope. In what follows, I investigate the core sociological categories of “experience”, “testing” and “co-operation”, developed both explicitly and implicitly by Dewey, recapitulating them regarding their respective analytical principles of reflexivity, revisability and the capacity for structuration. I discuss how, within sociological research, we might establish continuity between these principles, which pertain both to the constitution of investigative objects and resource generation, in light of their respective modi operandi. Finally, under the heading “What is experimentalism?” (a question that has informed this chapter from the outset), I summarise our findings so far, and we can formulate the first hypotheses laying the ground for the examination of the aforementioned categories and their criteria within relevant present-day social theory and theories of society.

2.3.1

“Experience”: Dewey’s Processual Epistemology

In Dewey’s philosophy, “experience”—a key concept of modernity73—became the yardstick for an experimental and functionalist concept through which Dewey reflected, epistemologically, the factor of uncertainty and the constant transformation of society. The modernity and timeliness of his concept of experience rests upon its epistemic form, namely, reflexivity. In Dewey’s theory of inquiry, the modus operandi of experience consists of the practice of situating, correlating and materialising—a practice established in qualitative social research as a form of data generation, as currently typical chiefly of grounded theory and ethnography. In his theory of inquiry, conversely, Dewey still took his lead from the investigative methods of the natural sciences. From the perspective of his holistic concept of inquiry, however, it is evident that these three modi are not unique to a particular discipline, but are basic elements of any research activity. In what follows, I

See Lindner, Rolf: “Experience as a Keyword of Modernity”, in: Horak, Roman et al. (ed.): Metropole Wien. Texturen der Moderne, vol. 2 (¼ Wiener Vorlesungen, Konservatorien und Studien Vol 9/II), Vienna: WUV 2000, p. 20–22. 73

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

38

illuminate the principle of experience, namely reflexivity, and the modi operandi of experience as a practiced “theory of inquiry”. I go on to examine in detail the trailblazing potential of Dewey’s concept of experience for compatible sociologies in the subsequent “test runs”.

2.3.1.1

The Principle of Experience: Reflexivity

No reflexivity without experience—this pithy proposition conveys Dewey’s thinking neatly. Reflexivity finds expression empirically—as Dewey contends, drawing on the work of James and Mead—at the moment when habitual action orientations, which Dewey called “habits”, are disrupted. Reflexivity occurs in the wake of an experience that inserts itself between the processes of acting and thinking.74 It is the expression of knowledge that is internalised both physically and cognitively, and it establishes the continuity between body and mind. Dewey’s philosophy of knowledge, thus, founds both an anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian tradition of thought. For pragmatists, knowing is inextricably interwoven here with practical, incorporated knowledge.75 Hence, knowing is an experimental phenomenon geared towards problem-solving, an “event” of an operational character. Dewey, similar to Peirce, James and Mead, saw the rationale for connecting knowing and change in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin’s studies of continuous change within species, as Julia Voss emphasises in her introduction to Darwin, laid the foundations for making ambivalences rather than immutability the starting point for establishing facts.76 His theory of evolution, therefore, also represented the “ability to turn uncertainty into a productive insight”.77 Dewey, thus, notes in his 1909 essay ‘The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy’: The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life. When he said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove,

74

On the significance of emotions as a specific form of the interruption of experiences and the trigger of reflexivity, see Adloff, Frank and Sebastian Büttner: “Die Vielfalt soziologischen Erklärens und die (Un)Vermeidbarkeit des Ekklektizismus”, in: Zeitschrift für theoretische Soziologie 2 (2013): 29. 75 On the parallels between Dewey’s concept of experience and Bourdieu’s concept of incorporated knowledge, see Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 51f. and Bogusz, Tanja: “Experiencing practical knowledge. Emerging convergences between pragmatism and sociological practice theory”, in: European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (2) 2012. Symposia: “Pragmatism and the social sciences: a century of influences and interactions”: 32–54; Bogusz, Tanja: “From Crisis to Experiment. Bourdieu and Dewey on Practice and Political Cooperation”, in: Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki and Anders Buch, London & New York: Routledge 2018, p. 156–175. 76 See Voss, Charles Darwin zur Einführung, p. 107. 77 Ibid., p. 106.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

39

he emancipated, once for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations.78

Dewey describes “the principle of transition” as processes of “coordination” and “transaction”, which are among the core conceptual elements of his evolutionary theory of the continuity of thinking and acting. Here, the constant change of the living world, as elaborated by Darwin, leads us to what Dewey saw as the inescapable fact that all modes of being,79 from the concrete reality of biological species to the abstract realm of metaphysical knowledge, are subject to inevitable revision by events and entities. The pragmatists interpreted the nature of knowledge and experience in analogy to the permanent revisability of life, as highlighted by Darwin, who remarked upon this characteristic as early as 1884: “The general conclusion at which I have slowly been driven from a directly opposite conviction is that species are mutable & that allied species are co-descendants of common stocks.”80 Their focus, therefore, was on both the potential and revisable aspects of experience and, thus, of possible knowledge, aspects realised through practical reflection.81 By emulating Darwin’s own way of thinking, that is, by adhering to a “darwinism without telos”,82 the pragmatists derived a fundamental critique of ultimate metaphysical justifications and a priori existential statements, to the extent that these are unable to demonstrate any verifiable function of knowledge acquisition. In Dewey’s work, this critique was associated with a practice-theoretical approach. Here “practice” means not only future-oriented and generalisable social action, but is also an expression of the uncertain, provisional nature of ‘active knowing’. This type of knowledge is as pervasive as it is permeable. “The realm of the practical”, writes Dewey, in a manner reminiscent of Darwin and Wright, “is the region of change, and change is always contingent; it has in it an element of chance that cannot be

Dewey, John: “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy”, in: Dewey, John, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought, New York: Henry Holt and Company 1910, p. 3. 79 Nowadays, chiefly from a Latourian perspective that draws on Dewey and James, these would be called “ontologies”. Dewey himself, however, uses the term ontology in a conceptually blurry manner. On the one hand, he refers to “ontological material”, in which “potentiality [relates to] actuality” (Dewey, Logic, p. 140) and, thus, seems to adhere to the Leibnizian definition of ontologies. Elsewhere, he gives the term a contrary, that is, essentialist meaning. Here, Dewey associates it with the kind of philosophies of knowledge, characterised by a distance from practice, that he criticised, as found in both the classical age and his own day: “The ontological hypostatization of a method, an instrumentality, of inquiry used to effect objective consequences, into something ontological, is the source of the mechanistic metaphysics of ‘reality’” (ibid., p. 216). 80 As Darwin wrote in a letter to naturalist and clergyman Leonard Jenyns. See Darwin, Charles: “Letter to Leonard Jenyns 12 October 1844”, in Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 782” [1844], https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-782.xml, accessed on 13 August 2021. 81 Dewey, Logic, pp. 386 and 429. 82 See Rorty, Richard: “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin”, in: Saatkamp, Herman J. (ed.): Rorty and Pragmatism. The Philosopher responds to his Critics, Nashville and London: Vanderbildt University Press 1995, p. 1–15. 78

40

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

eliminated.”83 Dewey’s theory of practice, however, did not adhere to an absolute, let alone atheoretical, relativism, but instead assumed that empirical knowledge may be imbued by theory. This proposition was prefigured in Darwin’s work. In his On the Origin of Species, he provided an exemplary instance of theoretical exploration through the empirically backed, successive development of hypotheses.84 For Darwin, it was beyond dispute that “without speculation there is no good and original observation”.85 Georges Canguilhem comes to similar conclusions in light of the laboratory technique developed by French physiologist Claude Bernard.86 Ultimately, according to Dewey, the fundamental transformation of society wrought by scientific knowledge production has shown that an analogous instrumental process of inquiry has impacted on the practical concerns of everyday life, an impact that philosophical epistemology can no longer ignore.87 Dewey put such a philosophy into practice by redefining the concept of experience; beginning with the Essays in Experimental Logic (1916), he declared the “experiment” the core concept of his theory of inquiry. James had established “experience” as a core pragmatist category, whose epistemological role was to simultaneously criticise and unite contemporary rationalist and empiricist philosophies of knowledge. At the time, James’s radically empiricist move, as Dewey noted in a lecture on the author of A Pluralistic Universe, brought about a “revolutionary change in traditional empiricism”.88 As James saw it, empiricism went too far, never overcoming its troubling tendency to attach too much pertinacity to local facts— because it refused to relate them to more general framework conditions. What was needed, therefore, was a “radical empiricism” that would embrace the idea that knowledge was empirically charged, as taught by classical empiricism, but radicalise this idea by deriving from it a firmly experience-based generalisation, one that facilitates the formulation of hypotheses.89 James distinguished two aspects to undergird his thesis: the “flow of experience”, on the one hand, and “pure Dewey, John: “The Quest for Certainty. A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action”, in John Dewey, The Later Works (1925–1953), Vol. 4: 1929. Edited by Jo Anne Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 2008, p. 16. 84 See Voss, Charles Darwin zur Einführung, p. 100. 85 As Darwin contended in an 1857 letter to the influential US-American botanist Asa Gray. See Darwin, Charles: The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1, including an autobiographical chapter. Edited by his son Francis Darwin. London: J. Murray 1887, p. 465. 86 Canguilhem, Georges: “Zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Leben seit Darwin”, in: Canguilhem, Georges: Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie, edited by Wolf Lepenies. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, p. 141. 87 Dewey, Quest for Certainty, p. 64. 88 Dewey, John: “William James as Empiricist”, in: Dewey, John: John Dewey. The Later Works 15, 1925–1953, (1942–1948), edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1991, p. 13. 89 We get a sense here of why pragmatism not only exhibits a proximity to more recent practicetheoretical concepts within social theory, but can also itself correctly be described as a theory of practice (see Schatzki, Theodore R. and Anders Buch (eds): Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory. London & New York: Routledge 2018). 83

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

41

Table 2.2 Historical experimentalism: concepts of experience in the work of James and Dewey Form of knowledge production Routine ¼ knowledge Production of difference ¼ knowing

James Flow of experience Pure experience

Dewey ‘Habit’ Experiment/reflexivity

experience”, on the other. These two concepts, and the distinction between them provided the direct template for Dewey’s experimentalism. What James meant by a “flow of experience” was uncontemplated experience, in the sense of the Darwinian, processual conception of the development of life outlined above. In this view, it is only when people become aware of an obstacle or problem that they begin to reflect. James calls this moment/phenomenon “pure experience”, and it is the starting point for investigative action/inquiry. Hence, as James put it in a letter to Peirce, the concept of experience entails a rejection of the notion that “consciousness” is “a constituent principle of all experience, as contrasted with a certain function or relation between particular parts of experience”.90 James had done away with the epistemic separation between empirical and cognitive experience, a division he believed persisted in the Kantian concept of consciousness and also remained unresolved in the work of Peirce. Dewey went a step further. Drawing on James’s work, he embraced Peirce’s concept of knowledge, inspired by the scientific experiment, and turned it into an epistemological experimentalism. The following overview elucidates this in simplified form (Table 2.2). Basing ourselves on James and Dewey, then, we might say that it is the production of difference by an event, one provoked by experimental action, that provides the prerequisites for knowing. In ‘test run II’, utilising the category of ‘testing’, I will elucidate why this aspect is of particular importance for establishing the continuity between experience as an observational category and researchers’ experience. What James referred to as the pre-reflexive and embodied flow of experience, Dewey, borrowing from Darwin, called a “habit”.91 As a precondition for the epistemic phenomenon of reflexivity, “habits” are based on three elements in Dewey’s philosophy of knowledge: the environment-dependence (ecology), materiality (bodies and artefacts) and processuality (genealogy) of knowing—three elements, in other words, that were mostly ignored by the classic epistemologies prior to the sociological epistemology of the late 1990s. I take a closer look at this state of affairs in the following excursus (Fig. 2.1). The modi operandi of experience: situate, correlate and materialise.

90

Morris, Charles W.: The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy, New York: Braziller 1970, p. 125; original emphasis. 91 On the concept of the “habit” in the history of sociology, see Camic, Charles: “The Matter of Habit”, in: American Journal of Sociology 91/5 (1986), p. 1039–1087. Due to its proximity to biology, at times, the concept has been frowned upon within the discipline (ibid., p. 1073). It gained a sharper definition as a result of Bourdieu’s theory of practice (see Bourdieu, Pierre: Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle, Paris: Seuil 2000, p. 256 and Bourdieu, Pierre: Le sens pratique, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit 1980, p. 91f.).

42

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

Reflexivity

environment-dependent & situational (ecology)

correlative (evolution)

material (bodies and objects)

Fig. 2.1 The prerequisite for reflexivity according to Dewey

(a) The situativity of experience Dewey looked for experience-causing sources of meaning beyond the res cogitum in the tradition of Descartes and Kant. Unwilling to derive the potential for reflexivity from “armchair philosophy”, he had to confront the question of what the situational points of the interface for “habits” and the conditions of their interruption might be, that is, for the situation and the context in which reflexivity is expressed. Dewey deployed the categories of situation and environment, in a similar way to Mead and in contrast to Peirce and James, in order to anchor in social space his hypothesis of the continuity of thinking and acting. For Dewey, this continuity was realised in ideal-typical form in the scientific laboratory, in which co-operative investigation brings into being an interactive microcosmos of problem-solving. This tallies with a core argument found in philosophy-of-science constructivism, which was refined, rendered more nuanced and expanded in the 1960s by US physicist Thomas Kuhn, system theorist Niklas Luhmann, and social scientific studies of science and technology. In Dewey’s relational epistemology, living being, situation and environment are not understood as separate entities but in systemic terms, that is, in light of their local relationships of exchange.92 In this view, the processes of life are “self-maintaining”.93 This combination of assumptions of functional continuity and integration, borrowed from biology, has methodological consequences for the relationship between theory and empirical reality.94 When it comes to the impact of inquiry, what this means is that “[t]here is no inquiry that does not involve the making of some change in environing conditions. This fact is exemplified in the indispensable place of experiment in inquiry, since experimentation is deliberate modification of prior conditions.”95 Hence, changes in environmental conditions depend on local and situational factors. Within the process of inquiry, reflexivity kicks in either when a sudden change occurs in environmental conditions, bringing about a new situation, or at the moment of

92 Dewey, Logic, p. 32. Robert E. Park takes up this idea in his dissertation The Crowd, when he states that ecology is en route to becoming a social science without ceasing to be part of biology. On this and on the connection between sociology and Darwin’s theory of evolution, see Park, The Crowd, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press 1972 p. 130f. 93 Dewey, Logic, p. 33. 94 Ibid., p. 39ff. 95 Ibid., p. 41.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

43

the experiment’s closure, in other words, when the actors involved reach conclusions. Therefore, whether we are talking about an experimental situation in a laboratory or everyday situations, such as the moment when you step into the road and suddenly find a car heading towards you or when a referee has to intervene in a sporting event, the assessment of an overall situation (environment) always comes into play, the overall situation of which a specific situation forms part and based on which actors evaluate new experiences. It is from this that Dewey derives his environment-dependent idea of reflection. But how are we to understand the environment-dependent contribution to the empirical process of “having a research experience”, in other words, an experience that triggers reflection in such a way as to influence investigative action? It is here that Dewey concretizes the spatial concept of the ‘environment’ through the spatiotemporal concept of the “situation”. In Logic, Dewey associates the reflexive contribution of the situation with the moment of judgement formation and, thus, ascribes an explicit methodological importance to the situation.96 Once again, Dewey agrees with Mead. Mead had observed in his essay, “A Pragmatic Theory of Truth”, of 1929 that: “We are not in the judgment simply associating two experiences with each other. We are making possible the experience which the conflicting elements in the subject situation call for.”97 The new situation in which a research finding has been obtained creates what Dewey refers to as a “universe of experience”, which he gives primacy over discursive reflection98: “A universe of experience is the precondition of a universe of discourse.”99 This remark may also be understood as a criticism of the cognitivist and empirically weak epistemologies of his day. Dewey defines the local situation as a prerequisite for having experiences with objects or events.100 Reflexivity begins when the flow of experience (“habit”) is disrupted due to either a random or manipulated event. Dewey also uses the term “impulse” for this in his writings on education.101 How actors deal situationally with the unsettling of acquired habits is crucial to the quality of reflection. Individual action options arise from the internalisation of prevailing “customs”, a process that characterises a specific habitual structure, in other words, a “habit”. Dewey works on the assumption that “habits” are socially acquired. Yet, in line with his cultural naturalism, they have a quasi-physiological rather 96

We can discern here an interesting congruence between Dewey’s linkage of situation and judgment (in contexts of inquiry) and Niklas Luhmann’s notion of “observation, defined as the operation of making distinctions and designations” (Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 73). 97 Mead, George H.: “A Pragmatic Theory of Truth”, in Mead, Georg, H.: Studies in the Nature of Truth, University of California Publications in Philosophy 11 (1929), p. 72. 98 Dewey, Logic, p. 109. 99 Ibid., p. 74. 100 Ibid., p. 73. 101 See Dewey, John: Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology, New York: Modern Library 1922, p. 89f.

44

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

than classifying role because they require “the co-operation of organism and environment”.102 In other words, the environment-dependent situation requires that experiences be had with a view to their future consequences, which Dewey refers to as “ends-in-view”. The situation, understood in this way, leads us to a theory of medial closure that facilitates action. Hence, the situational judgement pursues operational ends—and not an end in itself, such as road safety or the quality of a sports tournament, though it might possibly do this as well.103 Instead, the significance of an experience’s environment-dependence, or the significance of an experience’s interruption, is that actional decisions and, thus, situational knowing are made available as “procedural tools”. What we are dealing with here are “modes of operation that will resolve the doubtful situation which evokes and demands judgment”.104 Helmut Pape sums these insights up as follows: “The theory of the situation translates the primacy of practice, as found in pragmatism, into the primacy of spontaneous co-ordination, as part of the flow of life, of ‘habits’ through inquiry in both everyday life and science. The presence of the situation of physical being constitutes the practice of mutually oriented action and makes it possible to identify what research refers to for a particular community.”105 Environmentdependence and situativity, thus, establish constitutive preconditions for having experiences and the capacity to process them reflexively. This also applies to the materiality of experiences—as discussed by Dewey around 50 years before philosophy-of-science constructivism and laboratory studies won out over a theory of knowing limited solely to subject, discourse and cognition. (b) The correlativity of experience Dewey’s concept of experience is of such interest to sociology because it is located at precisely the point where habit and surprise intersect. This concept guarantees physical, psychological, social and physiological stability, but, at the same time, it integrates disruption, difference and change. These multifarious uses of experience are based phenomenologically on the “habit”, and epistemologically on the functional interdependence of experience, practice and knowing. While the reception of Dewey has already addressed his contribution to a different conception of history, the specific historicity of experience in the little investigated Deweyan experimentalism entails an insight of tremendous value to research practice. This is because here, in contrast, for example, to the “practical sense” of Pierre Bourdieu, this historicity is explained in terms of process rather than genealogy. Evolution and correlation—on this basis, Dewey hoped to contribute to an epistemological rapprochement between philosophy, the natural sciences and the social sciences.

102

Ibid, p. 14f. See Dewey, Logic, p. 168. 104 Ibid., p. 169. 105 Pape, Helmut: “Deweys Situation. Gescheitertes Handeln, gelingendes Erkennen und das gute Leben”, in: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 34/3 (2009): 341. 103

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

45

In Logic, Dewey buttresses his thesis of continuity between experience and practice by endowing it with an evolutionary core: “Events occurring in the future stand in such relations of continuity to those that have occurred and those now occurring that they serve as evidential matter for testing provisional appraisals of recollection about what we have done and what has happened to us in the past.”106 This proposition connects with the situativity and environment-dependence of knowing because “the point that every temporal proposition is a narrative proposition means that the proposition is about a course of sequential events, not about an isolated event at an absolute point in time”.107 Hence, the history of judgement formation within the process of historical investigation is “culminating evidence that judgment is not a bare enunciation of what already exists but is itself an existential requalification”.108 From the standpoint of experimentalism, then, the correlativity of reflexive experience does not consist of falling back on “existing facts” but in their redefinition, which lays bare their temporary (because hypothetical) character. It is the hypothetical qualities of preceding events and their stabilization as realised through practice that make experimental action possible in the first place. Because attained knowledge is transformed inductively by new knowledge, in other words, is subject to constant change through the intervention of new experiences, Dewey mobilises not only the situation but also its inherent prehistory in order to facilitate reflection. Once again, he links this with a fundamental critique of the rationality-centred philosophies of knowledge of his time: “The inherent defects of the traditional (formally rationalistic) theory are (1) its failure to recognize that the procedures of experimental science transform the singulars from which inductive generalisation proceeds; and (2) its failure to recognize the strictly instrumental relation born by hypothesis to experimental determination of singulars.”109 This instrumental relationship also corresponds to the first and second basic principles of logic, which tell us that the latter is a “progressive discipline” and its substrate is “determined operationally”,110 though Dewey underlines that “neither the existence nor the indispensability of primary logical principles is, then, denied. The question concerns their origin and use.”111 Basing himself on Peirce, Dewey refers to “guiding principles”112 that stimulate further investigation. These logical principles, thus, amount to an operational a priori. In this sense too, experiential knowledge (“knowledge by acquaintance”) is based on the possibility of identifying a starting point for testing a hypothesis, as is common in settings of

106

Dewey, Logic, p. 226. Ibid., p. 227. 108 Ibid., p. 238. 109 Ibid., p. 436. 110 Ibid., p. 21f. 111 Ibid., p. 19. 112 Ibid., p. 19. 107

46

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

exploratory sociological investigation. The correlativity of an experience is, at one and the same time, the evolutionary basis for reflection and the precondition for redefining the knowledge we have already obtained. (c) The materiality of experience The editors write in the introduction to an anthology that pays tribute to Dewey’s Logic: “It should be emphasized that Dewey understands an environment to be composed of both physical and social conditions.”113 Dewey’s oeuvre is, in fact, pervaded by examples of the way in which experience is materialised in environments and finds expression in the interplay of various forms of materiality. Dewey put forward a theory of co-ordinated relationships of translation in his essay on the reflex arc in psychology, a theory that defines human action, such as a child’s testing of a candle’s heat, as a circular interaction between human being, situation and object—and not, as was common at the time, as a causal chain of events. In this view, the co-ordination of the human and non-human participants assembled in the situation and the desire to create an integrated relationship between them guides the child’s inquiry. Dewey, thus, set his face against those theories that deny the epistemic contribution and the quality of the object—its brightness, its flickering, its heat—when it comes to triggering reflection. The hand’s rapid retraction implies much more than just a physical reaction—as Dewey saw it, it involves the relational formation of a judgement through interaction with the object. Similar examples can be found in Art as Experience (1934), but were already present in Dewey’s earlier writings, which are consonant with Mead’s epistemological analyses, especially regarding the problem of the object. Dewey, borrowing from James, distinguishes between “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance”, in other words, descriptive and experiential knowledge, in his essay “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge” (1906), which marked the beginning of his studies in experimentalism. Here, “knowledge by acquaintance” corresponds to a reflexive experience that amounts to knowing. In this view, reflexive experience is material, empirical and relational—“a manipulation of things experienced in the light of one another”114 – and creates the basis for making a judgement. Taking a river in full spate as his example, Mead had highlighted the fact that experiences with non-human entities have consequences for human action.115 Once again, non-human contributors to social reality are ascribed here an operational and steering role. This is consonant with Dewey’s hypothesis that materialities may provide the impetus for reflection—a premise currently being explored within research on science and technology through the heuristics of laboratory studies. This concordance

Burke, F. Thomas, et al.: “Editors’ Introduction”, p. XV. Dewey, John: “The Experimental Theory of Knowledge”, in: John Dewey. The Middle Works 3. 1899–1924 (1903–1906), edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1988, p. 109. 115 See Mead, “A Pragmatic Theory of Truth”, p. 80. 113 114

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

47

becomes clear in light of the experimental situation within the laboratory, in which objects are simultaneously tools and objects of knowledge. Dewey’s relational hypothesis of human-object co-ordination as a means of generating reflexive knowledge anticipates a key perspective within the “sociology of translational relations”116 and of actor network theory (ANT): “To the original gross experience of things there is superadded another type of experience, the product of deliberate art, of which relations rather than qualities are the significant subject-matter. These connections are as much experienced as are the qualitatively diverse and irreducible objects of original natural experiences.”117 To paraphrase Durkheim’s pithy formulation: according to Dewey, it is imperative to treat material relationships like objects whose attributes contribute to the generation of knowledge.118 Dewey’s relational materialism, though he only hints at it rather than setting it out explicitly, is the tangible counterpart to his assumption of the continuity between everyday and scientific forms of knowing. However, there is no guarantee that the objects involved within the experiment—instruments, vessels, apparatus and substances—will, in themselves, lead to reflection. Their epistemic locus switches between “habit” and “impulse”, with the latter triggering reflection by disrupting the experiential continuum. This continuum must, in turn, be defined situationally on a caseby-case basis. In this way, the apprehension of an object may facilitate the “seizing or grasping [of the object], intellectually, without questioning”.119 However, it does not guarantee the onset of reflexivity because: “Its very familiarity may be obstructive, tending to fix indications that are suggested in old grooves when the need is to search for data which will start suggestions in an unaccustomed direction.”120 Once again, we must always define the situation and the practical value it requires in a contextual, in other words, operational, way. When it comes to the material aspect of experimentalism, Dewey’s discussion of contemporary physics and particularly the insights of Werner Heisenberg are of key importance. In The Quest for Certainty (1929), prompted by Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainty principle in 1927, Dewey declares the “spectator theory of knowledge”, in other words, knowledge not backed up by empirical knowing, an “anachronism”.121 At the heart of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was the empirical demonstration of the way in which the elements in an investigation (in the case of Heisenbergian quantum physics, these were the

116

See Akrich, Madeleine, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour: Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs, Paris: Presses des Mines de Paris 2006. 117 Dewey, Quest for Certainty, p. 101 (original emphasis). 118 Durkheim asserted that: “The first and most fundamental rule is: consider social facts as things.” Durkheim, Émile: The Rules of Sociological Method, New York: Free Press 2014, p. 29. 119 Dewey, Logic, p. 146. 120 Ibid. 121 Dewey, Quest for Certainty, p. 160f. and p. 195.

48

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

location and impulse of a particle) depend on and intervene in the attributes and measurability of the object under investigation (that is, the particle being studied), and vice versa.122 Dewey underlines the epistemological contribution of observation itself (including the instruments used to carry it out) to the development and production of the research object. The goal here, then, is not to eliminate uncertainty but to integrate it into the epistemic process, because without it, we cannot establish valid criteria for closure—that is, the reduction of uncertainty. Dewey emphasises here that: “The element of indeterminateness is not connected with defect in the method of observation but is intrinsic. The particle observed does not have fixed position or velocity, for it is changing all the time because of interaction: specifically, in this [Heisenberg’s] case, interaction with the act of observing, or more strictly, with the conditions under which an observation is possible; for it is not the ‘mental”’ phase of observations which makes the difference.”123 Dewey’s rejection of the metaphysical “spectator theories of knowledge” was in line with the experimental principle of the natural sciences, in which, as in the work of Heisenberg, a broad array of entities are involved in the production and definition of the object of investigation. These entities interact with one another and trigger reflection precisely because their contribution to an integrated situation is simultaneously certain and not ultimately definable. Similar to Heisenberg, Dewey in no way wanted to suggest that this amounts to an essentially “subjective” influence on knowledge. Instead, what he sought to achieve was the systematic integration of the interdependent material and contextual elements of research. Just as a particle is not simply a particle, problems, as Peirce had already shown, cannot be investigated as such. These problems are object-dependent or are themselves objects that participate, observe and contribute to the constitution of research objects. Hence, the materiality and physicality of experience-based reflection are the prerequisites for its environment-dependence and, thus, for its social being as well. This insight is in line with the concepts of materiality that have been integrated into more recent theories of practice,124 but because it is both relational and empirical, it is even more consonant with the concepts of materiality found in STS.125 Finally, Dewey’s concept of experience reaches its full maturity through his assumption of the continuity of epistemic processes. This notion is closely bound up with the significance of learning action, which is based on the correlativity of reflection. Situativity, correlativity and materiality—we can concretize Dewey’s experimentalism by grounding his reflexive concept of experience epistemologically

122

Ibid., p. 160f. Ibid., p. 162. 124 See Reckwitz, Andreas: “The Status of the ‘Material’ in Theories of Culture: From ‘Social Structure’ to ‘Artefacts’”, in: Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32/2 (2002): 195–217. 125 See Sørensen, Estrid: The Materiality of Learning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, Sørensen, Estrid: “Human Presence: Towards a Posthumanist Approach to Experience”, in: Subjectivity, vol. 6/1 (2013): 112–129. 123

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

49

in these three conditions. They reflect the social scientific efforts to address Dewey’s concept of experience, a notion that has been put into practice in research contexts chiefly by ethnographers. These three conditions, therefore, highlight the epistemological project of making sociology into an experiential science, an endeavour realised through the modi operandi of situating, correlating and materialising. Hence, while the concept of experience gives us the epistemological prerequisite for experimentalism through the criterion of reflexivity, my next step will be to tailor Dewey’s concept of testing to sociological theory building. I demonstrate that the category of “testing”, far from merely incidentally realising the principle of the revisability of knowledge, actually declares it the explicit point of departure for social scientific reasoning. “Testing” is the heuristic core of experimentalism, in the absence of which, not only Dewey’s concept of experience but also his concept of co-operation must remain analytically hollow.

2.3.2

“Testing”: Dewey’s Constructivist Social Theory

If, as Dewey envisaged, the “logic of inquiry” is to help us investigate investigation, in other words, to produce an external description of research, then we have to ask how Dewey unites the processual, quasi-unending activity of inquiry, within both science and everyday life, with the need for concrete, mostly temporally limited solutions to particular problems.126 In what follows, I hypothesize that we can comprehend problem-solving as a procedure that operationalises experiential differences in a way that we can grasp, from a social theory perspective, through the category of testing. The category of “testing” has risen to prominence since the 1980s chiefly as a result of the ideas of Ulrich Beck, as well as those of STS. Its emergence as a category of a social theory has been further impelled since the 1990s by ANT and the pragmatist sociology of critique, as elements of philosophy-ofscience constructivism were incorporated into it. We can place Niklas Luhmann’s system-theoretical contribution to the concept of testing in the same context. Though Luhmann formulated no explicit theory of testing, when it comes to the perpetual revisability of sociological knowing, we can still acknowledge the relevance of his statements on the interplay between observation, operation, social action and theory building, statements that reflect the key attributes of the category of testing. These various social theories, in contrast to the Weberian tradition, put forward methods of analysis that are not opposed to the natural or life sciences but which, at times, make

126

Whether he managed to do so is still contested among philosophers, even those well-disposed towards Dewey’s work. For a relevant critique, see Jaeggi, Rahel: Critique of Forms of Life, Cambridge M.A. and London: Harvard University Press 2018, p. 237ff.

50

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

explicit reference to them, methods already suggested by Dewey’s constructivist naturalism.127 For Dewey, the natural sciences were the guiding light not only for his theory of inquiry but also for what I call his social theory. The experiment provided the paradigmatic frame for problem-solving action, a type of action that Dewey viewed as a model for the production of non-scientific and scientific explanations, not because of a naive faith in science but for strictly methodological reasons. The centrepiece of the experiment, namely, the testing situation, exemplifies Dewey’s heuristic of the transaction methodologically, as well as bringing out its alleged applicability to the solving of social problems. Here, the modi operandi of “preparing”, “testing” and “modelling” become the pivotal elements in knowledge acquisition. The resulting methodological consequences are of key importance to determining the social-theoretical lessons arising from Dewey’s theory of inquiry. These lessons come to light only when we take a closer look at the basic principles identified by Dewey in Logic, their innovative character and the connection he makes between the experiment as a testing situation, experience in the sense of researchers’ and intellectual experience, and his emphasis on co-operation between differing mindsets, methods and instruments, which interact with one another in the testing situation. Here, once again, it becomes clear why, in the dispute between rationalist and empiricist approaches, the experiment signposted a distinct approach and provided a means of casting off the deadwood of an epistemology that, in view of the contemporary dynamics of modernity, had proved quite detached from the world. The previous section already intimated that Dewey’s attempt to combine a processual heuristic with empirically backed facts seems paradoxical at first sight. This is one of the reasons why it is important to clarify just what Dewey meant by an experiment, an issue I will investigate while paying special attention to the principle of “revisability”. This principle compliments that of “reflexivity”, as embedded in Dewey’s concept of experience, by emphasising the contingency of a given finding, in other words, the fundamental possibility that it might have been different. In addition, revisability is a broader concept than contingency because it anticipates potential redefinitions of the object of investigation—an object that incorporates the

127

Hence, within sociology, philosophy-of-science constructivism has responded to the fact that, excepting the organicisms of the early classic figures, US-American sociological imports to Europe have always exhibited this proximity to the natural sciences. From the outset, then, US sociology viewed itself essentially as a sociological form of natural science, and certainly not as a branch of the humanities. Regrettably, the positivism dispute in Germany did more to mystify this scientism than to stimulate a productive engagement with it, widening the rift between theory and empirical reality for decades. See Adorno, Theodor W.: “Soziologie und empirische Forschung”, in: Topitsch, Ernst (ed.): Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne & Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1964, p. 511–525 and Lazarsfeld, Paul F.: “Wissenschaftslogik und empirische Sozialforschung”, in: Topitsch, Ernst (ed.): Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne & Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 1965, p. 37–49, and for a summary, see Ritsert, Jürgen: “Der Positivismus-Streit”, in: Kneer, Georg and Stephan Moebius (eds.): Soziologische Kontroversen. Beiträge zu einer anderen Geschichte von der Wissenschaft vom Sozialen, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010, p. 102–130.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

51

researcher—and readies this object for future changes. Because all knowing must be open to revision, Dewey sees no contradiction between cumulative and processual inquiry, in other words, between the epistemic forms of the natural and social sciences: It is the convergent and cumulative effect of continued inquiry that defines knowledge in its general meaning. In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry.128

In line with this, the fashioning of a problem-solving research heuristic always goes hand-in-hand with the preparing of new, mostly as yet unknown heuristics of inquiry; indeed, such modelling necessitates the latter process. This idea was taken up by Thomas Kuhn in the early 1960s. Revisability, then, refers to not only a descriptive but also a prescriptive-normative criterion that must be repeatedly activated while testing is going on, in other words, over the course of the experiment. As I see it, this is not just the most important and, as yet, least acknowledged of Dewey’s contributions to the philosophy of science, but is probably also the most far-reaching potential source of innovation within his work for the present-day social sciences. Sociologists certainly express a range of often clashing views about the extent to which the history of sociology may be narrated as one of the cumulative knowledge of the social.129 Nonetheless, studies of the laboratory and science over the last 30 years have shown that it is impossible to distinguish the natural and social sciences meaningfully when it comes to their socio-cultural interdependencies with non-scientific research conditions. This has taken the wind out of the argument that the social sciences produce no cumulative knowledge but only knowledge that must always be negotiated anew in particular contexts. Thus, we can no longer rule out the possibility that social theories will also have to prepare their analytical approach in such a way that this form of knowledge is capable of factoring in its necessarily applied, immanent revisability.130 The present-day social sciences are probably better prepared to do this now than they ever have been. It is not just that the advent of the so-called “turns” has shown that whatever social-theoretical accomplishments we might identify, the associated theoretical models and research methods are going

128

Dewey, Logic, p. 16. Andrew Abbott, for example, proposes a fractal heuristic in response to this question, with the help of which he identifies conflicting and ever-repeating interpretive schemas in the history of the discipline (see Abbott, Andrew: Methods of Discovery. Heuristics for the Social Sciences, New York: Norton 2004). But I do not accept Abbott’s notion of cycles of social-theoretical innovation that, ultimately, always address the same issues and, thus, essentially represent formal innovations featuring very little, in terms of content or methodology, that is truly new (see Abbott, Andrew: The Chaos of Disciplines, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2001, p. 32). 130 In recent debates on methodology, revisability is conveyed by the term “situated analysis” (Adele Clarke), or, as in the work of John Law, “situated inquiry”. See Law, John: After Method. Mess in Social Science Research, London: Routledge 2004: 3. 129

52

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

to be subject to permanent revision.131 Even post-constructivists now appear to have grasped that pure or radical relativism can only take us so far.132 The performativity of knowledge acquisition requires both: a sense of secure methodological anchor points in order to provide a framework for knowledge already attained and revisability. Located at the interface between methodologies of “explanation” and “understanding” (Verstehen), experimentalism promises to furnish us with a systematic heuristic of the transaction between forms of knowledge, a heuristic whose methodological implications for sociology have yet to be grasped. In what follows, I elucidate the category of testing in light of its social-theoretical principle of revisability. In “test run II”, meanwhile, I provide a detailed account of the trail-blazing potential of Dewey’s concept of testing for the compatible social theories (outlined above) and describe the modi operandi of testing—preparing, trialling and modelling—as a practised social theory of inquiry.

2.3.2.1

The First Principle of Testing: “Revisability”

What is testing? Dewey developed a heuristic of the active transformation of uncertain situations. Building on the work of Darwin, Peirce and James, he made this tool the basic prerequisite for his reflexive concept of experience: “In scientific inquiry, every conclusion reached, whether of fact or conception, is held subject to determination by its fate in further inquiries.”133 This heuristic served Dewey as the starting point for a functional closure.134 Inspired by the scientific research process, he discussed this closure as a case of “intelligent action”, a constitutive operation that A good example of such accomplishments is the debate on “writing culture” within international cultural and social anthropology, which successfully critiqued the Eurocentric and paternalistic investigative stance of many (mostly white and male) ethnographers. In addition to calls for reflexivity regarding the relationship between researcher and researched, key figures in this debate also discussed the narrative strategies that typify the writing of research results (see Clifford, James and George E. Marcus [eds.]: Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press 1986). Another example is the feminist critique within the social sciences, and especially in STS, though, as yet, this critique has been mostly limited to the Anglo-American world (see Suchmann, Lucy: ‘“Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial” in: Hackett, Edward G. et al.: New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge & London: MIT Press 2007, p. 139–163). 132 See Knorr-Cetina, Karin: Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences make Knowledge, Cambridge M.A. and London: Harvard University Press 1999; Marres, Noortje: “Why We Can’t Have Our Facts Back”, in: Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4 (2018): 423–443. 133 See Dewey, Logic, p. 343. The early laboratory studies took the same view; see Knorr-Cetina, Karin: “Time and Context in Practical Action. Underdetermination and Knowledge Use”, in: Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 3/2 (1981): 157f. 134 On the debates on functionalism in experimental psychology and behaviourism, andon the differences between the approaches of Dewey and Karl Popper, see Tiles, J.E.: “The Fortunes of ‘Functionalism’”, in: Haskins, Casey and David I. Seiple (eds.): Dewey Reconfigured. Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, Albany & New York: SUNY Press 1999, p. 39–61; Swartz, Ronald: “Dewey and Popper on Learning from Induction”, in: Interchange 16/4 (1985): 29–51. For an 131

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology Fig. 2.2 Dewey’s “cooperative phases” within the research process

53

Induction

Deduction

Experiment

reduces uncertainty in both science and society. According to Dewey, the advancement of science rests not only on the fact of its application, but, above all, on the ceaseless scrutiny of methods: “The developing course of science thus presents us with an immanent criticism of methods previously tried.”135 In this view, science constantly carries out checks and tests based on the criticism of and doubts about given phenomena. Dewey’s prescriptive-normative criterion of the revisability of acquired knowledge assumes the equality of everyday-practical, scientific and epistemological explanatory strategies, thus, prefiguring one of the main ideas in the constructivist study of science. According to Dewey, inquiry exhibits a permanent oscillation between inductive and deductive testing formats. What he essentially means by induction is the subfield of experimental testing action that entails the preparation of facts for investigation.136 Deduction, meanwhile, combines the processes of testing and modelling as functional processes of closure, which, in turn, form the starting point for new investigation. Hence, induction and deduction must be understood as ‘co-operative phases’ in the research process that underlie the general operation of the experiment137 (Fig. 2.2). This heuristic of research anticipates a number of methodological debates in a social theory which have grappled with the supposed incompatibility of deductive and inductive methods of investigation. Without discounting the fruits of this methodologically advanced debate, Dewey had already outlined its provisional finding, which is that we should treat inductive and deductive methods of analysis—that are mindful of the need to construct and explore empirically substantive hypotheses—not as alternatives but as complimentary practices. Dewey’s experimentalism, however, goes beyond the pure complementarity of methods. He extends it to encompass the assumption of a both stabilizing and revisable form of theory building. From this standpoint, induction and deduction are not only involved in the constitution of research objects but also in the way in which theories are constructed via this process of constitution. Of course, Dewey’s rejection of the totalism of ultimate a priori justifications did not lead him to question the formation of theories and hypotheses per se. Quite the opposite. Similar to James, Dewey took the view that empiricism had overstepped the mark here. Both enlightening and amusing fictional interview with Dewey and Popper, see Phillips, D.C.: “Popper and Pragmatism. A Fantasy”, in: Educational Theory, 25/1 (1975): 83–91. 135 Dewey, Logic, p. 13. 136 Ibid., p. 427. 137 Ibid., p. 423.

54

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

criticised empiricism for failing to go much beyond case studies not amenable to generalisation. Instead, the pragmatists worked with an experience-based conception of theory that made the potentiality and revisability of theories a key requirement. Here we see the social-theoretical consequence of the substitution of the Kantian “synthetic a priori by the conception of the operational (or pragmatic) a priori”.138 This is because, in contrast to his contemporaries Weber and Durkheim, Dewey did not associate the normative aspect of his theory of inquiry with a Kantian facticity based on reason and consciousness, in the sense of a synthetic a priori. Instead, Dewey’s constructivist assumption of normativity was associated with the revisability of the process of theoretical closure. Hence, presumably in order to stake out a clear distance from the remnants of that synthetic a priori, in case of doubt, Dewey emphasised the primacy of induction. This goes hand-in-hand with the assumption, discussed earlier, of the fundamentally cumulative character of all investigations. In this way, Dewey integrated the fact, which he acknowledged, of the revisability of the judgement into his assumption, anchored in the theory of evolution, of the continuity of experience, practice and knowing.

2.3.2.2

The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

Dewey constructed his operational heuristic of examination out of Darwin’s evolutionary principle of development and Peirce’s experimentalist theory of science. Peirce had made the premise of empirically substantiated doubt the foundation for his logic of inquiry.139 For Peirce, it was only this doubt, rather than any general “search for trut”, that justified investigation in the first place. However, an empirically substantiated doubt is nothing other than a testing situation, both in the context of research and in everyday circumstances, up to and including major social dynamics. How was this testing situation operationalised by Peirce and Dewey? Peirce proposes three epistemic steps. These consist of the sequence of abduction, which corresponds with the formulation of a hypothesis, deduction, which involves the setting out of the possible consequences of this hypothesis, and induction, in other words, the testing out of the hypothesis, which gives rise to a new

138

Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy, p. 77, original emphasis. In an examination of James’s concept of truth and his critique of Kant, Dewey, thus, came to “two conclusions about the character of truths as faits accomplis: namely, that they are made, not a priori, or eternally in existence, and that their value or importance is not static but dynamic and practical’. Dewey, John: “What Pragmatism Means by ‘Practical’”, in: The Essential Dewey, vol 2: Ethics, Logic, Psychology, edited by Larry Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1998, p. 383. 139 See Peirce, Charles S.: “The Fixation of Belief” in: Popular Science Monthly 12/1877: 1–15. On the differences between Peirce and Dewey, see Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy, p. 52f.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

55

hypothesis.140 Dewey takes up Peirce’s idea of abduction by dividing up the experiment, which Dewey situates between induction and deduction, into five stages of inquiry. It is significant regarding his experience-based principle of inquiry that Dewey identifies the stage of induction with the ‘testing stage’ of investigation. Testing, thus, corresponds to an intervention in the object being investigated, in line with Heisenberg’s conception. According to Dewey, earlier analyses endow the “nature of induction” with two aspects: 1. the selective determination of specific attributes, which, in experimentally induced modelling, represent a sort of change, while 2. these attributes, which arise from the process of induction, themselves entail a simultaneously testing and proof value—as we have already seen in the case of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The first aspect means that every instance of testing brings to light a specific quality of the object, such as coldness, hardness or density. The second aspect involves the continuity, discussed at the start of this chapter, between the constitution of research objects and the generation of resources to facilitate research. In physics, this would be comparable with the present-day experimental transformation of wind energy into electricity by means of photovoltaics. This transformation not only has a particular effect—electrical energy—but as a result of this transformation, electrical energy itself both indicates the potentialities of photovoltaics and puts them to the test. According to experimentalism, the same principle should be applied to every form of knowledge production, that is, in principle, to the methods of producing a social theory as well. Hence, according to Dewey, any theory incapable of depicting this trait of the transformation of given facts and unable to bring out the associated production of new facts can only be viewed as “radically defective”.141 Taking his reflexive concept of experience as his starting point, Dewey puts forward five testing stages of experimental action, which I will reduce to the three modi operandi of “preparing”, “trialling” and “modelling”: Stage I: “The antecedent conditions of inquiry” (the indeterminate situation, or suggestion). [I “preparing”] Stage II: “Institution of a problem” (a problem is identified and possible solutions anticipated). [I “preparing”] Stage III: “The determination of a problem-solution” (the formation of hypotheses through the increasingly controlled development of ideas). [II “trialling”] Stage IV: “Reasoning” (the hypothesis is developed and conclusions are put forward in light of it). [II “trialling”]

140 141

See Peirce, Charles S.: “Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking”, p. 89f. Dewey, Logic, p. 422.

56

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

Stage V: “The operational character of facts-meanings” (manipulation and situational clarification of the operational relationship between facts and ideas). [III “modelling”]142 As we saw in light of his concept of experience, Dewey was concerned with the correlativity of experimental action based on a situationally exploratory investigative strategy, whose originality consisted of the environment-dependent possibility of ever new instances of verification—such that the test stage consists only in the transition between the preparation of a new object and its (theoretical) modelling, that is, its provisional closure in order to ensure the capacity for action.143 If we are to grasp the epistemic value of “testing” and its criterion of revisability as a transitional moment within a social-theoretical explanatory heuristic, the situation or, to be more precise, the testing situation is once again crucial. Revisability, in the context of sociological explanation as elsewhere, means reflexive problemsolving through the operationalisation of a testing situation within a circumscribed field of action (ends in view). While impulses, Dewey tells us, act as irritants to everyday investigative action by disrupting habitual structures and reorganising them, in the laboratory, this irritation is deployed deliberately in order to obtain new knowledge: “Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.”144 The nature of the situation determines which data should be regarded as relevant and which as irrelevant. It, thus, helps the researcher come to a conclusion. What I call “preparing” combines Dewey’s stages I and II and ensures the circularity of the procedure by building on antecedent uncertainties.145 “Trialling” fuses Dewey’s stages III and IV, in which the researcher actively influences the object of study. Subsequent to the testing phase, “modelling”, Dewey’s stage V, anticipates possible solutions, which are generated through particular forms of observation, measurement and theorising. The closure that this entails ratifies the empirical findings, a moment of verification that is, in turn, a prerequisite for research and, thus, for new instances of testing. Taken as a whole, the three modi operandi of testing give expression to the dialogical function of induction and deduction. But how do they enter “into conversation” with one another? Contrary to the primacy of practice (as opposed to discourse) in his work, Dewey himself does not refer to processes of preparing and modelling but to “propositions”, which function like a hinge between testing action and judgement, in other words, between induction and deduction. These propositions secure the results of inquiry,

142

Ibid., p. 109f. See Dewey, John: “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology”, in: The Psychological Review III/4 (1896): 355–370. 144 Dewey, Logic, p. 108 (original emphasis). 145 Dewey himself makes it clear that “proof” is not (just) the end of an experimental process of verification, but always also an intermediate step that advances the experiment (see Dewey, Logic, p. 424). 143

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology Fig. 2.3 The model of sociological explanation (Esser)

57

Primacy of analysis

Sociological explanation

Primacy of theory

while also impelling inquiry by requiring a temporary closure. Dewey distinguishes between “existential” and “ideational or conceptual” propositions,146 which are “functionally correspondent”.147 We can see here that Dewey not only comprehends the moment of (empirical) trialling as an inductive activity, but always simultaneously permits revisability at the level of both induction and deduction. This distinguishes him from Peirce and the common social-theoretical explanatory models, which essentially allow revisability at the level of empirical irritants, but not necessarily at the level of ratification, in other words, theory building. The typical counterpart to this in a social theory would be the sociological explanation as envisaged by German sociologist Hartmut Esser.148 According to Esser, a sociological explanation is deduced from the primacy of analysis and theory (Fig. 2.3). Following Dewey, by contrast, the criterion of revisability could lead us to a different model, one based on the three modi operandi of preparing, trialling and modelling, which combine induction and deduction at the level of both empirical ratification and theory building. Hence, a sociological explanation that borrows critically from Esser involves the co-ordination of analytical and methodological choices, with researchers obtaining social-theoretical insights from their experimental linkage (Fig. 2.4). In this view, a social theory derived from a sociological explanation of this kind would not be something fixed but rather something composed149 by fusing analytical (deductive) and methodological (inductive) choices, a composition whose aptness we can establish only through the mutual process of verification that goes on between deduction and induction. From this perspective, theory relies on the verification of its operational, in other words, above all, its empirical circumstances of production. Here, theory is based on reflexive and revisable theoreticalmethodological testing experiences and is itself, therefore, always under scrutiny. 146

Dewey, Logic, p. 283f. Ibid., p. 284. 148 See Esser, Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen, Vol. 1: Situationslogik und Handeln, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 1999, p. 14f. Esser refers to Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Richard Münch and Neil J. Smelser (eds.): The Micro-Macro Link, Berkeley, Los Angels and London: California University Press 1987. 149 For a “sociology of composition”, combining pragmatism and ANT, see Laux, Henning: Soziologie im Zeitalter der Komposition. Koordinaten einer integrativen Netzwerktheorie, Weilerwist: Velbrück. 147

58

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

Analytical decision (theoretically informed/ experience of reflection) Sociological explanation Methodological decision (empirically informed/ experience of research) Fig. 2.4 Sociological explanation as envisaged by pragmatic experimentalism

Hence, Dewey’s deductive criterion of revisability elucidates what the character of testing situations must be, in heuristic terms, in order to keep an operational a priori in play. Empirical data can, of course, provide the impulse and the “material means” for reflection on operational a prioris, which relate to analytical and methodological decisions. As observed data, material means are “potentialities which, in interaction with other existential conditions produce, under the influence of an experimental operation, the ordered set of conditions which constitute a resolved situation”.150 Induction and deduction, thus, refer to a process of constant transaction between episodes of testing, which, in operational terms, are geared towards a particular problem; prepared for their experimental verification; and, finally, trialled and modelled through new (research) experiences. Hence, the modi operandi of testing fulfil all six of the basic principles of the logic of inquiry as set out by Dewey.151 From this perspective, (1) inquiry is a progressive discipline, (2) whose substrate (a priori) is defined operationally. (3) Logical forms take the shape of postulates, and (4) logic is a naturalistic theory (in other words, it is correlative and revisable),152 (5) a social discipline (reflexive) and (6) autonomous, in the sense that it always entails the investigation of (its own) inquiry, which is carried out with the tools of inquiry (it is the ‘inquiry of inquiry’), in other words, it is antifoundationalist.153

150

Dewey, Logic, p. 288f. See Ibid., p. 21f. 152 What Dewey meant by naturalism was his thesis of continuity between “operations of inquiry and biological operations and physical operations” (see Dewey, Logic, p. 26), the non-causal continuity between thinking and acting, and, finally, the “observability [. . .] of activities of inquiry” (Ibid.). The latter is, in turn, the prerequisite for the investigation of research (‘inquiry of inquiry’) of the kind that we have yet to see in the shape of—a sociology-of-science of sociology. 153 Ibid., p. 28. Klaus Oehler elucidates the anti-foundationalism of US-American pragmatism in a general sense: “The roots of its antifoundationalist character lie in its opposition to basic assumptions found in the systematic philosophy of German idealism. With a markedly antidogmatic and antiscientistic outlook, and invoking the finitude and historicity of human existence, pragmatists contest and deny the possibility of ultimate theoretical justifications, the a priori, timeless, absolute 151

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

59

In this view, the experiment localises solutions to problems by transforming and requalifying an uncertain situation.154 For Dewey, consonant with his reflexive concept of experience, this requalification always occurs in a situation and under specific coexisting environmental conditions, which must be factored in reflexively and described.155 Thus, the experiment is simultaneously the locus and practice of explanation as well as representing the material and normative limits of explanation, limits that impel the identification of new problems. In the experiment, qualities are translated into experiences and there is a progressive movement towards the explained situation. Functional closure comes at the end of the experiment in the form of a situational clarification. This closure mediates between the hypothesis that has been formulated and its experimental embodiment. But it also mediates between observer and object, in that the object itself, as a result of the effects of the linkage that affect it, continues to exercise an influence on the process of knowing and explanation, thus, paving the way for the stabilization of the theoretical generalisation. Here, the analysis and method of explanation irritate one another, unleashing a productive engagement with the object of investigation that culminates in the concluding assessment.

2.3.2.3

The Second Principle of Testing: Revisability Within the Experience of Inquiry

If the pragmatic concept of experience does away with the Kantian elimination of experience from knowing, this has consequences, firstly, for the classic separation of empirical and theoretical knowledge and, secondly, for the epistemic locus of knowing. We, therefore, need to reformulate the concept of experience as discussed so far when it comes to the category of testing. We might relate the issue of the site of knowing solely to observation, which reinstates Weber’s restricted concept of experience as an observational category. However, in that case, where do we locate research experience (of both theory and empirical knowledge) and its inductive contribution to the constitution of research objects? Regarding research findings, the pragmatist investigation of what inquiry consists of highlights that it must indicate whether, and if so to what extent, the resulting insight makes a difference. Yet, while Mead’s and Dewey’s ideas about the primacy of method pointed to a continuous process of research involving conceptual and active knowing, they do

validity of structures of consciousness, transhistorical constants in the interpretation of reality, and transcendental preconditions for knowing. They do not recognize ultimate justifications of any kind as a form of argument.” Oehler, Klaus: “Einleitung”, in: Oehler, Klaus: (ed.): William James: Pragmatismus. Ein neuer Name für einige alte Wege des Denkens, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2000, p. 4f. In his critique of antiscientism, Oehler is presumably alluding to the positivism from which James and Dewey distanced themselves. However, the term antiscientism fails to capture the nature of Dewey’s work, which sought to integrate the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences. 154 See Dewey, Logic, p. 183f. 155 See Ibid., pp. 220 and 239.

60

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

not establish an explicit link between the thesis of continuity, on the one hand, and testing, on the other, when it comes to researchers’ experience. The latter, however, includes not only the material results of research but also the theoretical and methodological experiences internalised by researchers, which are subject to a constant process of transformation over the course of experimental testing. This results in a certain indecision on Dewey’s part when it comes to the practicetheoretical aspirations he always emphasised, and sheds light on a general problem characteristic of his Logic. Dewey did not intend to compose a pure epistemology of the kind that predominated in the philosophical conceptions of logic of his time, which lay within the Aristotelian tradition. His was intended to be a “down to earth” logic, which, by fusing inductive and deductive epistemic steps, brings to fruition that which he could only express as a critique and aspiration in The Quest for Certainty: the de-hierarchization of philosophical, natural scientific and all other forms of knowing through the development of a practice-theoretical methodology of knowing. The constructivist foundation of this methodology consisted of the thesis of continuity, which interweaves thinking and acting in the experimental situation in such a way that testing and experience are always simultaneously exogenous and endogenous means of generating knowledge (focused on the constitution of research objects, on the one hand, and inquiry, on the other). I, therefore, concretize, in terms of researchers’ experience, the criterion of revisability, and I do so regarding both the category of testing and Dewey’s hypothesis of experiential difference. The starting point for Dewey’s argument was the following hypothesis. While the separation of experience and practice, of common sense and analytical reflection was socio-cultural in origin,156 the triumph of the natural sciences has de facto done away with this distinction—regrading both its internal stimulus and its application. According to Dewey, it is part and parcel of this shift that we have new experiences based on scientific findings.157 However, in Logic, Dewey either limits himself to experiences of the reception of material research findings, such as new objects, substances or technologies, or emphasises the functional contribution of experience to the validity of research findings.158 It is true that he applies his concept of experience, developed in light of experimental psychology, to research experience in the latter sense and, thus, goes beyond the metaphorical use of the concept of experience as it appears in the work of the sociological classics. But, in the context of his own theory of inquiry, he does not make it clear how this concept of experience is systematically linked with the need for revisability. It is helpful here to take a look at his psychological and educational writings. The early Dewey initially conceived of knowing within the research process as the realisation of a potentiality. In his essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), he replaced the causal logic then common of stimulus and response

See Dewey, John: “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?”, p. 7f. Dewey, Logic, p. 83f. 158 Ibid., p. 248. 156 157

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

61

with the thesis of the experience-based and situationally activated co-ordination of action.159 The web of interaction, co-ordination and situation, in other words, a “contextual whole” within a specific field, which is as relevant to a child touching a candle as it is within an experimental testing situations in central to this idea. Here, knowing is co-constituted by observation: “Observation of the [event, T.B.] is made for the sake of finding out what the field is with reference to some active adaptive response to be made in carrying forward a course of behavior.”160 This active, adaptive response, which produces specific experiences in a situation and a particular field within the research process, in turn, has a specific relationship to a provisionally concluding statement. As knowing, this statement presupposes reflexivity, which consists of defining the quality of this experience. It is this definition that facilitates the co-ordination of action, temporary closure and the formation of a judgement. This clarifies the concept of experience—in the context of testing action—at the deductive level of judgement formation; this level is congruent with Dewey’s general thesis of continuity between thinking and acting. But how is revisability not only related to research findings but also located in the experience of the researcher, an experience which is, after all, as Dewey himself always emphasised, involved in the constitution of the research object? Dewey is short on details here. Revisability requires not only the hypothetical possibility of its realisation but also a place in which it can find expression. Regarding the testing situation of the experiment, we have seen that Dewey’s heuristic of transaction kicks in at the point where researchers switch from induction to deduction, in other words, through a shift in the regime of investigative action. From this perspective, revisability is ensured through the selective feeding of empirical data and theoretical knowledge into the research context—in other words, through induction—and through medium-term closure, which occurs by means of propositions that relate to ideas or concepts—in other words, through deduction. The process of induction corresponds to the research stage not only of testing but also of modelling, while deduction denotes the preparing of a research heuristic with a view to a closure or judgement, both of which can be subjected to a new round of testing. This brings us back to the simultaneous endogenous and exogenous character of research, as implied in Dewey’s Logic. This character is ensured by the continuity between the constitution of the research object and research, with the testing situation functioning as translator. If observation, as set out in the last section, is constitutive of the reflexive production of the research object—Dewey’s thesis of continuity—and one can constantly change and expand the observational focus by switching between induction and deduction—Dewey’s constructivist thesis—then the experience associated with the observation must also change. This is the change I define as “experiential difference”, and it closes the circle between the concepts of knowledge expounded by James and Dewey. What James referred to as the event of

159 160

See Dewey, “The Reflex Arc in Psychology”. Dewey, Logic, p. 73.

62

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

“pure experience”, becomes, in John Dewey’s experimentalism, the experiential difference that disrupts the flow of experience (James) or internalised “habits” (Dewey) and triggers a new impulse. Basing ourselves on Dewey, then, we might state that it takes an experiential difference (in the absence of which, a change in the object is unthinkable) to produce knowledge. Hence, within Dewey’s heuristic of testing, the confirmation of a hypothesis can produce experiential difference and, thus, revisability only if it opens up a new stage of inquiry.161 This experiential difference, therefore, does not lead to greater uncertainty but rather, in the context of the experimental testing situation, results in a systematic specification of the circumstances in which the acquired knowledge is to be considered as valid. A learning process can only be set in motion in this way and, at the end of the day, what is knowledge but learning?162 Dewey defines this learning process in Democracy and Education: Mere activity does not constitute experience. It is dispersive, centrifugal, dissipating. Experience as trying involves change, but change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it. When an activity is continued into the undergoing of consequences, when the change made by action is reflected back into a change made in us, the mere flux is loaded with significance. We learn something.163

“Experiential difference”, as set out in the present book, is the decisive factor in the success or failure of testing situations. With the help of this concept and borrowing from Dewey, it becomes clear how experimental testing situations may be realised as an interplay of regimes of action, regimes that integrate revisability into both the constitution of objects and the researcher’s experience. This clarifies the epistemological potential of the concept of experience for the social sciences, a concept for which the sociological classics laid the basis but which still awaits systematic reflection today. Furthermore, the linkage of the category of experience with the category of testing is of outstanding importance for present-day sociology if we wish to provide an external account of sociological research. This is particularly significant given the increased expectations of transdisciplinary qualitative social research and, above all, ethnography. Precisely because reflexive experiential knowledge— “knowledge by acquaintance”—is simultaneously so central to ethnography and epistemically unsettled within it, the concept of experiential difference proposed here opens up a concrete methodology that also gives us an idea of the socialtheoretical potential of experience-based social research.

161

See Dewey, Logic, pp. 144 and 183f. The following remark by Luhmann reads like a comment on Dewey’s theory of transformation through knowledge-as-learning: “If we assume that cognition means a readiness to learn and if we conceive of a readiness to learn as a capacity for changing structures, then this steers all other considerations inexorably towards an at once ‘constructivist’ and ‘evolutionist’ theory of science.” Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 150. 163 Dewey, John: Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, 23rd printing, New York: Free Press 1944, p. 139. 162

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

63

The premise of experiential difference brings together the research criteria of reflexivity and revisability and translates them into the level of the social, filling a gap in Dewey’s theoretical architecture. Dewey certainly traces a line of continuity between the scientific laboratory and society, but his explanations as to how this relationship of continuity is produced are far too vague for it to be adapted to a social theory. What a theory-of-science of sociological research must clarify, then, is what happens when experimental action and, above all, testing are examined not only as observational units of the contingent management of uncertainties but also always as the transformation of sociologists’ epistemic heuristics. What this might mean, in concrete terms, for the sociological production of knowledge is discussed in “test run II”. Dewey himself, taking revisability as his starting point, had far-reaching aspirations, championing a heuristic of the transfer of scientific styles of knowing into socio-political affairs. He was not driven by a naive faith in progress but, instead, aimed to systematically tease out the potential to shape society as impelled by experiential differences. Dewey hoped to achieve this transfer—as a means of reorienting action to solve problems—through the co-operative organisation of knowledge: In spite, then, of all the record of the past, the great scientific revolution is still to come. It will ensue when men collectively and cooperatively organize their knowledge for application to achieve and make secure social values; when they systematically use scientific procedures for the control of human relationships and the direction of the social effects of our vast technological machinery.164

On this basis, we can now examine the scope of Dewey’s experimentalism as a theory of society by turning to the category of “co-operation”. This category also served as the lodestar for what became known as Dewey’s democratic experimentalism, which has been enjoying a new wave of reception in recent times. I call this his “co-operative theory of society” in what follows.

2.3.3

“Co-operation”: Dewey’s Theory of Society

While John Dewey has occasionally been referred to as a sociologist,165 to call him a theorist of society still seems presumptuous. However, it is his theory of the public,

Dewey, John: “Science and Society” (from: Philosophy and Civilization), in: The Essential Dewey, vol 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1998, p. 368. 165 For example by Richard Münch; see Münch, Richard: “IV. Interaktionismus. Symbolische Interaktion—Herbert Blumer”, in: Münch, Richard: Soziologische Theorie, Vol. 2: Handlungstheorie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2007, p. 259. 164

64

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

the public sphere and democracy that, alongside his ideas on education, has attracted most attention from theorists of society.166 But even when scholars refer to Dewey as a theorist of society, they rarely do so in light of his theory of inquiry. Social philosophers particularly have either ignored or barely penetrated (theoretically) the methodological starting point of his experimentalism, namely, the concepts of experience and testing, along with their respective criteria of reflexivity and revisability. This is all the more astonishing given that a number of theories of society have been put forward that, while not referring directly to Dewey’s experimentalism, explicitly discuss its core elements (the laboratory, the experiment, testing, reflexivity and revisability). We need only think of the idea of the “society as laboratory”167 or of the “experimental society.168 Another problem is Dewey’s performative combination of the constitution of research objects and the formation of values. On the face of it, this seems diametrically opposed to Max Weber’s postulate of sociological value freedom. Consequently, Germanspeaking scholars particularly have tended to be sceptical about the theory-ofinquiry roots of a Dewey-derived theory of society or disregarded them, at a constitutive level, by pigeonholing Dewey’s work as “critical theory”. Let us begin by looking at this problem in light of the thorny issue of distinguishing between theories of society and social theories. From a pragmatist perspective, we might state that theories of society seek to make statements about public problems and, if possible, to identify ways of achieving the kind of reflexive management of such problems typical of modern societies. It is in this spirit that I proceed on the assumption that we can adapt Dewey’s democratic experimentalism to address empirically relevant present-day problems, while comparing it critically with more current theories of society. It, thus, has a potential role as a theory of society not just retrospectively but vis-à-vis the present. The present-day reception, within theories of society and pragmatism and sociological theories of differentiation, agrees implicitly with Dewey that when it comes to tackling major challenges, the options open to contemporary societies are saturated by contingency. Building

See Honneth, Axel: “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation. John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy Today”, in: Political Theory 26/6 (1998), p. 763–783; Joas, Hans (ed.): Philosophie der Demokratie. Beiträge zum Werk John Deweys, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000; Brunkhorst, Hauke (ed.): Demokratischer Experimentalismus. Politik in der komplexen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1998; Marres, Noortje: “The Issue Deserves More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy”, in: Social Studies of Science 37/5 (2007): 749–780; Latour, Bruno: “Turning around Politics. A Note on Gerard de Vries’ Paper”, in: Social Studies of Science 37/5 (2007): 811–820; Boltanski, Luc: On Critique, p. 30; Thévenot, Laurent: ‘Powers and Oppressions Viewed from the Sociology of Engagement: in Comparison with Bourdieu’s and Dewey’s Critical Approaches of Practical Activities’, in: Irish Journal of Sociology, 19/1 (2011), special issue ‘Key Issues in Contemporary Social Theory’, edited by Piet Strydom: 35–67; Lamla, Verbraucherdemokratie; Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, p. 237ff. 167 Krohn, Wolfgang and Johannes Weyer: “Gesellschaft als Labor. Die Erzeugung sozialer Risiken durch experimentelle Forschung“, in: Soziale Welt 40 (1989): 349–373. 168 See Groß, Matthias, Holger Hoffmann-Riehm and Wolfgang Krohn: Realexperimente. Ökologische Gestaltungsprozesse in der Wissensgesellschaft, Bielefeld: Transcript 2005. 166

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

65

on this insight, Gesa Lindemann has defined the shift/leap from a social theory to a theory of society in terms of the primacy of a social theory—to the extent that the latter is empirically substantive: “If the statement that modern society is characterized by contingency is an empirical statement, then, in the first instance, a social theory must play a foundational role for the theory of society.”169 However, according to Lindemann, we should not underestimate the demand for an external account of theory, an account based on an understanding of its historical, material and cultural situatedness.170 In this view, then, we should, in principle, regard clarifying the relationship between empirical and theoretical knowledge as paramount—both at the level of a social theory and of the theory of society. This, Lindemann contends, means that we cannot perforce make inferences from social theories to theories of society. Instead, meso-theories or theories of limited scope mediate between them: “What happens in a theory of society is that we extrapolate an ideal-typical form on the basis of middle-range theories.”171 In other words, these theories of society should not operate based on general social theories simply because the latter would always predetermine, theoretically, what one can perceive empirically. By contrast, Lindemann argues, middle-range theories differ from other social theories in that the former may be verified or falsified empirically. In this definition, as Dewey might put it, middle-range theories are hypotheses or propositions about “ends-in-view”, in the sense of their mandatory testability and potential for revision. In this vein, we would define Dewey’s project as a specifically experimentalist variant of a middle-range social theory, which differs from other social theories through its core, empirically grounded criterion of revisability. So, in this context what is the status, in theory-of-society terms, of the concept of co-operation? Taking up the investigation, set out above, of the principle of revisability, when it comes to the question of social transformations, Dewey’s processual concept of experience assumes experiential differences that we must define in social-theoretical terms through the category of testing. In this premise, experiential differences are generated by testing situations, whose consequences Dewey translates into the category of “co-operation”. In Dewey’s work, the category of co-operation, which I discuss in what follows, ensures continuity between the epistemological category of experience and the social-theoretical category of testing, up to the macrosocial level of analysis. Co-operation is a theory-of-society category because it contributes to the (infra-) structuring of general, socially relevant action configurations. Co-operation is a way—the most crucial way, as Dewey would probably have argued—of dealing with experiential differences that produce uncertainties, both within experimental laboratory situations and in macrosocial contexts. Dewey, thus, associates

169 Lindemann, Gesa: “Die Gesellschaftstheorie von der Sozialtheorie her denken—oder umgekehrt?”, in: Forum Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3/1 (2009): 3. 170 See ibid., p. 4f. 171 See ibid., p. 6.

66

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

co-operation with a normative aspiration, one we can relate to his conception of freedom. As Wolfgang Knöbl emphasises, this conception revolves around the structural potential for the reflexive processing of uncertainty: “According to Dewey, then, we can conceive of the freedom of human action only against the background of the structuredness of the natural and social worlds.”172 Informed by the principles of “reflexivity” and “revisability” we have now established, the sociologisation of experimentalism can make the leap from a social theory to the theory of society by augmenting these principles with that of a “capacity for structuration”. My assumption here is that Dewey’s theory of society, consonant with his constructivist assumption of continuity, helps us illuminate both situational configurations of action and more general processes of social ordering. In this premise, co-operation is a means of dealing with uncertainties, contingencies and experiential differences productively.173 In what follows, I elucidate the principle of co-operation, namely, the capacity for structuration, along with its modi operandi of criticising, participating and collaborating, as a practiced theory of society. In “test run III”, meanwhile, I discuss in detail the trail-blazing potential of Dewey’s concept of co-operation for those sociologies capable of integrating it, while also shedding light on its status as an apt theory of society for our times.

2.3.3.1

The Category of Co-operation and Its Role in Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry and the Theory of Society

Time and again, Dewey has been revered as the quintessential US-American philosopher, upholder of the humanistic “American” values of the pursuit of liberty, tolerance and innovation. This is because in his work, perhaps more than anyone else, he foregrounded the nexus of scientific-technological progress and political progressivism, fusing it with his inexhaustible desire for reform. Intimately familiar with US-American progressivism, he was also one of its leading protagonists. Regarding this engagement, James Campbell remarks: “Dewey’s position is in essence that democracy can be seen as a kind of cooperative experiment.”174 Helmut Knöbl, Wolfgang: “Makrotheorie zwischen Pragmatismus und Historismus”, in: Knöbl, Wolfgang, Bettina Hollstein and Matthias Jung (eds.): Handlung und Erfahrung. Das Erbe von Historismus und Pragmatismus und die Zukunft der Sozialtheorie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2011, p. 298. 173 Since not all experiential differences can be resolved productively, one would have to supplement the category of co-operation with the category of violence. The idea here is that violence may follow experiential differences if they generate experiential ruptures (of a biographical nature, for example). I will touch on the category of violence in relation to current theories of violence in brief remarks in “test run III”, but there is no space in the present book for a more in-depth analysis. 174 Campbell, James: “Dewey and Democracy”, in: Haskins, Casey and David I. Seiple (eds.): Dewey Reconfigured. Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, Albany/New York: SUNY Press 1999, p. 10. The enthusiasm for Dewey’s reformist ideas in the fields of art and architecture was particularly evident in the Black Mountain Project. In existence between 1933 and 1957, this “‘interdisciplinary experiment” established one of the first free art colleges in the US, bringing 172

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

67

Pape boils this down to the question, discussed by Dewey, of how a good life might be possible.175 Dewey’s optimism seems to have been informed by a profound conviction that even the most adverse political circumstances can never justify abandoning the ongoing democratic experiment—a view he was not always able to sustain, but one that did much to shape his socio-political interventions.176 Dewey’s sympathy for the organised public controversy was well known. As he saw it, this was the only way to render simmering conflicts visible and accessible to all, and to settle them through co-operative action. In this spirit, Dewey believed that co-operation must become nothing less than a “habit” of civil society. As he underlined in The Public and its Problems, he considered the public sphere the guarantor of a functioning democracy, one that draws its legitimacy from an integral conception of politics. This political philosophy, geared towards citizen involvement, has made a remarkable comeback over the last 10 years, encompassing everything from local citizens’ initiatives to global participatory movements. Jörn Lamla sums up Dewey’s position: In Dewey’s theory, democracy does not denote an ideal form of government, but rather a pragmatic societal learning process. Through a number of stages, featuring plenty of trial and error, actors must express problematic configurations, define the groups affected and their interests, form associations, and identify, appoint and hold to account experts and representatives, while also establishing forms of mediation and arenas of negotiation.177

The concept of co-operation was central to this idea of democracy and was subject to lively discussion on the eve of the twentieth century, particularly within political philosophy.178 Dewey’s evolutionary concept of co-operation stood out due to its unwavering holism: he conceived of co-operation as a pervasive phenomenon within together renowned European Bauhaus artists and architects, as well as photographers and choreographers. See Blume, Eugen, Matilda Felix, Gabriele Knapstein and Catherine Nicols (eds.): Black Mountain. Ein interdisziplinäres Projekt 1933–1957, Leipzig: Spector Books 2015. Dewey was consulted by the founders of this college on a number of occasions and was explicitly viewed as the project’s spiritual progenitor: “Established with John Dewey’s reformist pedagogical principles in mind [. . .] the Black Mountain College represented an intrinsically interdisciplinary structure, in which materials and content, encompassing a variety of artistic media, reflected an exchange with the natural and social sciences and even with the everyday life of the college. [. . .] Both students and teachers viewed their activities as a terrain of ‘trial’ or ‘testing’, in which the priority was to encourage experiments.” Dreyblatt, Arnold: “Das Black Mountain-Archiv als Aufführungskunst”, in Blume et al., ibid., p. 17. 175 Pape, “Deweys Situation”. 176 During the First World War, for example, Dewey was accused of “blind technicism” (see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 187). In addition, he was party to a public dispute over the normative foundations of political responsibility with his former student Randolph Bourne, who vehemently criticised and condemned Dewey’s support for US military intervention in the First World War (see ibid., p. 196f.). In subsequent years, this debate prompted Dewey to conclude that war was a failed experiment, but, in contrast to Bourne, he did not believe that this extended to experimentalism itself (see ibid. and Sennett, Richard: Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, London: Penguin Books 2012, p. 231f.). 177 Lamla, Verbraucherdemokratie, p. 94. 178 See Calhoun, Craig: “Sociology in America. An Introduction”, p. 1–38; Sennett, Together.

68

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

both nature and society, one that furnished his progressive optimism with an epistemic foundation. Co-operation articulates the key importance, within his theory of society, of the capacity for creative adaptation, which had also informed Darwin’s ideas on the transformation of nature. With an emphasis on “capacity”, Dewey believed this to be of far greater epistemic relevance than the aporias of the “iron cage” of a form of rationalisation that entailed an obedience to authority, as envisaged by Max Weber, or the “social constraints” so central to Durkheim’s analyses of modernity.179 But how does Dewey define “co-operation” and why is this category of such cardinal importance to the sociologisation of his experimentalism? One common sociological definition holds that co-operation is characterised by practically shared norms and values that lead to collective action, though the individual interests fused together within it may vary greatly.180 Against this background, Dewey’s conception of democracy, as defined above, entails the following inference: it is vital to create structures of participation and organisation of the sort typical of civil society in order to, nonetheless, find solutions to shared problems. Co-operation facilitates participation. It releases individuals and groups from the role of political spectator and enables both experimental action and active participation in the life of society—this is what Dewey believed the end of the “spectator theory of knowledge” must mean for a theory of society. His call for societal co-operation, thus, extends the line of continuity that Dewey discerned between thinking and acting as the reflexive expansion of spheres of action, and translates this line of continuity into the public sphere: We take then our point of departure from the objective fact that human acts have consequences upon others, that some of these consequences are perceived, and that their perception leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others. Following this clew, we are led to remark that the consequences are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public.181

According to Dewey, we should not equate this distinction with that between the realm of the individual and the social, which he calls a “false problem”. To quote his critique of his interlocutor Walter Lippmann, this supposed problem rests upon a problem of methodology. The distinction between the realms of the private and public holds out the prospect of a reflexive, external account, in light of the existence of spheres of action and ways of life of varying scope, which are connected relationally rather than in a substantialist sense. By contrast, as Dewey saw it, the distinction between individual and society contributes to obstructing social 179

But on co-operation, see Durkheim, Émile: La Division du travail social, Paris: Alcan 1911, p. 91f. Durkheim refers to specialisation, which is nothing other than a specific form of active adaptation, as an important foundation of the social contract, that is, the core, formal practice of societal co-operation (see ibid., p. 93). Durkheim also makes a naturalistic analogy to the functional workings of the human body (see ibid., p. 98). 180 See Esser, Hartmut: Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen, p. 14. 181 Dewey, John: The Public and its Problems, Athens: Ohio University Press 1954, p. 12.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

69

co-operation as the “problem is now conceived as that of bringing individuals as such under the control of society as a collectivity. It should still be put as a problem of readjusting social relationships; or, from the distributive side, as that of securing a more equable liberation of the powers of all individual members of all groupings.”182 Just how relevant Dewey’s ideas on co-operation were to the nascent US-American sociology is evident in a 1919 essay by C.J. Bushnell, published in the twenty-fifth issue of the American Journal of Sociology, entitled “Scientific Method in Sociology”. Bushnell draws inspiration here from Dewey’s experimentalism, in addition to the work of Herbert Spencer, Edward A. Ross and James M. Baldwin.183 He describes the success or failure of co-operation as the cardinal problem of the present era, which he believes must be resolved by a sociology that deploys the natural scientific methods of biology and psychology. This, he contends, will entail both human beings and “social factors”184 co-operating with one another. Bushnell derives from this the role and objectives of a sociology grounded in the theory of evolution, a sociology he associates directly with the concept of co-operation: “[S]ociology has been developed to furnish the understanding of social organization and evolution indispensable to cooperation.”185 In 1918, 1 year before the appearance of Bushnell’s essay, Dewey’s colleague in Chicago, James H. Tufts,186 had published a slim volume entitled The Ethics of Coöperation, which prefigured some of the key ideas in Dewey’s theory of the public. Here, as later in the discipline of economics, co-operation is understood as a market-like interaction that represents a practical alternative to domination and competition. Within this framework, co-operation becomes the common property of political and economic organisation, in the sense that successful association influences the organisation of society. Tufts understands the connection between co-operation, on the one hand, and domination and competition, on the other, in relational terms and, similar to Bushnell, attributes to it an ethical and moral quality. “In unfair competition there is no common purpose of public service or of advancing skill or invention; hence, no cooperation. The cooperation purpose or result is thus the test of useful, as contrasted with wasteful or harmful, competition.”187 Tufts defines the principle of co-operation as follows: “[U]nion tending to secure common ends, by a method which promotes equality, and with an outcome of increased power

182

Ibid., p. 192. Bushnell, C.T.: “Scientific Method in Sociology”, in: American Journal of Sociology 25/1 (1919): 43f. 184 Ibid.: 53. 185 Ibid.: 47. 186 Tufts is considered one of the founders of the pragmatist school. He brought Dewey and Mead to Chicago in 1894. After Dewey left Chicago, Tufts took over from him as head of department. Together with Dewey, he had published the collaborative work Ethics in 1908. 187 Tufts, James H.: The Ethics of Cooperation, Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 1918, p. 12. 183

70

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

shared by all.”188 He describes what Durkheim had defined as “organic solidarity” about 20 years earlier, in other words, the mutual dependency between participants in the process of production, apodictically, as the only route to peaceful societal coexistence. In this view, co-operation determines the success of industrial, scientific and moral relationships of exchange. It facilitates the ordering, convening and collective modelling of societal reproduction. Tufts does not discuss class differences, let alone class struggle; his focus is on a holistic and naturalistic conception of social organisation. Dewey, by contrast, expands the fact of social differentiation, understood as an experimental process of social integration, into the core, axiological element of his political philosophy. To this end, he draws on his concept of experience, working it up into a kind of social ecology. The reflexive category of experience becomes the functional starting point for the integration of the environment and, thus, of co-operation. In Dewey’s hands, however, as set out above, environment always encompasses a physical and social situation. Similar to Tufts, he considers social co-operation the most important means of advancing contemporary democracy. Hence, if we follow Dewey’s evolutionary naturalism, the analogy looks like this: just as reflexivity, as a practice of the adaptation of experiential differences, leads to the structuring of a situation and, thus, of the environment, social co-operation contributes to the structuring of society. Notably, this integration finds empirical confirmation in the testing situation itself. At the level of the theory of society, the testing situation plays the operational role of handling contingencies by facilitating public verifiability. The verification of “warranted assertions”, in other words, empirically backed facts,189 can only be achieved collectively. This verification requires processes of collective agreement determining the criteria for testing and the purpose of co-operation. Verification also ensures the integration of multiple regimes of action, which keep decisions already made open to future reflection and potential revision. Hence, as a form of the collective tackling of problems, co-operation represents a key practice in the organisation of society, lending structure to social and cultural life. But what exactly does this mean?

188

Ibid., p. 13. Dewey refers to “warranted assertions” as opposed to “belief” and “knowledge”. Helmut Pape elucidates the term as follows: “[He] introduced ‘warranted assertion’ and the general term ‘assertibility’ to describe the end processes of research, inquiry and reflection, such that assertibility expresses a stable relation between the beliefs and the process of inquiry leading to it. For Dewey knowledge in general is equivalent to warranted assertibility. [. . .] The warranted assertion suggests that other lines of inquiry are feasible.” Pape, “Assertibility”, in: Lachs, John and Robert Talisse (eds.): American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, London & New York: Routledge & Chapman 2007, p. 59.

189

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

2.3.3.2

71

The Principle of Co-operation: The Capacity for Structuration

Recent studies of co-operation emphasise its socially binding power and lament political theory’s widespread failure to acknowledge this quality. Richard Sennett foregrounds three aspects of societal co-operation in his book Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (2012): its political framing, social fragility and artisanal nature.190 For Dewey, public co-operative action comes into play when testing situations produce indirect consequences that neither its causers nor those directly affected can resolve alone. Without mentioning Dewey, Sennett also makes an analogy between natural and social co-operation, contending that the latter is always fragile because it can never be fixed, as in the natural world.191 In this sense, the experimentalist category of co-operation differs, in the first instance, from those theory-of-society categories that assume (relatively) long-term processes. According to Sennett, what we must do is rediscover the contribution of social co-operation to the success of societal interaction, as a political art that must be preserved and fostered. From this perspective, the stabilizing effect of such co-operation lies not in the belief in a “great community’” but in a curious, anticipatory and active approach to otherness, difference, conflicts and competition.192 But if co-operation is not a model of order, in the sense of a stable edifice, how can it have a stabilizing effect, in other words, how can it help to structure society? Dewey identifies the preconditions for social endurance and innovation with the help of a conception of democracy grounded in epistemology, a conception that presents co-operation as practical problem-solving intended to process uncertainty, contingency and experiential differences. This goes hand-in-hand with an evolutionary concept of structure. Dewey remarks in Experience and Nature: “The fact is that all structure is structure of something; anything defined as structure is a character of events, not something intrinsic and per se.”193 Hence, the temporary and event-like significance of social co-operation consists of the practice of ‘stabilizing’ as a practical activity, not primarily as a substantialist and, so to speak, ideal objective.

190

See Sennett, Together. See Ibid., p. 68. 192 At present, the often invisible everyday efforts to secure and re-establish co-operative behaviour is being investigated with particular intensity in studies of the politics of ‘care’. See Boris, Eileen and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas (eds.): Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2010. 193 Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 72. See for a pragmatist approach on infra-structures Star, Susan Leigh: “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”, in: American Behavioral Scientist 43/3 (1999): 377–391. Incidentally, Dewey recalls Durkheim’s concept of structure as informed by Durkheim’s emergence theory, a notion of structure that was later taken up by Bourdieu and that Durkheim defines as follows in an essay from 1900: “Structure itself is encountered in becoming, and one cannot illustrate it except by pursuing this process of becoming. It forms and dissolves continually; it is life arrived at a certain measure of consolidation; to disconnect it from the life from which it derives or from that which it determines is equivalent to dissociating things that are inseparable.” Durkheim, Émile: “Sociology and its Scientific Field”, in: Émile Durkheim et al.: Essays on Sociology & Philosophy, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, New York: Harper & Row 1960, p. 362. 191

72

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

The work of structuration must be constantly performed, tested, ratified, concluded and begun again, just as Dewey understood democracy itself as a never-ending experiment. But what does it mean to define structure as the ‘character of events’? The concept of the event had already appeared in James’s and Dewey’s definitions of knowledge, with Dewey characterising the latter as an event with operational character. I have defined this event as an “experiential difference” that, extended to the concept of co-operation, structures social action. We can derive from this the following theory-of-society definition of co-operation: co-operation is an event arising from testing situations, social and experiential differences, and collectively shared insights. Taken together, within the processual development of society, these generate solutions that have an, at least, situationally stabilizing effect. Hence, as a social trope of societal structuring, co-operation occurs based on reflexive and revisable action options engendered by testing situations. Before shedding more light on the modi operandi of a capacity for structuration, namely, criticising, participating and collaborating, we still need to resolve the following issue. If the structuring capacity of social co-operation is characterised by reflexivity and revisability, this still tells us nothing about which normative criteria agents deploy when modelling the anchor points and points of closure within the event of social co-operation in such a way as to endow it with structuring capacity in the first place. Among other things, this problem touches on the question of the normative character of the experimentalist theory of society. Dewey takes the concept of structure close to a constructivist and anti-essentialist mode of reflection, as the following definition reveals: Structure is what makes construction possible and cannot be discovered or defined except in some realized construction, construction being, of course, an evident order of changes. The isolation of structure from the changes whose stable ordering it is, renders it mysterious— something that is metaphysical in the popular sense of the word, a kind of ghosty queerness.194

Hence, the “ghosty queerness” of structure dissipates as soon as we place it in relation to its environment. As Dewey saw it, the capacity for social structuration is distinguished by the fact that the structure is conceptualised as “stable or permanent relationally and in its office”.195 Thus, co-operation contributes to the construction of stable social structures by producing relationships. It provides the event-like character of social interaction with a basis that, in turn, influences the potential for co-operation. Without the capacity for structuration, social co-operation would be a mere event, without effect, and irrelevant to finding solutions to socio-political problems. Dewey links this to what he calls “the structure of inquiry” in Logic. This boils down to three core normative premises: firstly, problem-solving is defined in a situational and anticipatory manner through co-operative processes of negotiation. Secondly, its aptness arises from the collective making of compromises, that is, a form of co-ordinated harmonization, with this production of compromises being 194 195

Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 72. Ibid., p. 73.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

73

based on mutual agreement between the entities assembled regarding a particular problem. Thirdly, harmonization must indicate “consequences” that “will follow when certain interactions take place”.196 So, within this interactive conception of assessment, it is not only situationally indicated solutions but also their ‘potentialities’ that take on a structuring role: an “object [. . .] is a set of qualities treated as potentialities for specified existential consequences”.197 What does Dewey infer from this when it comes to his theory of society? Dewey often refers in his theory-of-society interventions to “intelligent action”, in which anticipation occurs through co-operation, that is, through active participation in the production of new structures: the “knowing which occurs within nature involves the possibility of direction of change. This conclusion gives intelligence a foothold and a function within nature which ‘reason’ never possessed. That which acts outside of nature and is a mere spectator of it is, by definition, not a participator in its changes.”198 The “end of spectator theories of knowledge”, a desideratum Dewey derived from the natural sciences, not only forms the basis for an evolutionary criterion for the structuring of social co-operation but also underpins the specific modi operandi of co-operation, namely, the socio-political practices of criticising, participating and collaborating. These modi operandi also make it possible to determine the theory-of-society criteria for stabilization, which inject a capacity for action and judgement into the ongoing democratic experiment.

2.3.3.3

The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and Collaborating

Dewey, more than just a public intellectual, put forward arguments about the prospects and failings of the modernity that he observed with such a keen eye in the US over the course of his life. With reference to the wide array of movements within the civil society of his time, Dewey traced how social co-operation, as a response to experiential differences, improved the equality of opportunity, access to education and political participation. Socio-cultural co-operation became an everyday political practice that shaped political change within the US decisively. Dewey experienced the real-world structuring capacity of social co-operation in Chicago in the shape of the settlement movement, and within US-American progressivism as broadly understood.199 As he saw it, both were a testimony to the fact that democracies function when they manage to provide and design laboratories for

196

Dewey, Logic, p. 129. Ibid., p. 129. 198 Dewey, Quest for Certainty, p. 170. 199 Dewey’s political engagement was so multifaceted and complex that a summary always leads to problematic abridgement. So, once again, I refer the reader to the book by Robert Westbrook, which provides a detailed account of the various phases of Dewey’s activities against the background of contemporary political conflicts. See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy. 197

74

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

the collaborative transcendence of individual solutions to problems. The critical public—given the theory-of-society pluralism that Dewey defended, we should really refer to publics, plural200—provided the empirical litmus test of the state and quality of such co-operation, which is realised through the modes of criticising, participating and collaborating, as Dewey was able to observe, above all, at the “Hull House” community centre in Chicago, led by his colleague Jane Addams. Even if such social laboratories entailed local “events”, as envisaged in his concept of structure, in contrast to an expertocracy—the only means of reducing contingency according to Walter Lippmann—as Dewey saw it, these laboratories ensured both political stability and a relational interface, one anchored in everyday life, with further opportunities for co-operation. These social laboratories, then, offered a means of transcending the problem of contingency by integrating revisability into societal interaction. At the start of this chapter I highlighted the fact that theories of society are distinguished by their firmly diagnostic and reflexive character regarding specific public problems or, at least, those problems of relevance to specific societal groups. Dewey applied his “theory of inquiry” to the tasks of social scientific analyses that sketched out, in rudimentary form, how—based on experimental action—one might generate sound theory-of-society explanations that help enhance the life of society.201 In this sense, we can read his democratic experimentalism as a theory of modernity exhibiting characteristics typical of early sociological theories of modernity. Firstly, it questions common schemas for differentiating between individual and society; secondly, it explains typically modern forms of social communitization and socio-cultural variation; and thirdly, it pursues its own project of modernity by elaborating a theory of society that is intended to help come up with ways of dealing with the industrial revolution’s unsettling consequences for social cohesion. While the first two points undoubtedly apply to most relevant early European social theories and theories of society, the third appears to represent a “special American path”. By contrast, for example, to the neo-Kantians Durkheim and Weber,202 for Dewey the pragmatist, “intelligent action” meant that his own discipline ought not to content itself with producing detached analyses of “facts on the ground”. Instead, it must actively seek to improve living conditions in what was still a quite untamed form of capitalism by using the tools of the natural sciences and philosophical insight. This analysis is consonant with the continuity, inherent in his

200

A view also taken by Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 305. See Dewey, Logic, p. 481f. 202 Wolfgang Schluchter distinguishes Weber’s “Kantianizing sociology” from Durkheim’s “sociological Kantianism”. See Schluchter, Wolfgang: Handlung, Ordnung und Kultur. Studien zu einem Forschungsprogramm im Anschluss an Max Weber, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2005, p. 102; see also Schluchter, Wolfgang: Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht, vol. I, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2015. For a critical reading of Dewey’s critique of Kant, see Rorty, Richard: “Kant vs. Dewey. The current situation of moral philosophy”, in: Rorty, Richard: Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 184–202. 201

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

75

social theory, between the constitution of research objects and inquiry, between observational category and epistemic resource. In contrast to the concept of (mechanical or organic) “solidarity”, deployed by Dewey’s contemporary Durkheim chiefly to distinguish between different forms of society with their characteristic divisions of labour, Dewey, in his study of the public sphere, discussed forms of association intended to mitigate everyday problems. In line with this, we can always translate “experience”, “testing” and “co-operation” into the practice of philosophising, or into the practice of sociological research and sociological theorising. Long before Bourdieu and the “turn” to practice in the 1990s, Dewey proposed a theory of practice that entailed a problem-solving professional ethics and took a collaborative form: “Philosophy is called upon to be the theory of the practice, through ideas sufficiently definite to be operative in experimental endeavour, by which the integration may be made secure in actual experience.”203 To this end, unlike Weber, Dewey did not presuppose a necessary separation of factual and value judgement, instead, privileging collectively verifiable forms of compromise and of co-operation to achieve shared solutions. More reformer than revolutionary, he embraced a model of the permanent reconstruction of social life by means of a public process of discussion, one that accompanies and steers rapid technological and social change by developing experience-based social plans. For this process to generate relevant and efficacious publics, then, co-operation must lead to action; it begins by establishing associations and must then transcend the limited circle of those assembled within them in order to establish or intensify broader connections. This raises the question of why Dewey did not formulate the socio-political modi operandi of assembling, participating and activating, as inherent in his perspective, as an explicit critique of asymmetrical power relationships, in other words, the question as to experimentalism’s capacity for critique.

2.3.3.4

Excursus: Co-operation Under Fire

The ideas on co-operation put forward by Dewey, Tufts and Bushnell In the early twentieth century were impelled by a desire to provide guidance for a nascent democracy and mitigate the social dislocation caused by a rapidly accelerating, bare-knuckle form of industrialisation. In comparison to Tufts’s remarks of 1918, Dewey emphasises that conflicts are necessary to ensure the functionality of testing situations in the laboratory experiment if anything like progress is to be achieved. Nonetheless, critics have often asserted that, as intimated above, Dewey failed to explain, not only in The Public and Its Problems but also in other writings on democracy, how and why citizens should embrace such a ‘common faith’ in the

203

Dewey, Quest for Certainty, p. 204.

76

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

good life within a democracy.204 This deficiency prompted suspicions, among other things, that Dewey’s faith in democracy reflected a ‘sacralization’ of the political, in a context in which Dewey, raised in a staunchly puritan environment, had renounced the Christian faith.205 Regardless of whether this argument is correct or not, it only tackles the motivation for co-operative action—a motivation that, it must be admitted, is not discussed explicitly in Dewey’s work, although it originates in experiential differences that are, of course, often due to socio-cultural asymmetries. One might counter the notion of sacralization by asserting that Dewey presumably felt that the motive for co-operation had been sufficiently covered by his constructivist social theory: people have experiences by developing “habits” to relieve them of the need for constant reflection, while also exposing themselves to testing situations that produce experiential differences and, thus, knowledge. After all, Dewey’s achievement was having reflected, based on his borrowings from evolutionary theory, upon non-rational motives for experimental action, which neither require an ersatz for sacredness nor can be located outside of bodies and nature. The critique of Dewey’s supposed failure to explain socio-political or other motives for social co-operation runs out of steam if we eschew the hitherto dominant tendency to read Dewey’s experimental concept of democracy independently of the criteria not only of reflexivity but also of the revisability of knowledge. But how might we envisage the contribution of Dewey’s experimentalism to the kind of critique of modernity typical of the sociological theories of modernity of his time? The simple answer is that Dewey was not a critic of modernity. He was, in fact, a convinced modernizer. His project was one of reform rather than a critique of capitalism.206 The critical nub of Dewey’s “intelligent action” lies in the continuity between the constitution of research objects and inquiry and, thus, in the wholesale rejection of any privileged external stance, an approach that applies just as much to the “progressive” social researcher as to anyone else. The agnostic radicalism of this critique comes out if we contrast it with teleological materialism in the wake of Marx and Engels, the heroic historical pessimism of Weber’s sociology or the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The key point here is that in order to keep the experiment going, sociologists too must be prepared to fundamentally modify or discard their preconceived hypotheses. To recall Durkheim’s compelling phrase, they “must be prepared for discoveries which will surprise and disturb” them.207

204 See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 309; Joas, Hans: “Einleitung. John Dewey – der Philosoph der Demokratie“, in: Joas, Hans (ed.): Philosophie der Demokratie. Beiträge zum Werk John Deweys, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2000, p. 13. 205 See Joas, Hans: Die Entstehung der Werte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1999, p. 187. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a copy of the English translation: Joas, Hans (2001): The Genesis of Values, Chicago: Chicago University Press. 206 On the downright wilful misinterpretation of Dewey by the Frankfurt School, particularly Horkheimer, see Hartmann, Martin: “Vertiefung der Erfahrung. John Dewey in der deutschsprachigen Rezeption’” in: Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 34/3 (2009): 415–440. 207 Durkheim, Émile: Rules of Sociological Method, London & New York: The Free Press 1964, p. xlv.

2.3 Dewey’s Logical Experimentalism as Sociology

77

Dewey’s critical sociology differs from the dominant critical sociological schools of thought in that here, critique, in the sense of “intelligent action”, can be achieved only through reflexivity within research practice; researchers must be willing to let go of cherished analytical models if they are incapable of meaningfully tackling the problem at issue. The critique generated by experimentalism, through its shift away from the “spectator theory of knowledge” and its crucial facilitating of an external account of its own research, always has a partially self-reflective character. It, thus, provides one of the foundation stones for the desideratum, as set out at the start of this chapter, of a theory of science of sociology. “Intelligent action” and co-operation appear in Dewey’s experimental conception of democracy as an intervention necessary to ensuring negotiation among actors, interest groups and institutions in the emerging US-American social formation. This conception of democracy cannot be separated from his philosophy-of-science ethics, whose critical practice entails a problem-solving strategy encompassing the micro level of a local and everyday situation of inquiry, the scientific experiment, and the development of states. Dewey calls for a type of thinking in a discussion of the connection between critique and moral values that comprehends that “limits, closures, ends are experimentally or dynamically determined, presenting, like the boundaries of political individuals or states, a moving adjustment of various energy-systems in their cooperative and competitive interactions, not something belonging to them of their own right”.208 What this means is that inquiry is always also critique, because it induces experiential differences that bring revisions in their wake and foster transformations. However, in contrast to the critical programmes, it is capable of subjecting the construction of its own judgements and their consequences to collective ratification. In practice, this ratification is not structured solely by philosophers or sociologists, but also by forms of co-operation (within civil society) among those in possession of the relevant experiential knowledge. A public situation of uncertainty is followed by critical inquiry, that is, experimental action in the sense of an act of testing things out. Knowing, and, thus, the possibility of critique, is the result of an experiential difference. It becomes an event by modifying the antecedent situation. As Dewey saw it, the potential for co-operation within civil society in order to initiate political change is always inherent in this modification. Undoubtedly, as Martin Hartmann underlines, the priority must still be to “unlock the radical potential underlying Dewey’s concept of science, a potential that may lead to a reformulation of political and ethical issues”.209 This brings me to my first interim conclusion.

208 209

Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 395. Hartmann, “Vertiefung der Erfahrung”, p. 427.

78

2.4

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

What Is Experimentalism? Summary and Initial Hypotheses

In this first chapter, I have sociologised John Dewey’s experimentalism by defining and elucidating its categorical foundations. This provided a basis for determining Dewey’s contribution to a strand of sociological thought that, during the period of sociology’s emergence as a discipline, offered interpretive concepts pointing to an alternative to the discipline’s classic figures with their neo-Kantian arguments. Because my goal in the present book is to explain the contemporary relevance of sociological experimentalism and advance its development, I sought in the section above to develop an analytical schema sufficient to this task. Hence, in the spirit of historical experimentalism, I do not aim to determine the sociological sustainability and limits of this schema in advance but, instead, to put them to the test in the following three “test runs”. This interim conclusion, then, is of a rather programmatic cast. Dewey’s theory of inquiry integrates the fields of epistemology, social theory and the theory of society. I identified a core category for each field that articulates the specific methodological orientation required to realise a practice-theoretical research stance. In addition, I assigned specific principles of investigation to the three fields and their associated core categories. Within research practice, be it of a theoretically exploratory nature or geared towards the elucidation of an empirical problem, these principles require specific modi operandi. The latter lend concrete form to the analytical principle embedded in the various categories by establishing a relationship of continuity between the constitution of objects and research. It is in the associated thesis of continuity that the special contribution of experimentalism to the sociological epistemic style undoubtedly lies. This is because experimentalism breaks with the traditional methodological distinction, rejected by pragmatists, between inquiry and everyday action not only as an aspiration but also in methodological terms. The idea here is to make a tool available with which we can investigate existing epistemological, social-theoretical and theory-of-society programmes, whose experimentalist core we can bring out, reflect upon and put to the test, not only analytically but also in terms of research practice. The concept of “experience”, a spectral presence in sociological discourse since the discipline’s foundation, is classified in Dewey’s work as part of epistemology. The principle with which Dewey believes we can decode experience is its reflexivity, and Dewey, building on Darwin, defines this as a creative adaptation to a given situation. Experience, then, is more than a “habit” because it takes reflexivity for it to generate knowledge. It is this that gives it its sociological relevance. The modus operandi of experience typifies both researchers and other actors as they situate, process and materialise experiences, mobilising them to generate resources for problem-solving. But what is it that triggers the translation of experiences into epistemic resources? In Dewey’s theory of inquiry it is the “test” which triggers a modification of “habits” both in the context of an intricate scientific laboratory experiment and in everyday

2.4 What Is Experimentalism? Summary and Initial Hypotheses

79

situations. The category of testing guarantees that one can ratify, revise and, if necessary, redefine the epistemological foundation of experience through concrete testing situations. Its principle, therefore, is “revisability”. The category of testing is an apt means of bringing out experimentalism’s value to social theory because it transfers the element of modelling, which represents a step towards problem-solving within the experiment, into a testing situation—based on doubts inspired by empirical problems, following Peirce. Hence, comparable to the theory building showcased by Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species rather than obliterating uncertainty by positing ultimate reasons, here, uncertainty is made the point of departure for new tests. This is of fundamental importance not only for the everyday requirements of problem-solving action but also for an empirically exploratory form of theory building. In the testing situation, revisability is ensured by the modi operandi of preparing, trialling and modelling, which are consonant with the fundamental stages of experimental inquiry as identified by Dewey. The assumption here is that reflexivity and revisability generate experiential differences that bring in their wake not only individual new insights but also collective forms of ratification. This is the basis for the theory-of-society significance of experimentalism, which I have examined, building on Dewey, with the help of the key category of “cooperation”. Through this lens, co-operation is a productive processing of experiential differences, which the major theories of modernity subsumed under the term “contingency”. The category of co-operation, therefore, supplements revisability and experiential difference by lending concrete form to the theorem of contingency regarding its consequences for social action. Critics might object that co-operation is only one and perhaps not even the most common response to experiential differences. Co-operation does, in fact, reflect Dewey’s optimism when it comes to the potentialities of societal coexistence, learning communities and public participation, all of which we can easily relate to comparable present-day phenomena. Dewey’s “democratic experimentalism” also requires a theory-of-society principle with which we can flesh out co-operative action’s capacity for socio-cultural structuration. Rather than succumbing to cultural pessimism and capitulating to social inequalities and injustices, Dewey’s experimentalism worked on the assumption that uncertainties can and, in fact, must be structured through the modi operandi of criticising, participating and collaborating. So far, one might assume that the categories of “experience”, “testing” and “cooperation” are pure observational categories that I have merely assembled under a new rubric and given the new label of “experimentalism”. This is where Dewey’s thesis of continuity regarding the constitution of both objects and inquiry comes into play. What does this thesis tell us about the rationale for a sociological experimentalism? I will seek to elucidate this by proposing the following three premises: 1. As a science of reality, sociology observes lived experiences while simultaneously generating sociological experiential knowledge that feeds back into society through the reflexive management of social problems. 2. Sociological transformation research focuses analytically on social testing situations in which traditional action options are questioned or suspended and

80

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

experiential differences are produced. Sociologists, as observers, scrutinize the practices of networking and production in such testing situations but are also obliged to put their own methodologies and theoretical models to the test, compare them and, thus, subject them to testing situations. The latter extend the spectrum of uncertainties that might have to be dealt with as far as possible. 3. Finally, sociological experimentalism studies social co-operation as a way of approaching testing situations in a problem-solving manner and examines social co-operation’s relational and structural interactions on a macrosociological scale. This experimentalism incorporates the co-operative character of its own research by conceiving of itself as an integral science whose findings are generated not in some isolated armchair but through exchange with the other sciences (interdisciplinarity) and social actors, challenges and entities (transdisciplinarity). Hence, the sociological experimentalism that I seek to develop further over the course of the present book can unravel the scholastic knot assailed by Bourdieu and others by explaining implicit universals and problematising (operationally) its own preconceptions and research problems rather than clinging to a symbolic “freedom from value judgement” that is of no methodological value. In brief, a sociology geared towards experimentalism observes social change through the lens of experience, testing and co-operation, while viewing itself as an experiential science that exposes itself to testing situations that, together with other actors, it seeks to resolve co-operatively. Dewey “sociologised” James’s radical empiricism by going beyond the investigation of co-operation as part of various individual experiences. Dewey wanted to illuminate how collectively unsettled standards of value might be worked up with a view to their adaptation to a specific problem—in such a way that they might be mobilised to help tackle public issues and enhance problem-solving strategies. Consequently, Dewey’s theory of inquiry establishes a combination of evolutionary theory, a pragmatism of the laboratory and a theory of practice. This combination makes his experimentalism a crucial forerunner of philosophy-of-science constructivism. What is more, Dewey’s sharp criticism of “spectator theories of knowledge” integrated the possibility of providing an external account of (social) inquiry, an account in which interested parties, both academic and non-academic, become communities of research.210 Morris Dickstein compares Dewey’s evolutionary theory of society with Thomas Kuhn’s “structure of scientific revolutions”: “Working from a scientific model like the one later developed by Thomas Kuhn, Dewey envisioned a self-correcting community of enquirers who would proceed experimentally according to fallibilistic norms of “warranted

210

Earlier I touched on the growing interest in such forms of collective problem-solving under the heading of ‘collaborative research’, as practiced over the last few years in international STS. I will be going into this in more depth in “test run III”.

2.4 What Is Experimentalism? Summary and Initial Hypotheses

81

assertibility”, instead of claiming to discover timeless truths that corresponded to the way the world actually is.”211 Dewey, as a socially engaged philosopher, pursued the democratic experiment in an active and interventionist manner. The experiment, thus, incorporated the fact of a co-operating observer, in this case, Dewey himself. Unlike Weber who made a neat distinction between the lectern and political activism, Dewey, similar to James, was highly doubtful about the fundamental Kantian assumption that it was possible to make an environment-independent judgement. Rather than regarding this as a problem that must be erased, as did most Kantian sociologists from Weber to Bourdieu, Dewey turned it into an assumption of continuity that applied just as much to the micro situation of a child’s experience when they first touch a candle as it did to the macro level of deliberative political decision-making. Hence, Dewey’s contribution, geared towards the natural scientific experiment, radicalises the aspirations of established sociological theories of practice by foregrounding the constitution of objects and inquiry at the same time: if knowledge occurs based on a breach within the continuum of experience, in other words, as “experiential difference”, then the empirical methodology itself automatically becomes the object of an external account of inquiry. This lays the ground for a veritable experimentalist social heuristic, one that takes account of contemporary tendencies in the fields of sociological epistemology and sociological theories of science as well as social theory and the theory of society, tendencies that are increasingly making waves within the field of transformation research. As empirically motivated methodologies have risen to interpretive prominence, their capacity for theory building has gained attention within socialtheoretical debates. Furthermore, in the context of ongoing technological, political, economic and ecological processes that entail the dissolution of boundaries and transformation, approaches that identify temporary criteria of closure, such as the criteria of reflexivity, revisability and capacity for structuration, have become increasingly important. Therefore, in the context of constructivist research on science and technology, for example, revisability entails that scholars must allow their theories to be influenced by research practices, to the extent that the latter throw up new questions. Nevertheless, in the first instance, such middle-range theories are anticipatory only in terms of their structural attributes, and not necessarily when it comes to their normative aspirations. During this current period in which deliberative and participatory societal dynamics have become increasingly prestigious in political terms, the timeliness of these theories has found expression in transdisciplinary forms. The result of this is that methodology, along with the theory building in communication with it, has become an actor in the production of the social by producing problemsolving sociological explanations. Hence, that which we can discern in James’s

Dickstein, Morris: “Pragmatism Then and Now”, in: Dickstein, Morris (ed.): The Revival of Pragmatism. New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, Durham & London: Duke University Press 1999, p. 6.

211

82

2 Categorical Foundations of a Social Theory of Experimentalism: John Dewey. . .

pragmatism as the targeted transformation of a “pathos of human and cosmic uncertainty” into an “ethos of contingency’”, as Rosa Calcaterra has correctly remarked,212 led Dewey to lay the foundation for an epistemological and postheroic experimentalism. In what follows, I present a range of social scientific programmes that are compatible with this experimentalism if we utilise the categories of “experience”, “testing” and “co-operation”.

Calcaterra, Rosa M.: “Truth in Progress. The Value of the Facts and Feelings Connection in William James”, in: Flamm, Matthew C., John L. Lacks and Krysztof P. Skowronski (eds.): American and European Values: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press 2008, p. 97.

212

Chapter 3

Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of Knowledge

Dewey and James were pragmatists. What I learned from them was the value of experiment and experience as distinguished from exposition and of research as opposed to scholasticism as a method of education in the social as well as in the physical sciences.—Robert E. Park, 19411

3.1

Reprise: The Two Aspects of Experimentalism—Social Trope and Investigative Strategy

As I showed in the first part of the present book, Dewey’s experimentalism helps us conceptualise sociology not only nominally but also methodologically as a genuine “experiential science”, one based on a relationship of continuity between the observation of society and the production of resources for sociological knowledge. I brought out this continuity with the help of the three categories of “experience”, “testing” and “co-operation” within Dewey’s theory of inquiry, preparing it for the sociological discussion that follows. The special relevance of experimentalism to present-day sociology consists of the methodological integration of sociological research practice into the constitution of objects. “Experience”, “testing” and “co-operation” are understood here as objects of sociological observation and, concurrently, as epistemic practices typical of the sociological profession. My assumption is that social researchers, just like the actors they study, interact with the world around them reflexively, with an openness to revision and in structuring fashion, in order to solve problems assigned to them by society. This prompts us to envisage two aspects of experimentalism. It is simultaneously a social trope and an investigative strategy. This raises the question of how these two aspects interact with one another and what this means for sociological

1

Park, Robert E.: “Methods of Teaching. Impressions and a Verdict”: 40.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2_3

83

84

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

epistemology (or the philosophy-of-science of sociology), social theories and theories of society. A relationship of continuity of this kind, as I argue, is already being realised in a number of relevant sociologies—the most prominent example being Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. This continuity-focused approach, though with a quite different thrust from Bourdieu’s work, is being implemented today in STS. Both schools are occasionally subsumed under the term “theories of practice”. Yet, few scholars working within these two frameworks have made good on the explicit claim to link social trope and investigative strategy. They typically associate “practice” exclusively with the social trope or regard it as an observational category, without scrutinizing the consequences for empirical research practice. Thus, despite the designation “theory of practice”, the Weberian bias persists. The present book, by contrast, envisages a sociological experimentalism, building on Dewey, that will remedy the lack of methodological debate, especially within the German-language reception of practice theories. In “test run I”, which now follows, I scrutinize how the integration of the constitution of inquiry into the constitution of objects—regarding the category of experience—can be put to sociological use. Here, I locate the category of experience in the field of sociological epistemology. This category, thus, forms the point of departure for sociological arguments about and with society, and links up with my initial critique of the methodologically underdeveloped concept of experience within sociology. Its analytical anchor point is the principle of reflexivity, which finds its empirical expression in the modi operandi of the situating, correlating and materialising of problems observed and the sociological investigative procedure. Once again, my analysis begins with a short detour into philosophy. The fact that it is not self-evident that the concept of experience is of such crucial importance, not only to sociology but also to Dewey’s own theory, even for those philosophers who have contributed greatly to rehabilitating Dewey within the canon of philosophies of knowledge, is at issue here.

3.2

Why Rorty Was Wrong

That pragmatism is back in vogue at present is a rather improbable development. Pragmatism already found itself in retreat during Dewey’s later years and, above all, with the rise of the analytical and critical philosophies and social theories from the 1960s onwards. The list of criticisms was long and the condemnatory zeal was often matched by the depth of ignorance. Pragmatism was claimed to be obedient to authority, have an affinity with fascism, be unsystematic and—to quote the least severe of all the criticisms—be beset by a naive romanticism. Philosophy was dominated by analytical philosophy, which cultivated a Kantian-externalised epistemic standpoint. Exponents of critical theories within sociology, meanwhile, argued with those espousing differentiation-based analyses and the interpretive paradigm. That pragmatism might have a good deal to say, particularly to the latter three fields,

3.2 Why Rorty Was Wrong

85

is an assumption that has taken hold within sociology only since the 1990s. The renaissance of pragmatism within US-American philosophy amounted to a smallscale palace coup. It was none other than one of the best-known analytical philosophers, Richard Rorty, who professed his embrace of the “pragmatic turn”, for which the ground had been laid in the United States principally by Richard Bernstein.2 The fact, briefly discussed in what follows, that Rorty, nonetheless, remained a Kantian, in that he accepted pragmatism’s success or rehabilitation only if it relinquished the concept of experience, is, thus, all the more interesting. Meanwhile, abandoning Dewey’s concept of experience also meant denying Dewey’s thesis of continuity between the constitution of inquiry and the constitution of objects. According to Rorty, a postmodern neopragmatism must integrate the linguistic turn in order to neutralise Dewey’s criticism of cognitivism. In this view, the continuity of thinking and acting, asserted by Dewey by means of the concept of experience, is unsustainable empirically and, contrary to Dewey’s own criticism of Hegel’s ahistorical assumption of an action-grounding telos, itself postulates a “panpsychic” criterion that Rorty considered outdated: “In short, contemporary philosophers who profess sympathy with pragmatism show little sympathy with empiricism—they would rather forget empiricism than radicalize it.”3 Rorty identifies the concept of experience with the deadwood of an idealism that had provided analytical philosophy (in the US) with arguments against pragmatism. He, therefore, proposes viewing Dewey’s philosophy as an alternative located not between rationalism and empiricism but between historicism and scientism. From this perspective, the renaissance of pragmatism and the increasing number of pluralistic theoretical instruments are not a result of the “practice turn” but of the “linguistic turn”. As Rorty sees it, the Darwinian element in Dewey’s thesis of continuity culminates in a problematic ontologisation of experience and nature and makes it more difficult to develop an analytical heuristic.4 Rorty’s philosophical elimination of the Deweyan concept of experience, which Dewey himself famously questioned in a postscript to Experience and Nature,5 has met with both approval and disapproval among philosophers and historians.6 It also See Bernstein, Richard J.: “John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy”, in: Bernstein, Richard J.: The Pragmatic Turn, Cambridge: Polity 2010, p. 70–88. 3 Rorty, Richard: “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin”, in: Rorty, Richard: Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 290–306, here p. 292. On the connection between the philosophy of language and pragmatism in Rorty’s work, see Gross, Neil: “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism. A Case Study in the Sociology of Ideas”, in: Theory and Society 32 (2003): 93–148. 4 See Rorty, Richard: “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin”, in: Saatkamp, Herrman (ed.): Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, Nashville and London: Vanderbildt University Press 1995, p. 1–15, here p. 2. 5 See Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 331f. 6 See West, Cornel: The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press 1989, p. 198f.; Frega, Roberto: Pensée, expérience, pratique. Essai sur la théorie du jugement de John Dewey, Paris: Fayard 2006; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 539f. 2

86

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

reflects a typical mode of reception: at most, experience may be of value as an observational category, but not as a contributor to research itself. An open hostility to empiricism is surely more problematic in an empirical science such as sociology. Yet, while such hostility is not always expressed as explicitly as in Rorty’s work, it finds expression in the widespread absence of reflection on methodology when it comes to theory building or the further development of theory. However, this attitude is becoming increasingly hard to sustain in the present context of the revival of pragmatism. Rorty’s advice, therefore, runs counter to the context of the emergence of pragmatism’s more recent renaissance in sociology, particularly within science studies and the internationally influential French “pragmatic sociology of critique”. Even if, for example, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot did not initially base themselves on the classic figures, they explicitly foregrounded their focus on empirical methodology against the “linguistic turn”.7 Recent studies of Dewey of a social-theoretical nature also take up the concept of experience and integrate it into contemporary problematiques. The revival of the experimentalist approach is undoubtedly most apparent in the “radical empiricism” inspired by James, which Rorty abandoned precipitately, an empiricism that is a key point of reference for exponents of STS and ANT. Bruno Latour stems on James’ radical empiricism8 and, in this context, displaying his characteristic self-assurance, considers himself as the only true living French pragmatist.9 Noortje Marres’s research on material participation draws explicitly on Dewey’s empiricist and experimentalist contribution,10 while John Law and Karel Williams, in their proposal for “experimental governance”, emphasise the experience-based and pragmatist aspect of sociotechnical and political crisis management.11 All these authors have put forward relevant sociological heuristics which render absurd Rorty’s hypothesis that the concept of experience (and philosophy-of-science experimentalism along with it) can get by without an empirical heuristic. So, Rorty’s conclusion that pragmatism could survive the transition into the twenty-first century only if it abandoned the concept of experience is untenable, See Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot: “The Reality of Moral Expectations. A Sociology of Situated Judgment”, in: Philosophical Explorations 3 (2000): 212f. This realism and focus on practice are now also emphasised in the more or less contemporary “instruction manual for a pragmatic sociology” by the now renegade ancient students and colleagues of Boltanski and Thévenot, who underline its significance to future research, such as the investigation of critical publics (see Barthe, Yannick et al.: “Sociologie pragmatique: Mode d’emploi”, in: Politix 26/103 [2013]: 175–204). 8 See Latour, Bruno: Latour, Bruno: An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2013, p. xxv and p. 178. 9 In a conversation with me in September 2008. See also Bogusz, Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski, p. 81f. 10 See Marres, Noortje: Material Participation. Technology, Environment and the Everyday Publics, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2012. 11 See Law, John und Karel Williams: “A State of Unlearning? Government as Experiment”, in: CRESC Working Paper 134 (2014), https://hummedia.manchester.ac.uk/institutes/cresc/ workingpapers/wp134.pdf, accessed October 2021. 7

3.2 Why Rorty Was Wrong

87

both from an epistemological and a social-theoretical and theory-of-society perspective. Given the sociotechnical pluralisation of action orientations that began in the late 1980s as a result of globalisation, politically successful public critique and the digital revolution, an explanation of social change focused on language no longer seems convincing. The highly accelerated interpenetration of science, technology and everyday practices has brought about a shift of boundaries regarding concrete spaces of action, modes of production and public modes of problem-solving. Furthermore, a culturally comparative perspective, anchored in non-Occidental intellectual criteria, has enabled scholars to perceive the locality of linguified knowledge production and knowledge transfer and placed a question mark over universalist epistemic principles. The documentary forms of representation that have undergone such dramatic growth in art and media since the 1990s, including observers’ (self-)presentation and their methods, also point towards the further differentiation of a “reflexive modernity” in which, rather than the perfect masquerade and error-free presentation, “authenticity” and “having been there” are symbolically charged and enjoy high regard. Technologies, bodies, spaces and artefacts are becoming explicit participants in the process of observation. They partake of observation and are becoming key argumentation components of the philosophyof-science “turns” that precede them.12 Language and communication remain important, but social scientific analyses are foregrounding material co-presence, the relating of local situations to dynamics with a global impact, and the mutual referencing that goes on between various natural, material and cultural entities. Regarding the social sciences, in addition to the radicalisation of such “realist” research perspectives, this development triggered a growth in the epistemic prestige of qualitative empirical social research and particularly ethnography. And it is not only sociology students who want to go “into the field”. Political scientists, historians and jurists are (once again) carrying out interviews and participant observation in the fields of investigation of relevance to them. The much-lamented “lack of reference to practice”, particularly within the field of sociological theory building, and the recurrent “crisis debates” since the 1990s at sociological conferences and in journals are symptomatic of the profound unsettling of this academic guild. It comes as no surprise, then, that “experience”, having been the key term of modernity, has evidently once again become a key term in our late modern present, with sociology having made no contribution to this development worth mentioning. But what is the significance of the concept of experience and what contribution has it made to sociological epistemology so far? In the following “test run I”, I seek to examine the conceptual linchpin of experimentalism, that is, the experientially charged nature of knowledge entailed in the experiment, in light of three attempts to implement an experimentalist programme in sociology. This leads me to trace a

Bogusz, Tanja: “Nicht Naturalismus—nicht Konstruktivismus. Wissenschaftstheoretische ‚turns‘als Paradigmenjäger”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Estrid Sørensen (eds.): Naturalismus| Konstruktivismus. Zur Produktivität einer Dichotomie, Berliner Blätter. Ethnographische und Ethnologische Beiträge. Special issue 55 (2011): 93–111.

12

88

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

temporal arc from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. The scope of the experimentalist concept of experience is reconstructed on three levels: firstly, regarding the transdisciplinary effects of socio-cultural experiential differences or experiential ruptures; secondly, with a view to the methodologies developed on this basis, which build on ethnographic research experiences; and, thirdly, concerning Dewey’s naturalism, that is, his thesis, derived from Darwin, of continuity between thinking and acting, a thesis that demonstrates striking epistemological potential in these programmes. While Dewey the philosopher took the thesis of continuity as the starting point for researchers’ experience while concurrently positing experiential differences as a precondition for knowledge, sociological analysis takes the historically situated social situation as its starting point. This tallies both with the pragmatist demand for the micro-grounding of generalisation and the demand for what is referred to in the rational choice tradition as the identification of the “context of emergence”.13 From an experimentalist perspective geared towards the work of Dewey, the social micro-grounding of the investigative procedure is simultaneously the prerequisite for its external description. The epistemic duality of experimentalism takes on a concrete form when it takes effect as both a social trope and an investigative strategy.

3.3

Socio-Political Experiential Differences as the Starting Point for Experimental Action: The City, the Country, the Laboratory

In what follows, I discuss Dewey’s experimentalism in light of the hypothesis, put forward in the first chapter, that experimental action within research is environmentdependent and seeks to discover something previously unknown. This “cultural naturalism”, as Dewey called it, encompasses every type of inquiry. Let us begin with environment-dependence. Dewey contended that social inquiry, more than the natural sciences, is subject to a dual hermeneutic, in the sense that realities seemingly external to research, from which it, nonetheless, draws its material and concerns, always represent pre-structured, prepared material—an idea that Alfred Schütz translated into the concept of the “second-order construct”.14 Hence, empirical facts must “be determined in their dual function as obstacles and as resources”.15 According to Dewey, inquiry means that “ends in their capacity of values can be validly determined only on the basis of the tensions, obstructions and positive

From a pragmatist perspective, however, “context of emergence” cannot be equated with the idea of a nomological origin but rather with that of contextualization. 14 Dewey, Logic, p. 486; Schütz, Alfred: On Phenomenology and Social Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1970, p. 274f. Schütz himself documents Dewey’s influence on him in a number of places. 15 Dewey, Logic, p. 493. 13

3.3 Socio-Political Experiential Differences as the Starting Point for. . .

89

potentialities that are found, by controlled observation, to exist in the actual situation”.16 Taking an ethnographic approach, this provides an approach to transformation research for social sciences that integrates experiential differences into its own investigative programme not only in a phenomenal sense but also methodologically. These social sciences observe actors as they produce, qualify and process social change. But they also produce and are subject to experiential differences themselves. The ethnographic analytical process changes both the preconditions for the constitution of the problem at issue, as well as changing the researcher themself because the research experience necessarily puts established certainties to the test. This makes the ethnographic method a particularly apt means of translating experiential difference into a symmetrical research method in which the transformation of society and knowledge enter into a powerful synthesis.17 However, due to the sociological claim to generalise, this method also has an obligation to put methodological limits on that symmetry—which can never be fully achieved—by providing criteria of closure for judgement formation, with the latter’s validity resting on its capacity to furnish us with a viable basis for addressing new problems. In what follows, I will be discussing three sociological programmes that have foregrounded, with the aid of ethnographic methods, the process through which social transformation and the transformation of sociological knowledge constitute one another mutually. The point of departure for all three lay in situations of historical upheaval, all three contributed to the renewal of conventional methods of investigation, and all three championed an epistemological continuity between actors’ experience and researchers’ experience. The first is the First Chicago School of Sociology under the leadership of Robert E. Park, the second is the theory of practice formulated by Pierre Bourdieu during the Algerian War, and the third are the so-called laboratory studies developed by Karin Knorr-Cetina and others, which have led to the international establishment of STS. “The City”, “the country” and “the laboratory”, therefore, represent the both locally circumscribed and paradigmatic sites of experimental social research that defined coping with uncertainties— both on the part of the actors observed and regarding researchers’ own investigative practice—as the distinct challenge faced by sociology.18 It is, thus, in crisis situations that uncertainty becomes a problem, one especially evident in the context of

16

Ibid., p. 496f. See Knecht, Michi: “Nach Writing Culture, mit Actor-Network: Ethnografie/Praxeografie in der Wissenschafts-, Medizin und Technikforschung”, in: Hess, Sabine, Johannes Moser and Maria Schwertl (eds.): Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte, Berlin: Reimer Kulturwissenschaften 2013, p. 79–106. 18 While Bourdieu’s studies of Algeria were carried out in both rural areas and the capital Algiers against the background of the geopolitical and colonial conflict between France and Algeria, I have concentrated on the rural side of the equation. However, urban research as conducted by Bourdieu, particularly in light of his studies of Algeria, can be methodologically productive, as shown by Wacquant, Loïc: “Bourdieu Comes to Town: Pertinence, Principles, Applications”, in: International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42/1 (2018): 90–105. 17

90

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

societal transformation. So, before going any further, I would like to make a few remarks on the relationship between social transformation and sociological experimentalism. From a sociological perspective, the transformation of social orders rests on the emergent materialisation of heterogeneous dynamics and refashioned structures. Recent discussions in the discipline of history also emphasise this correlativity of social change and reject the idea of the historical caesura. The recent history of globalisation19 and the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism, for example, have shown that the unleashing of the globalised society probably ushered in the end of Occidental universalism—thus, implying an epistemic rupture—rather than a series of qualitatively new entanglements within world society itself.20 In any case, the kind of epistemic ruptures often triggered by disruptive social events have consequences that, while certainly highlighting retrospective genealogies (thus, making such ruptures significant to the historian), undoubtedly brought about real-world experiential upheavals for the actors exposed to them. One only needs to think of the change of the system in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hence, it is, first of all, the social effects of such events and the way in which they become inscribed in individual and collective experiences that emerge as relevant to the sociological approach. Secondly, the experimentalist sociology developed here is not content with a descriptive concept of experience. Mindful of the pragmatist duty to think about the constitution of objects in terms of their effects (Peirce’s pragmatic maxim) and to locate knowledge at the moment of disruption of the experiential continuum (James’s radical empiricism), this sociology focuses its attention on the experiential rupture or experiential difference.21 It explores the localities and situational forms of practice through which one might pin down translocal experiential

See Conrad, Sebastian and Andreas Eckert: ‘Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, Multiple Modernen. Zur Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt’, in: Conrad, Sebastian, Andreas Eckert and Ulrike Freitag (eds.): Globalgeschichte. Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2007, p. 7–49. The work of Christopher A. Bayly is regarded as a groundbreaking contribution to recent theories of globalisation: Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, Malden et al.: Blackwell 2004. 20 See Conrad, Sebastian and Shalini Randeria (eds.): Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2013. 21 Even if, retrospectively, we can trace the end of the GDR back to a number of culminating factors, this does not change the fact that it brought about a fairly sudden biographical turning point for its people. In this sense, the notion of the historical continuum, or of a “beginning” that is pushed back ever further in time, only bears up to a certain extent if our objective is to capture empirically the relevant processes of reorientation and the invention of hybrid action strategies, which were played out, for example, at the administrative level in eastern Germany, or the winning strategies of eastern German elites after the change of the system. See the findings of Sonderforschungsbereich 580 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft “Gesellschaftliche Entwicklung nach dem Systemumbruch: Diskontinuität, Tradition, Strukturbildung” in Jena and Halle https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/54 84710?context¼projekt&task¼showDetail&id¼5484710&, accessed October 2021. Furthermore, it seems more than a coincidence that the historical disciplines introduced the topic of “global history” at universities at a time when the discourse of “globalisation” had become omnipresent. 19

3.3 Socio-Political Experiential Differences as the Starting Point for. . .

91

differences. This sociology records its array of contributors and tests multicausal forms of the external description of social scientific knowledge, forms that do not emerge in a (theoretical) vacuum but as a practical response to situations of social crisis. In brief, this sociology takes the thesis of the epistemic rupture out of the world of the sciences and back to its social context of emergence, illuminating its interferences with the formulation of new sociological investigative procedures. The rapid transformation of urban structures in Chicago from 1900 onwards, the French colonial war in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and the “new social movements” after 1968, alongside scepticism about technology and the looming ecological crisis, represent three factors that were crucial to the transformation of the social sciences. Firstly, they generated new sociological objects: urban studies, transformation research and practical studies of science, secondly, new methodologies, namely, urban ethnography, the theory of practice and empirical constructivism, and, thirdly, new sociological epistemologies resulting from these methodologies. Beyond this, what is the link between such different investigative approaches as the Chicago School of Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu’s practice-theoretical study in Algeria and constructivist laboratory studies? Firstly, all are sociologies that embraced the ethnographic method, raising it, in all three cases, to an unprecedented level of analytical sophistication. All provide us with examples of experimentalism that help us assess the epistemic yield of empirical researcher experiences. What I seek to show is why experimentalism, as an investigative strategy, made an impact in differing historical situations and social scientific disciplinary constellations. Secondly, the point of departure for investigation in all three programmes are the processes of social transformation that induce experiential differences or experiential ruptures for relevant social actors. While these experiential differences or ruptures undoubtedly gave rise to very different initial situations, temporalities and forms of expression (industrialisation and urbanisation, colonial war, scientific revolutions, critiques of technology and ecological critiques), (participant) observation of such disjunctures shaped the methods of these sociologies fundamentally. The dissolution of old orders and the problems entailed in establishing new ones—whether we are dealing with an urban organisation, a new social order determined by colonial power, or an epistemic culture challenged by crises and innovations—form the epistemic background to the following questions. How do social actors deal with these experiential upheavals? In what way do they themselves contribute to them and develop new action options? What structural limits do they come up against? It is in light of these questions that I aim to elucidate the contexts of emergence of these three programmes, relating them to one another with a view to discovering the conceptual relevance of the experiential rupture. I do this with the aid of a more precise definition of the three modi operandi of experience, which I relate to these programmes.

92

3.4

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

Dewey’s practice-theoretical contribution rests on the premise of a reflexive concept of experience that has proved its worth both in anthropological and sociological research processes. This is evident in the increasing efforts to turn ethnography, once the core method of ethnology and anthropology, into an established feature of qualitative social research and, thus, accommodate increased expectations of ethnography’s epistemic competency.22 The growing prestige of ethnography highlights a systematic rapprochement between sociology, ethnology and anthropology; in France, this is part of the development of the discipline of sociology.23 In Germany, meanwhile, it remains a novelty. Dewey’s concept of experience, then, finds its epistemological place in a changing epistemic constellation within the discipline of sociology. In the history of ethnography, the heuristic interdependence of experience and reflexivity was from the outset a constitutive element in the establishment and problematisation of its core business—participant observation. We can explain this on the international level, above all, in the US, France and the United Kingdom, in light of the connection between anthropology and colonial history.24 The initial situation of German-speaking social and cultural anthropology was rather different, with the field emerging—in Heinrich Riehl’s Wanderberichten (accounts of his journeys) and Utz Jeggle’s observations—from the interleaving of Volkskunde (roughly: folklore studies) and “oral history”, and shaped by the sharp distinction between Volkskunde and Völkerkunde (ethnology). Initially, participant observation was synonymous with the spatial and physical presence of the researcher—whether voluntarily, as in the case of Riehl’s visits to the dwellings and inns of rural Germany in the late nineteenth century, or involuntarily, as in the case of Polish-British anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who had only planned to stay in Melanesia for a few months when the First World War prevented him from returning to Europe, resulting in a sojourn of 3 years. Participant observation generated a professional ethos of total “immersement” in the everyday life of the society being investigated, not least in opposition to the interpretive sovereignty of armchair anthropologists. Subsequent to the “writing culture” debates of the 1980s, which proclaimed the “death of the ethnographic author” based on, notably, a post-colonial critique of

22

See Law, John: After method. Mess in social science research, London: Routledge 2004 and the international Journal HAU, Journal for Ethnographic Theory, https://www.haujournal.org/index. php/hau/index, accessed on 22 August 2021. 23 See Bogusz, Tanja: “Synchronisationen. Bourdieu, Durkheim und die Ethnologie”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz (eds.): Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2013, p. 348–361. 24 See, for example, Lewis, Diane: “Anthropology and Colonialism”, in: Current Anthropology 14/5 (1973): 581–602; Pinkowski, Marc: “Julian Steward, American Anthropology, and Colonialism”, in: Histories of Anthropology Annual 4 (2008): 172–204.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

93

hegemony, many scholars are presently engaged in an intensive debate on the connection between the temporally, physically and spatially co-produced research situation and reflexivity. An introductory text on the methods of cultural anthropology, thus, states: Cultural anthropologists conceive of research as a communicative process between researcher and research object, with the latter changing by virtue of the very fact that it is being investigated. Every observation influences the object being observed. Self-reflection and introspection are themselves part of the methodological repertoire of cultural anthropology and are central to its understanding of research.25

Consequently, we can strip down the epistemological basis of reflexive field research to an experiential knowledge that locates ethnographic situating, correlating and materialising spatiotemporally. In what follows, I will discuss, in turn, these three modi operandi associated with the production of reflexivity within the research process. I conceptualise them as experimental research strategies in which reflexive experiential knowledge passes through three epistemic stages: (a) the event of a transformational moment that engenders an experiential difference, perhaps even an experiential rupture; (b) the experimental realisation of this experiential difference in the researcher’s experience; which (c) culminates in a practice-theoretical thesis of continuity between knowledge and practice.

Situating The urban researchers of the First Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s initially interpreted experiential differences as instances of unsettling, at the level of both political steering and everyday individual and collective life. The Chicago sociologists sought to survey the derivatives, anomie and productive-creative consequences of these social problems. Their work reflected the contemporary emphasis on the de-dramatized exploration of problems and the attempt to solve problems, very much in the spirit of their contemporary and teacher John Dewey. Robert E. Park and his colleagues concluded that technological acceleration and socio-cultural differentiation, which were generating an explosive proliferation of social worlds in the city of Chicago, could be put down to three key phenomena: heterogeneity, mobility and acculturation. We may, thus, define the research practice of the Chicago School as a process of the situating of environment-dependent action in the context of social change, which also finds expression in the documentational techniques used by researchers within this school: population statistics, mapping, the calculation of spatially determinable socio-cultural groups, and the study of novel, mobile actors, such as the migratory worker, the “hobo”. It was based on this body of

Bischoff, Christine: “Empirie und Theorie”, in: Bischoff, Christine, Karoline Oehme-Jüngling and Walter Leimgruber (eds.): Methoden der Kulturanthropologie, Bern: Haupt Verlag 2014, p. 15.

25

94

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

research that one of the most influential Chicago researchers, William I. Thomas, referred to the “logic of the situation”,26 which posits that if people define a situation as real, then it is real in its consequences, a notion now known as the “Thomas theorem” in honour of this scholar and his wife Dorothy S. Thomas. This also means that the lived situation is perceived by actors as “reliable”, in other words, as a truth that emerges from the internal logic of a specific situation, that is, a specific form of situating oneself in the world. Subsequently, this served as a foundation for the school of symbolic interactionism and other qualitative research methods that drew on pragmatism and the Chicago School. However, the Chicago researchers were not only pioneers in the observation of situational logics in urban environments but also established a practice of self-situating as urban researchers and, thus, a specifically experience-bound style of research. The idea here was to commit oneself lock, stock and barrel to the study of the city, and, in this way, to become part of a chaotically burgeoning urban ecology. Correlating The French-Algerian colonial war, on the other hand, was characterised by processes of transformation that produced experiential differences of a quite different kind. In contrast to the comparatively peaceful economic expansion, despite the tremendous social tensions, in the Chicago of the 1920s, the northern Algerians in the late 1950s studied by Pierre Bourdieu lived in a colonial society dominated by France; one that, in the course of the war of liberation, attracted—of all things—a French researcher. Looking back, Bourdieu perceived this endeavour as a “veritable social experiment” in a genuine “laboratory situation”27: “In the Algeria of the late fifties and early sixties, then struggling for its independence, to work towards a scientific analysis of Algerian society meant trying to understand and explain the real foundations and objectives of that struggle, objectives which, beyond the strategically necessary unity, were clearly socially differentiated and even antagonistic.”28 Whether in the situation of war or the everyday experience of colonisation, Bourdieu used the term “practical sense” to convey the embodied locus of the management of experiential ruptures, both observed and experienced. However, the correlating of such practical sense with societal upheavals generated actor- and research-specific reflexivity not so much during periods of disruptive armed conflict as via a long-term process of deculturalisation and reappropriation of formerly valid economic and moral modes of interaction. Ethnography combined with statistics provided Bourdieu with a 26

See Thomas, William I.: The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1928; According to Ernest W. Burgess, Thomas was influenced by Dewey, in addition to Mead and Franz Boas, in a particularly enduring way. See Burgess, Ernest W.: ‘William I. Thomas as a Teacher’, in: Sociology and Social Research 32 (1948): 760. Source: https://www. brocku.ca/MeadProject/Burgess/Burgess_1948.html, accessed October 2021. 27 Bourdieu, Pierre: “Die Erzeugung des ökonomischen Habitus”, preface to the German edition of Algérie 60, in: Bourdieu, Pierre: Die zwei Gesichter der Arbeit. Interdependenzen von Zeit- und Wirtschaftsstrukturen am Beispiel einer Ethnologie der algerischen Übergangsgesellschaft, Konstanz: UVK 2000, p. 7f. 28 Bourdieu, Pierre: The Logic of Practice, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990, p. 2.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

95

means of observing and recording these processes over a number of years and in a number of places. This resulted in a heuristic that presented the constitution of objects and research as parallel processes, a heuristic Bourdieu translated into a methodology of correlation. Materialising At first glance, the natural scientific laboratory exhibits none of these tense, politically and morally charged traits present in the Chicago and Algerian fields of study. In fact, the roots of the laboratory studies seem to have lain in a debate among scholars in response to the crisis besetting the scientific representation of science within the public sphere. It became possible to view the production of scientific knowledge through a socio-cultural lens thanks to the book by US-American theorist of science Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was published in the United States in 1962 at around the same time as the emergence of the new social movements. Precisely because they proceeded empirically, the laboratory studies, which gave rise to the general research field of science and technology studies (STS) over the course of the 1980s, could feed the crucial importance of reflexivity into the social sciences, a reflexivity that consisted of the practice of “materialising” knowledge. Not only apparatus, machines, tools and devices but also coffee mugs, lists, fax machines, and so on, joined the traditional sociological categories, and were endowed with an equal status as participants in the production of social situations and processes. However, in the laboratory studies, the materiality of research experiences was not limited to the observation of natural scientific knowledge. These studies also foregrounded a constructivist reciprocity between material modes of reflection; taking up an old insight from ethnology, researchers studied the presence of the researcher in the laboratory, their participation, as an integral factor in the sociological constitution of subject matter and objects, and incorporated this presence into reflections on the modes of production of ethnographic knowledge. This is in accord with Dewey’s epistemological thesis of continuity. Hence, borrowing from Dewey, I conceptualise “experience” as a prerequisite both for the structuring of social life and for sociological epistemology. Against this background, in the following section, I investigate sociologies whose differences I assess by scrutinizing their specific relationship to an experimentalist concept of experience and in light of the premises they provide for the integration of a social trope and an investigative strategy. In this way, I seek to accentuate and strip down Dewey’s proposed experimentalist principles of reflexivity, revisability and capacity for structuration to their essentials, in methodological terms. What the programmes presented here have in common is that, initially on the formal level, I relate them to one another in light of the places in which they investigated the experience-bound nature of social reality and established associated sociological “founding scenes”29 Founding sociological scenes, according to Sina Farzin and Henning Laux, “highlight, even within the most general theoretical framework, the experiential and semantic background of all theoretical abstraction”. Farzin, Sina and Henning Laux: “Was sind Gründungsszenen?” in: Farzin,

29

96

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

that have exercised an enduring influence on the discipline: the city of Chicago in the 1920s (Chicago School of Sociology), Kabylie in northern Algeria during the French-Algerian colonial war in the early 1960s (Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice) and, finally, a number of natural scientific research institutes studied by scholars in the social and cultural sciences since the late 1970s, with the associated “laboratory studies” having contributed to the establishment of STS. Taking up the latter, in the sense of a “laboratory-based pragmatism”,30 I, therefore, conceptualise all three locations as laboratories that furnished the basic experimentalist idea of the continuity of actors’ knowledge and research knowledge with an epistemological foundation.

3.4.1

“Situating”: The Transformational Moment of Experiential Differences and the Chicago School

3.4.1.1

Chicago in the 1920s

US-American pragmatism first flourished at the Chicago Philosophy Club around 1900. Dewey, who was appointed to his first regular academic chair here in 1904, was able to found together with Mead, Tufts and others what William James enthusiastically described in 1904 as the “new school of pragmatism”.31 This period saw Dewey’s decisive turn to empiricism. Highly enthusiastic about the pulsating city full of “sheer matter with no standards”, Dewey was active on numerous local committees whose roots lay in the “settlement movement” and that launched reform programmes intended to improve poorer residents’ living conditions. As well as enabling Dewey to consolidate his philosophy, Chicago allowed him to subject this body of ideas to an analytical endurance test and forge a connection between a philosophy of inquiry geared towards the natural sciences, the “social gospel” and the public sphere, a connection that was to become so typical of Chicago’s new academic elite.32 This group of scholars was particularly interested in the capacities and potentials unfolding in a city in which socio-cultural innovations were responding to the problems of modernity in a wide range of ways. Dewey’s turn to empiricism was impelled by the objective of establishing a link between natural scientific knowledge and social reform. For Dewey, then, even more than for Mead, knowledge of nature was a blueprint for the social appropriation of the world. No one probably took Dewey’s preliminary work on a social ecology of this kind as seriously as his former student and sometime scholarly ally Robert Ezra Park. The

Sina and Henning Laux (eds.): Gründungsszenen soziologischer Theorie, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2014, p. 3. 30 I borrow this term from Jörg Potthast. 31 James quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 360. 32 See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 59f.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

97

founder of the Chicago School of Sociology advised his students to “Go into the district, get the feeling, get acquainted with people!”,33 “Get your feet wet!” and “Get the seat of your pants dirty!”.34 This imperative to engage in a potentially risky form of participant observation, one saturated with physical experience, came into focus against the background of the specific situation of Chicago, which was undergoing radical upheavals as a result of accelerating capitalist mass production, a process that transformed entire areas into large, colourful immigrant districts within just a few years. New professions arose and the city was gripped by a tremendous mobility, marked by interactions between not only journalism, the labour movement, criminality, poverty and exclusion, but also an unprecedented number of charitable organisations, with key actors and institutions translating the basic pragmatist idea of experimental action into political demands for citizen involvement in decision-making, educational equality and social participation. The Chicago Club of Philosophy—whose members, in addition to Dewey and Mead, included Jane Addams, a prominent figure in the city and co-founder of the charitable Hull House—was the inspiration for a social science that sought to reduce the distance between academics, the general population and governmental institutions.35 The new sociology, which was founded by W.I. Thomas, Louis Wirth, Roderick McKenzie, Robert Park and Anthony Burgess and that became established at the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department in the 1920s, around 10 years after the heyday of pragmatism, was also shaped by this aspiration to everyday relevance.36 The Chicago sociologists translated the external impulses of a city in transition into an ethnography-based experiential science that, as “human ecology”, geared itself directly and explicitly towards biology and geography. Participant observation became the creed of a sociology that recruited its practitioners from the fringes of respectable society and from journalism, and that had no qualms about coming into contact with the uncontrollable and the uncertain; research in Chicago’s red light district, for example, was characteristic. The sociological professional ethos that was taking shape in this context drew on the thesis, for which Dewey had laid the ground, of continuity between researchers’ experience and the experience of objects. The “experience of reportage”, elaborated by Rolf Lindner—which, since the late nineteenth century, had championed “nosing around” and a detached, in

33

Park quoted in Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture, p. 82. Park quoted in Orcutt, James D.: “Teaching in the Social Laboratory and the Mission of SSSP: Some Lessons from the Chicago School”, in: Social Problems 43/3 (1996): 235. 35 See Addams, Jane: A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, New York: The MacMillian Company 1914. On the importance of Jane Addams both for the development of pragmatism and the First Chicago School of Sociology see Fischer, Marilyn: Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing. Constructing “Democracy and Social Ethics”. Chicago: Chicago University Press 2019. 36 In what follows, in addition to Rolf Lindner’s studies of Park and the First Chicago School, I base myself on Park’s 1904 dissertation The Crowd; Burgess, McKenzie and Park’s study The City, Burgess and Park’s manual entitled Introduction to the Science of Sociology and the largely forgotten Students Manual (1928) by Vivien Palmer, which is, nonetheless, significant to the practice of urban ethnography. 34

98

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

other words, non-empathetic, muckraking journalism37—rendered participant observation the basic prerequisite for a form of knowing that emerged within an influential branch of international sociology as a taken-for-granted yard-stick. In a context marked by the practice of the “survey”, social statistics38 and the New Deal,39 a sociology emerged whose problem-solving potential was appreciated and fostered at the political and institutional level in an unprecedented way.40 During a period of profound socio-political change, sociology’s self-image and recruitment options both benefited from its popularity: academic and non-academic individuals, often with a background in investigative journalism, or simply curious and versatile men and women, some young, some already professionally established, were attracted by 37

See Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture, p. 15f. See Calhoun, “Sociology in America”, p. 13. 39 See Camic, Charles: “On Edge. Sociology during the Great Depression and the New Deal”, in: Calhoun, Craig (ed.): Sociology in America. A History, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007, p. 225–280. 40 See Fleck, A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences. We should not, however, underestimate the tense relationship between the altruistic reformist ideas espoused by Jane Addams and the amoral, potentially scandalous and often dangerous muckraking journalism practised by the contemporaneous generation of US-American reporters. The gender dichotomy circulating within the history of sociology, which followed an analogous trajectory, can probably be put down in part to Park’s conduct towards the women at the Sociological Department and the reformist programmes, as evident in the near-total failure to acknowledge the contributions of Chicago sociologist Vivien Palmer and her school-inspiring textbook of 1928. It appears to be more than a coincidence that James D. Orcutt highlights in Social Problems, originally founded by the more pro-reform Burgess and occupying a less prestigious position within the canon of journals, that: “Even though [Vivien M. Palmer] coordinated all the research being done in the department, organized student work groups, and supervised their field investigations [. . .], her crucial contributions as a scholar and mentor are overlooked in many accounts of the golden era [. . .]. Like other women who were at Chicago during the 1920s, Palmer was relegated to a subordinate, supportive position within that patriarchal academic community” (Orcutt, “Teaching the Social Laboratory”: 242). See on this issue also Kurent, Heather P.: Francis A. Donovan and the Chicago School of Sociology: A Case-Study in Marginality. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of doctor of Philosophy 1982. Online https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/20198, accessed in October 2021. and DeVault, Marjorie L.: „Knowledge from the Field“, in: Calhoun, Craig (ed.) Sociology in America. A History, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2007, p. 155–182. Among the journalistic pioneers of undercover empirical urban research in Chicago, Lindner (The Reportage of Urban Culture, p. 19f.) includes, among others, Elisabeth Cochrane, alias “Nellie Bly” (1864–1922), who travelled round the world in 72 days and slipped into a wide variety of roles in order to pose as a “madwoman” or a “Mexican”, get herself arrested or employed as a housemaid—and, thus, to investigate hard-to-enter institutions and unfair working conditions. Her reports, according to Lindner, achieved such notoriety that many began to eye beggars suspiciously in case they were “the Bly girl”, prompting her to disguise herself constantly, such that she “only appeared in the editor’s office wearing a large hat with a veil. This type of disguise also demonstrates the elegance which was attributed to her.” (Lindner 1996, p. 20). Neither Cochrane’s nor Palmer’s detached dauntlessness and spirit of inquiry tally with the contemporary, patriarchal sociological narratives recapitulated by Craig Calhoun in his critical introduction to Sociology in America. A History regarding the gender hierarchy (see Calhoun, “Sociology in America”, p. 18). 38

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

99

a discipline that not only described socially relevant knowledge but that literally internalised it through physical endeavour.41 The city of Chicago and the sociopolitical situation of the 1920s and 1930s evidently offered the ideal setting for this. The so-called “second industrial revolution”, including electrification, drove an unprecedented growth in urban agglomerations, in which the advent of the rotary press and the first cinemas expanded both communication and the press. Rolf Lindner identifies three thematic foci of Chicago sociology as led by Park, a sociology that surveyed the processes of transformation going on in the city: “(1) the city as a constellation of spatially located social worlds, (2) the development of new city-specific professions and the reshaping of mentalities and behaviours [. . .] and (3) the transformation of regulatory and integrating systems and the emergence of new social formations and mechanisms for forging consensus”.42 Hartmut Rosa has defined this development as a “circle of acceleration”, in which modernity, firstly, becomes functionally differentiated, secondly, generates growth societies, and thirdly, produces steered societies whose forms of political organisation are confronted with “paradoxical time horizons between desynchronization and disintegration”.43 This is bound up with the fact that as communicative relations are accelerated by technology, a political problem sets in. According to Rosa, this still exists today, because experiential expectations and participatory will-formation are “capable of being accelerated only to a very limited extent”, democratic politics risk being overwhelmed by “more acceleratable social and economic developments”, along with the technological means that underpin them.44 In the 1990s, French neopragmatists took this idea, culminating in Reinhard Koselleck’s trope of the separation of space of expectation from horizon of expectation,45 to mean that modern societies are subject to a continual flow of testing situations. According to Luc Boltanski, this raises the following question: “Is it not in fact, first and foremost,

On a comparable development in Germany, see Wietschorke, Jens: “Soziales Settlement und ethnografisches Wissen. Zu einem Berliner Reformprojekt 1911–1933”, in: Hengartner, Thomas and Johannes Moser (eds.): Grenzen & Differenzen. Zur Macht sozialer und kultureller Grenzziehungen, 35. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, Dresden & Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2005, p. 309–316. On this experience-based “esprit du temps” and its relevance to the disciplinary development of US-American sociology, Craig Calhoun writes: “Both Hull House specifically and the settlement movement more generally have been claimed primarily for histories of social work, but they figure integrally in late-nineteenth century sociology.” Calhoun, “Sociology in America”, p. 16. This connection between social reform as practised on a day-to-day basis and the emergence and development of sociology as an academic discipline was probably closer in the United States than anywhere else. 42 Linder, Rolf: Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2004, p. 127f. 43 See Rosa, Hartmut: Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press 2015, p. 251. 44 See ibid., p. 254. 45 See Kosselleck, Reinhart: “Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel. Eine historischanthropologische Skizze”, in: Meier, Christian and Jörn Rüsen (eds.): Historische Methode, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1988, p. 13–61. 41

100

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

the nature of everyday testing situations on which our experience of society, its presence and its disappearance, depends?”46 This differentiation and pluralisation of experiential horizons, ushered in by modernity and the scientific-technological revolutions, goes hand-in-hand with a promise of cultural autonomy, which, according to Rosa, renders permanent a “transformation of individual and collective sociopolitical self-relations”,47 in other words, experiential ruptures. The urban reportage in Chicago on the eve of the twentieth century offered a means of professional access to this permanent transformation. In his dissertation “The Crowd”, written in Germany in 1906, Park had called for a functional conception of both these categories, in which both “crowd” and “public” are regarded as ephemeral, transitional phenomena. For Park, these required description within a social-ecological framework rather than nomological essentialisation. Similar to the information churned through the rotary press at lightning speed, short-lived gatherings come into being around unfamiliar problems, which are best captured, by both reporter and sociologist, not through normative presuppositions but through strong documentational techniques. In contrast to the European flâneur à la Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin or Franz Hessel, the US-American urban observer is not out to track down the old in the new. Their focus is instead on the fascinating urban diversity of cultural life and its fusion under scarcely determinable conditions, a fusion based, for its observers, on a strong connection with the present.48 An increasingly insatiable curiosity for the unfamiliar had already set in by the late nineteenth century, a development that, according to Rolf Lindner, played a crucial role in making the mass press one of the leading institutions of the city. For what, it might well be asked, actually is familiar, ordinary and usual in the American big city of the nineteenth century? To an inhabitant, compared with the experiences he has brought with him as a migrant from the countryside or an immigrant from the Old World, everything is unusual and novel to begin with, not least the newspaper “for all” itself. In this respect, the notion of a symbiotic relationship between mass- press circulation and big city makes sense, since the New Press is as much a product of the process of urbanisation as it is mediator and promoter. The new type of newspaper is a central institution and an instance of the transition from the traditional to the modern, represented as a transition from country to town, from the Old World to the New World.49

The “green bible”, the Introduction to the Science of Sociology, published by Park and Burgess in 1927, also highlights the potential of an experimentalist sociology that describes the testing out of action options as symptomatic of a phase of historical transformation in which experiential ruptures are part of the constitutive selfunderstanding of public and political life.

Boltanski, Luc: “Une sociologie sans société?”, in: Actualités du contemporain, special issue: ‘Le genre humain’, winter 1999-spring 2000. Paris: EHESS 2000: 311. 47 Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 289. 48 Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture, p. 21. 49 Ibid., p. 9f. 46

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

3.4.1.2

101

Participant Observation in Chicago

The Chicago professional ethos embraced the thesis of continuity between researcher’s and actor’s experience, as prefigured by Dewey. The distinction between “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance” (acquired knowledge), meanwhile, was introduced by James. It prompted Dewey to conclude: “If we see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge resides in the consequences of direct action.”50 Just how much Park’s teaching method was influenced both by Booker T. Washington’s participatory teaching at the Tuskegee Institute and his experiences as Dewey’s student is evident in a 1942 retrospective51: “Sociologists cannot solve their problems by dialectics merely, nor by making problems for other people to carry out. Sociology must be empirical and experimental. It must, to use Booker Washington’s expression, ‘learn by doing’; it must explore, invent, discover, and try things out. So must students, so must education.”52 Park, together with Ernest Burgess, W.I. Thomas,53 Clarence M. Case, Roderick McKenzie, Vivien Palmer and others, clearly managed to pass this investigative stance on to his students.54 These scholars’ methodology rested on three pillars: ethnographic case studies, the centrepiece, were combined with the historicisation of the groups observed and urban districts and their statistical data. The main point of departure for consulting genealogical and statistical information was students’ participant observation, as James D. Orcutt emphasises: “[F]or students at Chicago

50

Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p. 157. See Park, “Methods of Teaching. Impressions and a Verdict”. 52 Ibid., p. 45. 53 In contrast to Park, W.I. Thomas did not regard Dewey as an intellectual pioneer, and railed against the latter’s allegedly “metaphysical” thinking, which he could not get anywhere with, as he himself stated. See Thomas in Baker, Paul J.: “Die Lebensgeschichten von W.I. Thomas und Robert E. Park”, in: Lepenies, Wolf: Geschichte der Soziologie. Beiträge zur kognitiven, sozialen und historischen Identität einer Disziplin (vol. 1), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1981, p. 247. Neil Gross can, nonetheless, discern pragmatist elements in Thomas’s studies, though principally with reference to the Meadian concept of intersubjectivity. See Gross, Neil: “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth Century American Sociology”, in: Calhoun, Craig (ed.): Sociology in America, p. 194. 54 Joachim Fischer has highlighted comparable efforts to map out a professional ethics by Émile Durkheim, which were not limited to his genuinely “sociological” work, but, at least as importantly, envisaged sociology as “socioprudence”. Fischer derives the latter from Durkheim’s pedagogy; what he has in mind here is the development of a “social intelligence”. “If sociology”, Fischer concludes, “in its deep structure, were closely associated with social intelligence in this way, it would have the air of a risky science, the flavour of an attractive discipline for entirely new talents, which”, to quote his sober assessment, “it tends not to appeal to at the moment” (Fischer, Joachim: “Durkheims Soziologie als Sozioprudenz”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz [eds.]: Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2013, p. 115). A risky and risk-taking sociology of this kind certainly has a particularly prominent predecessor in the Chicago School, though in a different sense and with different consequences than Fischer identifies in the case of Durkheim. 51

102

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

during the Golden era, a primary source of that direct experience and of promising research problems was fieldwork in the social laboratory of the city. [. . .] [D]irect observation of characteristic natural areas and neighbourhoods in the social laboratory was no less important than are basic anatomy lessons in biology.”55 The testimonies of former students refer to a collaborative and co-operative working atmosphere, which did much to enhance the appeal of Chicago sociology.56 In Chicago, the emphasis on the field and on field research meant paying a lot of attention to the object of study, as opposed to making hasty theoretical generalisations or subjecting particular phenomena to taxonomic social categorization. As a sociology of the field, this urban research proved sceptical towards the theoretical generalisation. In Park’s view, such generalisation always entailed the risk of overlooking important, unique features and idiosyncrasies in the constitution of objects. Conversely, urban, field-based sociology risked undertheorisation and, thus, failing to make an impact within the theoretical realm. However, because the choice of the “zone of acculturation” as a field was concurrently conceptualised as a contemporary problem of social importance, the ethnographic case study could generate relevant information for problem-solving, information that, as hypotheses, was transferred to other problem areas. It was in this hypothesis-generating vein that Vivien Palmer explained the decision to pursue case studies of group behaviour: “It was felt that at the present stage of sociological research the minute, exploratory studies of group behavior, would disclose new facts. Accurate case studies are also necessary as a prerequisite to statistical investigations, as anyone who has had actual experience in the collection of statistical data can well testify.”57 At the same time, the pluralisation of “cases” within the Chicago research enterprise was based on an integral approach to each individual case, which was conceptualised with a view to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary comparative studies and urban policy and governance.58 The experimental approach was evident in the exploratory calibration of different forms of data. Hence, researchers took as their starting point a public problem, one that may already have been partially confirmed by other researchers (I), then came an initial, randomly chosen, cursory descriptive case study, which was supplemented by a historicisation of the relevant district and the group observed (II). The next step saw researchers engaged in participant observation through extended periods in the field, which contextualized the descriptive material as much as possible, provided a corresponding cartographic outline and prepared the material for use in the generation of hypotheses (III). The latter were provisionally correlated with statistical figures and data, based on which, researchers would draw up a map of interest groups within a specified “natural area”

Orcutt, “Teaching in the Social Laboratory”: 240. Ibid., p. 236f. 57 Palmer, Vivien: Field Studies in Sociology. A Students Manual, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1928, p. xvi. 58 Ibid., pp. 20 and 45. 55 56

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

103

and complete the ethnographic account, that is, the case study (IV).59 These steps were carried out through a process of back-and-forth between differing investigative methods and situations. What is striking from a present-day perspective is that the theoretical modelling so familiar to us today does not represent an independent stage of research. This is probably because the researcher was meant to put as much epistemic faith as possible in experience and open themself to being surprised by the data collected. In such a “context of discovery”, then, an experiential difference characteristic of the epistemic process could be organised in a “natural scene”, a process that occurred through grasping the “consequences of direct action”. Nonetheless, the empirical case studies were not carried out “without theory”, as is plain from Palmer’s, Park’s and Burgess’s detailed references to the academic literature.60 But what was the epistemic status of observation itself? The Chicago sociologists dealt with the problem of social implementation through a professional ethos centred on the amoral recording of observed realities. While contemporary philosophy and ethics boiled down to an ethical and moral assessment of the observed, Chicagostyle observation of socio-cultural experiential differences did not seek to evaluate conduct as good or bad. This amorality, according to Lindner, was epistemically significant chiefly because it staked out a difference from the reform movement of the day and the Protestantism-based “social gospel”, whose adherents Park dismissed as “do-gooders”. The investigative research experience, sometimes associated with risks to life and limb, does, in fact, appear to have helped generate a stance of cool detachment, at least as presented to the outside world. This detachment could, thus, be understood as a contextual prerequisite for a close-to-life observation-based scientism. According to Palmer, observation as a process of testing or examination and an instrument of data collection was geared towards three experience-led criteria: “[T] he scientific validity of the observation, the contribution of the experience to the development of the research ability of the observer, and the contribution of the experience to the development of research techniques.”61 Park had suggested that the researcher’s observational abilities should eventually match those of an experienced reporter. In a more methodologically advanced way, Palmer highlighted the relevance of observation as a contribution to problem-solving and a social technology of inquiry. As such, observation required constant checking by those involved in the field,62 by colleagues and students and, depending on the range of actors dealing

59

See ibid., pp. 31 and 42. These case studies also included a selection of relevant theoretical texts on the problem at hand. See ibid., p. 44. 61 Ibid., p. 165. For the purposes of self-checking, Palmer proposes a list of questions that can help researchers assess the adequacy and validity of observations by correlating them with other sources of information. See ibid., p. 166. 62 See Lindner, Rolf: “Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld: Überlegungen zur teilnehmenden Beobachtung als Interaktionsprozeß”, in: Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 77/1 (1981): 51–66. 60

104

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

with the problem, by the public as well.63 Park’s interest in the issue of public communication and relevance had remained undimmed since his dissertation on “The Crowd”. He hoped to make ethnographic techniques of observation and documentation both scientifically relevant and accessible to an interested readership beyond the academy in his late academic investigative project.

3.4.1.3

On the Practice of Situating as a Human-Ecological Theory of Knowledge

The Chicago sociologists derived the relationship of continuity in urban settings between thinking and acting, between “physical structure” and moral organisation, not from a merely conceptual translation of concepts from the life sciences into sociology, as in Durkheim’s work, but by turning these concepts into methodology. The concept of human ecology is crucial here. It revolves around the idea of urban expansion, a concept that a number of scholars hoped would have tremendous interpretive power, as evident in Burgess’s remarks: “[T]hinking of urban growth as a resultant of organization and disorganization analogous to the anabolic and katabolic processes of metabolism in the body. In what way are individuals incorporated into the life of a city? By what processes does a person become an organic part of his society?”64 The concept of human ecology made it possible to think of social integration and disintegration in amoral terms and turn them into productive tools of analysis. Charles Camic sees the background to this biological scientism in the politics of theory: “As sociologists in the 1920s broke away from the concepts of the natural sciences at the explanatory level, they increasingly embraced the example of the natural sciences at the methodological level, in part as a tactic to differentiate themselves from the social reformers and applied practitioners who had previously dominated their ranks.”65 The conceptual analogies with biology and geography are, in fact, legion. Scholars working within a human ecology framework described urban districts as “natural areas”66 and the interactions between space and social group as

This divided impulse probably also sheds light on Park’s early interest in the “Thought News Project”, a large-scale journalistic project that incorporated both reportage and a philosophy that was applied to the political and cultural problems of the day, an endeavour that journalist Franklin Ford wished to pursue together with Park and John Dewey around 1890, though it was never to be realised (see Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture, p. 35f.). 64 Burgess, Ernest W.: “The Growth of the City. An Introduction into a Research Project”, in: Burgess, Ernest W., Robert E. Park and Roderick McKenzie: The City, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1967, p. 53. 65 Camic, “On Edge”, p. 231. 66 The concept of “natural areas”, probably developed conceptually by Vivien Palmer, was defined by McKenzie as follows: “The general effect of the continuous processes of invasions and accommodations is to give to the developed community well-defined areas, each having its own 63

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

105

“metabolism”. They even referred to the case study as a “specimen”,67 based on the assumption that the “species” observed can provide us with information about a “class” of behaviour patterns. The observational elements of relevance to experimentalism, namely heterogeneity, mobility and acculturation, can all be traced back to a processual, evolutionary mode of reflection, already prefigured in the work of Dewey and the pragmatists, with their references to Darwin.68 Active transformations, concurrently indicators of a heightened awareness of the production of social realities, reflect the aspiration to translate a naturalistic methodology into sociology, the key terms here being “transmission”, “expansion”, “succession”, “participation”, “invention” and “discovery”. Park and Burgess, drawing on Dewey in an introductory text on sociology, conceive of this affinity as follows: “Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment. Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.”69 They go on to highlight the learning effects of “acculturation”: “[N]ot only does social life demand teaching and learning for its own permanence, but the very process of living together educates. It enlarges and enlightens experience; it stimulates and enriches imagination; it creates responsibility for accuracy and vividness of statement and thought.”70 However, in contrast to a life-sciences theory of self-renewal, it is evident in the “ecological classification” put forward by Chicago sociologists that the investigation of social change assumes an actor-specific, competent and active modification of the environment—which is consonant with these scholars’ pragmatic orientation. Here the “marginal man” is the linchpin of the increasing socio-structural dynamism of socio-cultural areas and districts, which, much like biological life itself as envisaged by Chauncey Wright, undergo constant change. The undetermined character of this change leads to unpredictable short-term social consolidation processes and to “symbiosis”, in the sense of a coexistence within shared living spaces of otherwise separate cultures.71

peculiar selective and cultural characteristics. Such units of communal life may be termed “natural areas” or formations, to use the term of the plant ecologist.” McKenzie, Roderick D.: “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community’” in: McKenzie, Roderick D., Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess: The City, p. 77. 67 See Palmer, Field Studies in Sociology, p. 21. 68 On the Chicago sociologists’ direct references to Darwin’s evolutionary concepts of competition, specialisation, organisation and the natural forms of communication, see Park, Robert E. and Ernest W. Burgess: Introduction into the Science of Sociology, p. 518f. and 356f., and once again McKenzie: “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community”. 69 Park and Burgess, Introduction into the Science of Sociology, p. 184. 70 Ibid., p. 187. 71 See Park, Robert E. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man”, in American Journal of Sociology XXXIII/61928, p. 891. My thanks to Gerhard Wagner for alerting me to the significance of the concept of symbiosis in this context.

106

3.4.1.4

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

Summary

We can think of the investigative project of the First Chicago School of Sociology, as contemplated here chiefly regarding the practice of sociospatial situating, as a proposal for an experimentalist sociology of social transformation, one premised on a theory of observation. This sociology (a) is processually organised, (b) proceeds inductively, with the researchers’ experience being used as a yard-stick to assess how the research is progressing, and (c) is open to revision, in that its results are correlated with other measurement data and new research findings, and, thus, produce new knowledge; alternatively “news” prompts the discovery and organisation of a new research field. The researchers’ attention was focused on social change, and it seemed self-evident that this demanded a matching methodological flexibility. The city was a laboratory, field of experimentation and experiential space,72 one that must be understood in situ. The programmatic aims of “urban ecology” consisted of a politics of theory that rested on the only seeming contradiction between the participatory-engaged embedding of researchers and a scientistic conception of science. From an experimentalist perspective, there is no contradiction between these stances. The analogy, as grounded in epistemology by the Chicago School between the city and the biological habitat, with the latter in a perpetual process of biochemical exchange with the organisms living in it, translates Dewey’s thesis of continuity into an urban laboratory, one that brings together, in an exemplary way, the two sides of experimentalism: as social trope and investigative procedure. Just as the differentiation of the division of labour and the newly emerging professions engender individual and collective experiential differences, the sociological researcher experience too—as charged with the journalistic metaphors of thirst for adventure, border crossing and physically experienced risk—becomes a rite de passage. It became evident that Park, Palmer and their colleagues were more “Deweyans” than “Jamesians” in their emphasis on the experimental character of urban ethnography. Rather than taking inspiration from an a-empirical vitalism, Park particularly took his lead from Dewey’s theories on democracy and education, as well as Booker T. Washington’s principle of “learning by doing”, which Park integrated into sociological experiential knowledge. Through the modus operandi of the “situating” of such urban processes of development and acculturation, the social-ecological research programme translated the associated thesis of the continuity of actors’ and researchers’ experiences into empirical practice. Only when we grasp the connection between this school and pragmatism, and, to an even greater degree, its link with Dewey’s experimentalism, does it become clear that what was established here was much more than a hyphenated sociology. According to Andrew Abbott, its paradigmatic significance to the further development of US-American sociology also entails

See Lindner, Walks on the Wild Side, p. 119. On the notion of the “city as laboratory” see Gieryn, Thomas F.: “City as truth spot. Laboratories and field sites in urban studies”, in: Social Studies of Science 36/1 (2006): 5–38.

72

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

107

a specific conception of theory that privileged empirical exploration rather than concepts. This pre-eminence of empirical reality was congruent with a synchronous, inductive and local analytical perspective.73 Hence, the organised departure from familiar surroundings and experiences became the pivotal element in an engaged form of social research, with researchers avoiding romanticisation by adopting the cynical habitus of the reporter. As Lindner surmises, this professional ethos probably contributed to objectivity and establishing a clear boundary with the Protestantism-inspired reformers, partly because it managed to fuse a spirited, almost criminalistic curiosity with a pragmatist humanism. The raison d’être of this humanism lay not in moral superiority but in the intuition that a good description is more useful than asserting the validity (in an intellectually self-referential way) of supposedly ultimate truths.

3.4.2

“Correlating”: The Practice-Theoretical Thesis of Continuity and Bourdieu in Algeria

3.4.2.1

The Genesis of Practice Theory

We can derive the two faces of experimentalism from the connection that the sociologies presented here make between research experiences as observed by the researcher and as lived by them. The ethnographic rapprochement between research and researched reflects an investigative stance that rejects what Dewey assailed as “spectator theories of knowledge” and advocates what social and cultural anthropologists refer to as “immersement”. British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern conveys the epistemological benefits of ethnographic “immersement” by highlighting how it enables the researcher to find something they were not looking for.74 This is a particularly apt description of Pierre Bourdieu’s early research experiences. Bourdieu’s sociology is not generally regarded as one of social change. In the German reception, he is chiefly read as an analyst of social inequalities, a theorist of differentiation, a cultural sociologist and the founder of theories of practice that, together with pragmatism, have enjoyed an intensified reception since the 2000s. While his comprehensive oeuvre implies all these things, there has been an almost notorious tendency to overlook a key fact. The methodological framework on which he built his social theory emerged from a sociology of change, namely, the study of

See Abbott, Andrew: “On Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School”, in: Social Forces 75/4 (1997): 1152. 74 “[T]he fact that the intellectual journey [of the ethnographer] traditionally required total immersement has become either a platitude or an embarrassment. Yet it is by contrast with the traveller’s expectation of novelty that immersement yields what is often unlooked for: it yields precisely the facility and thus a method for ‘finding’ the unlooked-for.” Strathern, Marilyn: Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things, London, etc.: The Athlone Press 1999, p. 3, original emphasis. 73

108

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

Algeria in the context of its dual transformation from an agrarian to a capitalist society and from a colonised society to one at war. The challenge Algeria faced in knitting the upheavals that had occurred into a viable socio-political order was also significant to this sociology of change. Bourdieu’s theory of practice emerged from concrete socio-political and logistical constraints and problems. The roots of these lay in the French-Algerian colonial conflict, and they found methodological reflection in a social scientific experimentalism with no fixed outcome. The experiential ruptures that Bourdieu both observed and lived through formed the epistemic background to the development of sociological subject matter that he derived from specific social problems. It, therefore, seems paradoxical that his observation of the multifarious transcultural transformations of North Africa appears to have culminated in a sociology often perceived as “deterministic” in the present-day debate. The example of Bourdieu in Algeria actually shows how and why an experimental investigative framework can emerge through the interplay of testing out new methods and reflexive attempts to get to grips with their potential and limits. Given that the colonial situation of Algeria circumscribed the framework for research in material, ideational and logistical terms, Bourdieu’s endeavour and the creativity he showed (often “on the job”) during his investigations is all the more impressive. We can begin to understand why, similar to Dewey, he set his face against “spectator theories of knowledge”75 and why, in light of the Algerian experience, his work became ever more strongly opposed to such theories, frequently deploying severe and, at times, unjustified polemic. His “logic of practice” took up the cudgels against what he assailed as the scholastic errors of a science detached from social events. It was also opposed to the resulting social assignations, mindful of their epistemological (dis-)position within the academy. As Bourdieu saw it, the goal must be to “carry through to the end the analysis [of these social assignations] that even the boldest of philosophies often abandon in mid-course, at the point where it would encounter the social”.76 And it is this “social” that the young Bourdieu came up against and which prompted him, during his time in Algeria, to turn away from philosophy, initially towards anthropology and ultimately sociology—though the first two disciplines were always to remain part of his thinking to some extent. This integration of philosophy, anthropology and sociology is no doubt rooted in his specific research experience inside the Algerian war.

3.4.2.2

Experiential Ruptures as Social Trope: Geopolitical Backgrounds to Research on Algeria

Algeria, with the largest land area of any country in Africa, features a broad plateau extending along the rugged Mediterranean coastline. The population in the north of

75 76

See Bourdieu, Pierre: Pascalian Meditations, p. 51. Ibid., p. 50.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

109

the country, abutted by the famous Atlas Mountains, is relatively dense, while the Sahara Desert in the central and southern part of the country has a low population density. The Kabylie, the area studied by Bourdieu, is around 150 km east of Algiers and 1000 km south of Marseille. This region extends along the northern Mediterranean coast and is typified by mountain ranges inlaid with a complex web of ravines. Following its occupation by the Ottoman Empire, this agrarian part of Algeria came under French domination in 1857 after many years of resistance, other parts of the country having already been occupied by the French since 1830.77 The chequered history of “l’Algérie française” as characterised by colonisation and resistance, culminated, in the mid-twentieth century, in the organised national demand for independence and the foundation of the Front Libération Nationale (FLN) in 1954.78 The FLN’s liberation struggle confronted French rule and the roughly 1 million French settlers with a campaign of armed resistance. A worldwide process of decolonisation had begun in the mid-1950s, though its champions had to fight hard to achieve it. The Algerian War, which moulded and divided both the country and its French colonial masters deeply and is still a highly emotive topic, lasted from the autumn of 1954 to the summer of 1962. Charles de Gaulle officially recognised the country’s independence on 3 July 1962.79 One by one, numerous colonies of the South liberated themselves from their former rulers after the Second World War. France had to concede independence to Indochina and Tunisia in 1954. Yet, post-war France struggled bitterly to maintain a prominent place in the new world order and continued to wage its colonial wars, with relentless force, against movements seeking to achieve autonomy in Morocco and Algeria. Arbitrary killings, massacres and torture were the order of the day. When Bourdieu was called up to serve in Algeria in 1955, France dispatched an army of around 80,000 men to combat 1000 or so resistance fighters in the northern Mediterranean region. Bourdieu’s period of service saw the so-called “Battle of Algiers”, which dragged on between January and October 1957 and in which FLN fighters and the French armed forces struggled for political dominance in the capital. Due to the violation of human rights on a massive scale, however, this war between unequal opponents discredited France, with its vast military superiority, and paved the way for the FLN’s political victory on the international stage. When Charles de Gaulle took over from Pierre Pflimlin as president in 1958, the tone softened but the war continued.

77 See Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre, Ounassa Siari Tengour and Sylvie Thénault: “1830–1880: La conquête coloniale et la résistance des Algériens”, in: Bouchène, Abderrahmane, Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre, Ounassa Siari Tengour and Sylvie Thénault: Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, Paris & Algiers: Éditions La Découverte & Éditions Barzakh 2012, p. 32. 78 See Tengour, Ounassa Siari: “1945–1962: Vers l’indépendance de l’Algérie”, in: Bouchène, Abderrahmane et al.: Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, p. 480f. 79 On de Gaulle’s role in paving the way for the decolonisation of Algeria, see Stora, Benjamin: Le mystère De Gaulle. Son choix pour l’Algérie, Paris: Robert Laffont 2009.

110

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

Colonisation80 had plunged Algerian society into a state of profound poverty. The loss of their territorial rights had left Algerians dependent on the goodwill of their colonial masters, who owned around two-thirds of the arable land. Hunger was an everyday problem, with the traditional subsistence economy barely managing to keep families fed. The consequence was migration into the cities, but these were beset by unemployment, precarity and cultural deracination.81 Meanwhile, an incipient industrialisation was underway. The French government drew up a development plan for industrial production and a comprehensive programme of social development in the shape of the so-called “Plan de Constantine”. The French regime made a conscious effort to lure French investors to Algeria, with the additional incentive that large deposits of oil and gas had been discovered in the Sahara, and resolved to lay the ground for its development plan by carrying out a census.82 France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), founded in Paris in 1946, played a key logistical role in this context. In the shadow of the “Algérie française” policy, Paris-based INSEE statisticians Jacques Breil and Alain Darbel, along with clergyman Père Henri Sanson, created the institutional conditions for statistical and ethnographic studies in Algeria that were relatively independent of political imperatives. In 1959, roughly a year after Bourdieu had completed his military service, Jacques Breil established the Association de recherche sur le développement économique et social (ARDES) in Algiers.83 The ARDES was tasked with surveying the economic, social, statistical and ethnographic dimensions of Algerian civilian life. These studies were funded by the Caisse d’équipement pour le développement de l’Algérie (CEDA), also established in 1959 with the objective of implementing a number of structural reforms passed by several governments in Paris from 1955 onwards. These included an agrarian reform, industrialisation in the oil, gas, metals and chemicals sectors, housebuilding and the creation of an education system, the goal being to achieve a 100 per cent attendance rate among children of school age by 1966. These structural reforms were subsidised by tax revenues from France and Algeria, by local Algerian administrative institutions, through exploitation of Saharan oil and through loans from financial markets and credit institutions.84 Following the FLN’s victory, the CEDA was run on the basis of equal representation and received a new board in 1963. The ARDES’s statistical surveys of labour and housing were carried out subject to the “Algérie francaise” policy, and were officially linked with the objective of

80

On the political and psychological consequences of colonisation in Algeria and beyond, see Fanon, Frantz: The Wretched of the Earth, Cape Town: Kwela 2017. 81 See Tengour, “1945–1962”, p. 470. 82 See Seibel, Claude: “Les liens entre Pierre Bourdieu et les statisticiens à partir de son expérience algérienne”, in: Courrier des statistiques No. 112 (2004), p. 20. 83 See ibid., p. 20. 84 All information gleaned from the CEDA website: http://www.economie.gouv.fr/caef/caissedequipement-pour-developpement-lalgerie, accessed 22 August 2021.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

111

understanding the expectations of the Algerian people better regarding their housing and working conditions. However, in addition, this strategy of structural “modernisation” almost certainly sought to pull the moral rug out from under the Algerian liberation movement and secure France’s hegemony by making Algerians more content with their lives. This, however, also engendered a new element of practical self-reflection on the part of the occupiers—which, with hindsight, was conducive to the process of decolonisation. This new element also paved the way for the epistemic legitimation of social scientific interpretive instruments. It is this reflexive element that made the combination of statistical and social anthropological surveys in Algeria possible in the first place. Despite the war and a highly unsettled political situation, Bourdieu and his colleagues made full use of this factor.85 Bourdieu’s research soon came to focus on change in cultural and economic structures, as well as kinship relationships, in northern Algeria. The very titles of Bourdieu’s publications prior to the appearance of his major works on Algeria between 1958 and 1962 evoke his perspective on the experiential ruptures undergone by the Algerian people as they were confronted with colonisation, and a conflict that was both a colonial war and a war of liberation: “The internal logic of the traditional Algerian society”,86 “The clash of civilisations”,87 “Revolution within the revolution”88 “From the revolutionary war to revolution”,89 and “The Algerian sub-proletarians”.90 These early writings were not yet written based on commissioned ethnographic research, but were, instead, nourished by the information collected by the documentation centre in Algiers and intermittent excursions undertaken by Bourdieu in his free time. The historical significance of statistics as the “door-opener” for commissioned qualitative research would be worth a study in its own right. Both in the case of Durkheim and his great work on suicide, which was based on statistical correlation data, and in the cases addressed here of the Chicago School and Bourdieu’s studies of Algeria, it seems to have been not so much insights into the interpretive potency of socio-analysis as faith in the numerical validity of specific socioeconomic or socio-cultural correlative relations that prompted patrons, philanthropists and politicians to commission research that could also make use of other, so-called “qualitative” methods of investigation. This laid the material foundation for fields of methodological experimentation that enabled researchers to deal in an exploratory way with the experiential ruptures they observed and lived through themselves. Hence, surprisingly, Algeria became a field of experimentation and a locus of genuine methodological innovation with far-reaching consequences that extended well beyond French statistics (see Desrosières, Alain: “Pays en développement et innovations conceptuelles”, in: Desrosières, Alain: Prouver et gouverner, Paris: La Découverte 2014, p. 111–121). 86 See Bourdieu, Pierre: “La logique interne de la civilisation algérienne traditionnelle”, in: Le sousdeveloppement en Algérie, Algiers: Secrétariat social (1959), p. 40–51. 87 See Bourdieu, Pierre: “Le choc des civilisations”, in: Le sous-developpement en Algérie, p. 52–64. 88 See Bourdieu, Pierre: “Révolution dans la revolution” in: Esprit 1 (1961): 27–40. 89 See Bourdieu, Pierre: “De la guerre révolutionnaire à la revolution”, in: L’Algérie de demain, edited by F. Perroux, Paris: Presses Universitaires de la France (PUF) 1962, p. 5–13. 90 See Bourdieu, Pierre: “Les sous-prolétaires algériens”, in: Les temps modernes no. 199 (1962): 1030–1051. 85

112

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

His initial diagnosis was as follows. Prior to the war, the experiential ruptures characteristic of the civilian population were moulded by the coexistence of a variety of local traditions and French culture, and, thus, by various regional languages, structures of political decision-making and religions. The war accelerated this asymmetrical process of social differentiation. In these first writings, Bourdieu already critically borrows the concepts of “acculturation” and “culture clash” from the US-American debate, by economising and translating them into the struggle over decolonisation. In the encounter between the Algerian people and the French occupiers, he initially observes a period of adaptation (acculturation) on the part of the colonised, which then, during the war, suddenly turns into a period of deculturization of Algerian society, its culture and political modi operandi. “Acculturation” in Algeria, in contrast to the transformative processes of the modern city as investigated by the Chicago School of Sociology, took on greater explosive force as a result of the war. Bourdieu presented an initial summary of these studies in the shape of the slim volume Sociologie de l’Algérie (1958).91 This summary is still clearly moulded by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, which Bourdieu augments with Weber’s analysis of capitalism while also, with Marx, seeking to pin down the specific form of alienation characteristic of the transition to capitalism through colonial rule. In this first introductory text on the sociology of Algeria, Bourdieu refers—still somewhat schematically—to five stages of transformation supposedly being undergone by Algerians. In this view, colonisation results in a process of fragmentation cross-cutting traditional forms of social stratification, while fundamentally unsettling values. These social and psychological forms of unsettling, typical of the process of colonisation, are exacerbated by the military control of the population, resettlement camps and industrialisation.92 Finally, violence and forced displacement from their familiar surroundings trigger profound self-doubts on the part of the colonised.93 The Algerian community of production finds itself, almost overnight, splitting into an agricultural sector, an industrial sector featuring wage labour and an urban subproletariat. In “Algérie 60”, Bourdieu enlarges upon these analyses of the social devalorization of traditional modes of action and production.94 The introduction, accelerated by war and industrialisation, of novel dispositional systems and, hence, a new “lived philosophy” of economic action95 engenders severe incoherence between 91 The book’s very title was politically provocative in the middle of the Algerian War, in which France refused to recognise Algeria as an independent state (see Tassadit, Yacine: “Editorische Vorbemerkung”, in Bourdieu, Algerische Skizzen, p. 11). 92 See Sacriste, Fabien: Germaine Tillion, Jacques Berque, Jean Servier et Pierre Bourdieu. Des ethnologues dans la guerre d’indépendance algérienne, Paris: L’Harmattan 2011, p. 309. 93 See Bourdieu, Pierre: Sociologie de l’Algérie, Paris: PUF 1958, p. 116f. 94 See Bourdieu, Pierre: Algeria 1960: The Disenchantment of the World, the Sense of Honour, the Kabyle House or the World Reversed (Studies in Modern Capitalism), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979, p. 95f. 95 Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, p. 4.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

113

the practices acquired and those imposed by colonial rule, an incoherence that is congruent with these practices’ lack of temporal-historical consistency: “It follows from this that, both at the level of the economic structures and at the level of dispositions, representations, and values, the same duality is to be observed, as if these societies were not contemporary with themselves”.96 Bourdieu comprehends the internalisation of colonial standards of value and criteria for social sanctioning as an attempt to reconcile them with their traditional counterparts. This effort, he contends, expresses the social drama and internal despair of the Algerian people, who respond to the new economy that has been imposed upon them at times with “anxious identification” and at other times with “revolutionary negativism”. While some associate urban wage labour with the devalorization of the traditional form of production, others cleave fatalistically to the new labour regime or oscillate between the two extremes. They become farmers without land, urbanites without a city, proletarians without work and exiles in their own country.97 Bourdieu and his team carried out research in resettlement camps in the rural regions of Cheraia (c. 450 km west of Algiers on the Mediterranean coast) and in Djebabra on the Chelif river (50 km south-east of Algiers).98 The French armed forces erected these camps across the country at the beginning of the war and forced just under a third of the rural Algerian population, in other words about 2 million individuals, most of them peasants, to resettle, with many of them resident in camps for various periods of time. The armed forces aligned the geographical locations of the camps with the zones interdites, the “prohibited zones”. The latter served chiefly to destroy entire swathes of land featuring potential boltholes for the FLN. Established social structures that were often impenetrable to the French were to be broken up by bringing the population under the control of the armed forces and the Sections Administratives Spécialisées (S.A.S.).99 Algerians’ homes were rendered uninhabitable, while forests and fields were destroyed or burnt. As the ALN/FLN stepped up their attacks, the S.A.S., from 1957 onwards, served to disrupt routes of potential logistical relevance and establish a “modern social order” within the camps.100 The camp studies were the central source of empirical data for the book Le déracinement (“The Deracination”), authored by Bourdieu and his Algerian colleague Abdelmalek Sayad. In view of the militarily and economically controlled transformation of the social strata and classes of Algeria, which manifested itself in 96

Ibid., p. 5. See Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad: Le déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie, Paris: Minuit 1964. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the English copy of the book: Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad: Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria, London: Polity Press 2020. 98 See the maps of the sites investigated in Bourdieu, Algerische Skizzen, p. 502–503. 99 The S.A.S. was established in 1955 in response to the Algerian resistance, its remit being to “modernise” the Algerian people. 100 See Bourdieu and Sayad, Le déracinement p. 11f.; Sacriste, Germaine Tillion, etc., p. 308. 97

114

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

the camps in concentrated form, the two authors questioned the concept of acculturation. Originally, this concept assumed a minimum degree of input and room for manoeuvre on the part of the actors affected by acculturation—as, for example, in Ernest Burgess’s concept of social “metabolism”, in which social organisation and disorganisation alternate in a processual fashion.101 By contrast, Bourdieu and Sayad regarded the camps, some of which continued to exist long after the liberation of Algeria, as a consequence of French colonial and war policy. The researchers identified three stages of social transformation here: (a) social aggregation, (b) segregation and (c) disintegration. Furthermore, they asserted that the new problems of unemployment and precarity generated a specifically colonial form of social disintegration: In the first case the old social order, the traditions and corresponding values could be maintained at the price of their adaptation. Here we can refer to straightforward acculturation, which was based on contact between two societies and the cultural transactions engendered by the colonial system, and which was enough to give them a specific form. In the second case, the brutal destruction of the old society’s economic foundations resulted in the disintegration of social groups and the obliteration of the traditional cultures. The actions of the ruling power, which were geared methodically and deliberately towards destroying the economic foundations of the traditional order, led to veritable deculturalization.102

This “deculturalization” as a precondition for economic, social and cultural deracination, thus, emerged as an instrument for interpreting the experiential ruptures suffered by the Algerian people. In contrast to “acculturation”, the term used by the Chicago School to refer to social adaptation within a turbulent process of societal transformation, “deculturalization” in the work of Bourdieu and Sayad describes the enduring and dramatic struggle of the Algerian people to suppress their own standards of value and internalise colonial ones. The experiential ruptures bound up with this “deculturalization”, the result of war, violence and displacement, exacerbated existing social inequalities and led to the devalorization and reorientation of a previously acquired practical sense. This reorientation also shaped the researchers’ experiences.

3.4.2.3

The Role of Experiential Ruptures in the Constitution of Sociological Objects

Bourdieu was called up to serve in the Algerian War in 1955, at the age of 25. With reference to his time in the French armed forces, he relates that, following a dispute within the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, he was assigned to Algeria

101 The concept of metabolism in the Chicago School means quasi-natural processes of adaptation and repulsion in the context of urban ecology, which addresses the following questions: “In what way are individuals incorporated into the life of a city? By what process does an individual become an organic part of a city?” Burgess, Ernest W.: “The Growth of the City”, p. 53. 102 Bourdieu and Sayad, Le déracinement, p. 30f, original emphasis.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

115

against his will. The air force put him on sentry duty at a large explosives warehouse near Orléansville, present-day Chlef, 200 km south of the capital of Algiers. During this stint as a guard he composed love letters for his fellow soldiers.103 He was pleased that despite his prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) education, which would automatically have helped him become an officer, he was able to enter Algeria as a simple soldier, as this privilege was disagreeable to him.104 During the last few months of his military service, thanks to the support of a superior officer, an acquaintance of his mother’s from Béarn, he was able to transfer to a simple desk job. It was then that he wrote his first articles about the Algerian people. After completing his military service, during which he had already begun to delve into everyday life in Algeria and undertake his first field studies, he worked as a lecturer at the Faculté des lettres d’Algiers between 1958 and 1960. There he began to train a number of Algerian students, whom he recruited as informants and colleagues.105 He produced his studies of Kabylie between 1958 and 1961—at the height of the colonial war stirred up by French settlers and the paramilitary Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS)106 against the background of de Gaulle’s “Algérie française” policy. Bourdieu learned that his name was on a military blacklist shortly before the coup by the French generals of April 1961. At the behest of his mentor Raymond Aron, he was flown back to France from Algiers abruptly107 and, with the support of Aron and Germaine Tillion,108 within a few years he was

103

See Bourdieu, Pierre: Ein soziologischer Selbstversuch, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2002, p. 47. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the English copy of the book: Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Chicago: Chicago University Press 2008. 104 See Bourdieu, Ein soziologischer Selbstversuch, p. 47. Bourdieu provides no exact details on the length of his military service in his “self-analysis”; other sources refer either to 1955–1957 or 1955–1958. 105 See Seibel, “Les liens entre Pierre Bourdieu et les statisticiens”: 21. 106 The OAS is still hitting the headlines in connection with as yet unresolved and unpunished cases of torture and arbitrary killings of Algerians and alleged or actual members of the FLN. Many former OAS members later rose to leading positions in the Front National or are enjoying a peaceful retirement undisturbed by the need for justice. A furore ensued in 2000 in the context of a public debate between two OAS veterans on the legitimacy of wartime torture (see Quemeneur, Tramor: “La mémoire mise à la question: le débat sur les tortures dans la guerre d’Algérie, juin 2000septembre 2001”, in: Regards sur l’actualité 276 [2001]: 29–40) and the shamelessness with which former members of the French armed forces stood by their use of torture until the end of their lives (such as Paul Aussaresses, though he was not a member of the OAS. See Courrier International, 5 December 2013). Moulah Hennine, a medical student and colleague of Bourdieu and Sayad, was executed by the OAS. Le déracinement was dedicated to him (see also Bourdieu, Pierre: “Für Abdelmalek Sayad”, in: Bourdieu, Pierre, Algerische Skizzen, p. 462). 107 Johan Heilbron dates Bourdieu’s “flight” to 1960, which is improbable given that we have evidence of Bourdieu’s research on site up to 1961 (see Heilbron, Johan: “Practical Foundations of Theorizing in Sociology. The Case of Pierre Bourdieu”, in: Camic, Charles et al. [eds.]: Social Knowledge in the Making, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011, p. 185). 108 In her day, Germaine Tillion was one of the best-known anthropologists in Algeria. She was a resistance fighter and deportee and was later research director at the EHESS. She had already carried out ethnographic studies in Kabylie in the 1930s and went back there during the Algerian War. She

116

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

appointed research director at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the institutional forerunner of the EHESS (Ècole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). He was later to become head of the latter’s Centre de Sociologie Européenne. Little is known about precisely how the contact between Bourdieu and the INSEE came about or the concrete execution of this “collaborative research experiment”.109 His former colleague Claude Seibel surmises that Bourdieu himself had made contact with the INSEE or with ARDES in Algiers while composing his first contributions to the Revue du service d’information des armées, or in connection with his sketching out of the book Sociologie de l’Algérie.110 In addition, he not only found an excellent library at the French government’s information and documentation centre in Algiers but also encountered missionaries, anthropologists, journalists and colonial administrators. He was, thus, always able to obtain the latest information on the current situation.111 Bourdieu and his colleagues were exposed to many risks to life and limb during their ethnographic field research and aroused the suspicions of the French government, the French armed forces and the OAS, as well as the Algerian liberation army. Jean-Claude Passeron, one of Bourdieu’s colleagues during this period and a co-author of The Craft of Sociology (1968), stated that their ethnographic research was a potential risk to the Algerian liberation struggle.112 It seemed to Bourdieu doubly impossible to pursue an ahistorical science in the middle of a colonial war. Firstly, the war forced him to reflect politically on the meaning and purpose of scientific work. Secondly, armchair culturalism, even of a structuralist character, could provide no satisfactory analysis of the violent upheavals in Algeria that Bourdieu, sceptical of utopianism, was trying to get to grips with and write about

became an important mediator between the FLN and the French government over the course of the war and towards its end. She received numerous honours for her life’s work. The support she gave to Bourdieu is remarkable, in the sense that he sharply criticised Tillion’s culturalism, which he thought underestimated the economic inequalities induced by the colonial situation and the war. One of her most important texts in this connection is Les ennemis complémentaires. Guerre d’Algérie, Paris: Éditions Tirésias 2005. See Hardt, Lucas: “Rezension zu Germaine Tillion: Les ennemis complémentaires. Guerre d’Algérie. Préface par Jean Daniel, Paris 2005”, in: online journal Francia-Recensio 4 (2012), nineteenth/twentieth centuries – Histoire contemporaine, http://www.recensio.net/rezensionen/zeitschriften/francia-recensio/2012-4/19.-20.-jahrhunderthistoire-contemporaine/les-ennemis-complementaires/, accessed October 2021 and Sacriste, Tillion, etc., p. 295. 109 Heilbron, “Practical Foundations”, p. 188. 110 See Seibel, “Les liens entre Pierre Bourdieu et les statisticiens”: 20. 111 See Heilbron, “Practical Foundations”, p. 185. One gains an insight into reports on economic, cultural and political life in Algeria under French rule in the brief overview by Paul Leuillot of 1950 on the documentation centre in Algiers: Leuillot, Paul: “Documents Algériens”, in: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3 (1950): 428–429. 112 See Passeron, Jean-Claude: “La sociologie politique et vice versa: Enquêtes sociologiques et réformes pédagogiques dans les années 1960”, in: Bouveresse, Jacques and Daniel Roche: La liberté par la connaissance. Pierre Bourdieu 1930–2002, Paris: Odile Jacob 2004, p. 25.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

117

with academic rigour.113 The Algerian context alienated him from the paradigms of existentialism (which he had embraced as a philosophy student), Marxism and structuralism prevailing in Paris. As Bourdieu explained in 1980, taking structuralism as his example, in Algeria it was “above all [. . .] the ambiguities and contradictions which the very effort to push the application of the structural method to its furthermost conclusions constantly raised, that led me to question not so much the method itself as the anthropological theses tacitly posited in the very fact of consistently applying it to practices”.114 Bourdieu used his inner antagonism towards colonial racism as a reflexive foil for the ethnographic experience, a frictional element that enabled him to co-operate constructively with his Algerian colleagues and facilitated his access to the Algerian people.115 He wanted to not only analyse but also help solve problems by elaborating, together with his colleagues, possible ways of improving Algerians’ economic prospects amid the process of decolonisation.116 In this sense, Algeria also lent plausibility to the genealogical perspective. Knowledge of traditional ways of life and modes of production not only allowed a realistic assessment of the social consequences of colonisation, war and repression, but also helped develop appropriate socio-economic parameters for the economy and politics of post-liberation Algeria. Bourdieu’s much-cited epistemic break117 with the “supreme discipline” of philosophy during his time in Algeria was further reinforced by what he experienced

113 See Yacine, Tassadite: “L’Algérie, matrice d’une oeuvre”, in: Encrevé, Pierre and Rose-Marie Lagrave (eds.): Travailler avec Bourdieu, Paris: Flammarion 2003, p. 344. 114 Bourdieu, Pierre: The Logic of Practice, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990, p. 10. I have already published some of the following remarks: Bogusz, Tanja: “Synchronisationen. Bourdieu, Durkheim und die Ethnologie“, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz (eds.): Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2013, p. 354f. 115 Bourdieu valued his background in the rural Béarn region in the south of France and the biographical rupture he had already lived through as a result of his unusual ascent into the elite institutions of Paris for having given him a dispositional advantage when it came to the difficult and complex challenge, as a member of the French administrative system, of gaining the trust of Algerians. He carried out parts of his Béarn and Kabylie studies in parallel (see Bourdieu, Pierre: “Vom richtigen Gebrauch der Ethnologie. Ein Gespräch mit Moulod Mammeri”, in: Bourdieu, Pierre: Algerische Skizzen, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2010, p. 339–413). 116 Fabien Sacriste criticises Bourdieu for failing to include the French in Algeria sufficiently in his analyses, resulting in a simplistic oppositional contrast (homogeneous colonial society versus heterogeneous colonised). Bourdieu’s approach was presumably impelled by the understandable ambition of confronting the contemporary political one-sidedness in French discourse with an Algerian reality about which even the political left in France knew almost nothing in the late 1950s (see Sacriste, Tillion, etc., p. 324f.). In this sense, Algeria may have been for Bourdieu what the “sad tropics” were for Lévi-Strauss: a site of analytical nostalgia, a result not of romanticism but of the brutal reality of the irretrievability of a society which, to echo Marx, had not existed “in itself” but above all “for itself”. 117 See Schultheis, Franz: “Bourdieu und Lévi-Strauss. Eine ambivalente Beziehung’” in: Kauppert, Michael and Dorett Funcke (eds.): Wirkungen des wilden Denkens. Zur strukturalen Anthropologie von Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008, p. 98–110.

118

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

as anthropological “science colonial”. His personal and academic aversion to this colonial science made him aware of the contextual nexus of socio-cultural categories and their violent, indeed fatal consequences. In other words, Bourdieu had not only experienced the contradictory incorporation of contingent socio-cultural dispositions first-hand. He had also sought to translate these experiences into an experimental mode of research that, as he himself emphasised retrospectively, ultimately emerged as the centrepiece of his entire sociological project: Thus I was forced constantly to question both the generic and the particular aspects of my relationship to the object (without, I believe, introducing any self-indulgence). And it may be that the objectification of the generic relationship of the observer to the observed which I endeavoured to perform, through a series of “tests” that increasingly tended to become experiments, is the most significant product of my whole undertaking, not for its own sake, as a theoretical contribution to the theory of practice, but as the principle of a more rigorous definition, less dependent on individual dispositions, of the proper relation to the object which is one of the most decisive conditions of truly scientific practice in the social sciences.118

Dewey had described the stage of “reasoning” as that phase of the experiment in which the existing uncertainty is translated into hypotheses and examined operationally. Evidently, this was done in Bourdieu’s work mainly by provisionally defining relational dispositional criteria, which constituted the relationship between observer and object. Hence, in this context, Dewey also referred to “experimentation, as a manifestation of interactions that are taking place”.119 Bourdieu’s studies in Algeria show how the problem-solving action postulated by Dewey, through a reflexive processing of testing situations as a search for dispositional invariances, becomes a contextually motivated epistemic necessity. For it is these dispositional invariances that enable us to place existing, asymmetric social structures on an equal conceptual footing. We can understand Bourdieu’s heightened awareness of the limitations of culturalism, on the one hand, and of economism, on the other, as a methodological translation of the multiple experiential ruptures within his own biography: involuntary military service, his initial, successful flight to a desk job and, finally, his conversion of the problem of the disposition into a social scientific research programme.120 As Seibel underlines, it was this conversion that Bourdieu managed to achieve in Algeria through the constitutive and, at the time, entirely new fusion of statistics, anthropology and sociology.121 In the context of ethnographic experience, this turned into an attempt to escape, literally, from objectively given dispositions through an external description of one’s own research action in the sense of a “third position”. In the context of the Algerian War, it made sense to entrust this third position to sociology rather than philosophy. This entailed leaving the latter to 118

Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 15, my italics. Dewey, Logic, p. 268. 120 See Schultheis, Franz: Pierre Bourdieus Wege in die Soziologie. Genese und Dynamik einer reflexiven Sozialwissenschaft, Konstanz: UVK 2007, p. 18. 121 See Seibel, “Les liens entre Pierre Bourdieu et les statisticiens”: 21. 119

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

119

Fig. 3.1 Pierre Bourdieu as ethnographer in the resettlement camp of Ain Arhbal (Collo, Algeria), 1960 © Jérôme Bourdieu

develop an analytical toolkit capable of addressing the discrepancy between observer and object through a theory of practice in such a way that it simultaneously suggests possible ways of overcoming this discrepancy. “Experience in its vital form”, Dewey stated, and he always had the researcher’s experience in mind as well here, “is experimental, an effort to change the given; it is characterized by projection, by reaching forward into the unknown; connexion with a future is its salient trait” (Fig. 3.1).122

Dewey, John: “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, in: Dewey, John: Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, New York: Holt 1917, p. 3–69, here p. 7.

122

120

3.4.2.4

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

From Experiential Rupture to Correlation: Ethnography, Statistics, Epistemology

Bourdieu’s research on wartime Algeria was a radical turning point in more than just his personal and intellectual biography. It was itself a highly improbable, unpredictable, difficult to classify and nigh-on paradoxical endeavour. At the threshold of decolonisation, the country found itself in a state of war that intensified and brutalized the experiential ruptures already suffered by the Algerian people.123 The war had also triggered new social divisions, with the associated socio-economic and cultural upheavals not only exacerbating existing asymmetries but also adding new ones. To record these social ruptures by means of a genealogical and participatoryobservational approach, in a context that seemed to prohibit any kind of détachement, was already tantamount to an experiment. It was possible because, under the political conditions prevailing in the late 1950s in France as elsewhere, a “reflexive modernity” came into being. Its key protagonists sought to impose it through repression and control, while concurrently seeking to limit the potential for the people to make their “voice” heard despite their violent infantilisation. It was partially this risk that inspired de Gaulle’s hesitant policy, the generals’ putsch and the terror of the OAS, though these factors did no more than postpone the country’s liberation by a few years.124 In contrast to the urban laboratory of Chicago, it took a great deal of effort to carry out field research in Algeria successfully. When it came to the French actors commissioning research, it was mainly the establishment of statistical surveys in Algeria that opened the door to social scientific research. Statistics represented both the legitimising epistemic factor and an antidote to the one-sided culturalism of contemporary cultural anthropology. Bourdieu was the only member of the faculty in Algiers who, under the conditions of occupation and war, declared himself willing to carry out ethnographic studies at a time when the linkage of statistical and ethnographic epistemic instruments was still entirely virgin territory.125 This “mixed methods” research avant la lettre cemented the co-operative relationship between INSEE, headquartered in Paris, and the Institute of Statistics in Algiers. However, similar to the French colonial rulers since the country had been first occupied, the 1950s social taxonomy imported from France came up against realworld resistance in Kabylie. Because these categories lost their interpretive value there, ethnography could be brought into play as a means of problem-solving and, thus, as a challenge to traditional classificatory forms and their socio-economic 123

To this day, there is no agreement on the number of Algerian dead. The constitution of independent Algeria of 1963 assumes a total of 1.5 million dead; other sources refer to more than 300,000, which happens to be 3 per cent of the total population and roughly the same as the number of fallen French soldiers—some of them born in Algeria—in the First World War (see Thénault, Silvie: Histoire de la Guerre d’indépendance d’Algérie, Paris: Flammarion 2005, p. 265). 124 The first provisional government of Algeria (GPRA) was formed in 1958. 125 See Seibel, “Les liens entre Pierre Bourdieu et les statisticiens”: 21.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

121

effects. Ignorance of the traditional Algerian way of working—which came to light when it proved impossible to fall back on modern socio-professional categories, in other words, those developed in France—represented an obstacle to knowledge that could only be remedied through direct observation and dialogue. What the French researchers experienced, then, was that their classificatory systems, moulded by Occidental values, came up against interpretive boundaries that could only be overcome through an experimental expansion of research methods, the integration of Algerian researchers and the active participation of those being researched. The conclusion that Bourdieu and his colleagues came to in light of this was that statistics and ethnography must be placed in a correlative relationship to one another— particularly in a colonial context. The goal here was not to abandon the statistics now backed by “participant objectification”,126 statistics on whose logistical and political structure research continued to depend. Quite the opposite. Henceforth, Bourdieu championed the integration of statistical methods into qualitative social research. Following his return to France, he taught sociology at the École nationale de la statistique et de l’administration économique, and, thus, helped train a new generation of critical French statisticians.127 This correlation—engendered by a local problem—of quantitative social research and social anthropology also represents a methodological innovation that rests upon the continuity of actors’ and researchers’ experience, a continuity also traced by Dewey. Alain Desrosières put “two legacies” in Bourdieu’s research and oeuvre down to this “improbable confluence” of statistics, geared essentially towards mathematics and engineering, and the French sociology and anthropology of 1950s, which had mutated into “humanities” disciplines.128 The first legacy had to do with the development of a new school of quantitative sociology focused on the statistical surveying of the reproduction of social inequalities. Its protagonists provided the surveys of socio-professional nomenclatures found in Bourdieu’s major research projects, resulting in the books The Inheritors (with Jean-Claude Passeron) and Distinction. The second legacy is the work of those scholars who took up the correlation, developed in Algeria, of actors’ and researchers’ experience, by

126

To quote the title of Bourdieu’s acceptance speech when he was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the British Royal Anthropological Institute in 2000. See Bourdieu, Algerische Skizzen, p. 417–440. 127 In addition to Alain Desrosières, Laurent Thévenot was one of Bourdieu’s students during this period. In the shape of a “pragmatist sociology of criticism”, in the late 1980s, together with Luc Boltanski, Thévenot translated the self-reflexive attempt to get to grips with the generation of social relationships of correlation into a model of justificatory orders, a model that was to advance the symmetrization, begun by Bourdieu, of researcher and researched. The political potential of this reflexive school of statistics is currently being teased out by a former colleague of Desrosières, Emmanuel Didier, with colleagues, under the heading of “statactivsme”. See Bruno, Isabelle, Emmanuel Didier and Julien Prévieux: Statactivsme. Comment lutter avec des nombres, Paris: La Découverte/Collection Zones 2014. 128 Desrosières, Alain: “Une rencontre improbable et ses deux héritages”, in: Encrevé, Pierre and Rose-Marie Lagrave (eds.): Travailler avec Bourdieu, p. 210f.

122

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

calling for reflection on the genealogical emergence of classifications and codification practices.129

3.4.2.5

Summary

On the back of global decolonisation and the associated insight that major social problems might become a long-term political and economic problem for the colonial states as well and due to the new prestige enjoyed by anthropology in France, we can see with hindsight that Bourdieu had been provided with a virtually ideal basis for the exploration of new epistemic objects. Every study of Algeria by Bourdieu or carried out under his guidance is distinguished by a complimentary and systematic integration of anthropological, ethnographic,130 epistemological, sociological and statistical data. Ultimately, Bourdieu was to apply this principle systematically to his next work: from now on, guided interviews, statistics, participant observation and theory building were elements in the standard repertoire of the specifically Bourdieuvian collective research endeavour. Johan Heilbron puts it in a nutshell: “Bourdieu’s research experiences in Algeria where, in short, not merely the beginning of his œuvre, but its very foundation.”131 The theory of practice that Bourdieu developed based on this always underlined the epistemological claim that had provided the foundation for these correlations. The principle of reflexivity, as a consequence of antecedent experiential ruptures, was the empirical insertion point for his sociological epistemology. However, in contrast to the work of Dewey and the Chicago School, the roots of this reflexivity lay in a project that was both experimentalist and critically normative, a project Bourdieu later declared was the starting point for his studies of inequality. The theory of practice to which this gave rise profited from the early experimental stage by first empirically addressing the research-political challenges and the resulting methodological problems. The “constructivist structuralism”, on the basis of which Bourdieu carried out his major studies in cultural sociology, had not yet been developed in Algeria. Yet, the laboratory-like research situation in that country opened up the possibility of sociological experimentation, which was already tantamount to a political statement in the context of colonial war. Here, epistemological continuity was not focused on actors’ and researchers’ experiences but, instead, required an analytical model that could not ignore the structural asymmetries, as induced by colonialism, between researchers and researched. This analytical model 129 Ibid., p. 213. On the experimental character of attempts to fashion a statistics informed by the Bourdieuvian legacy, see Desrosières, Alain: “Deux senses d’évaluation: Des expérimentations aléatoires’” in: Desrosières, Alain: Prouver et gouverner, Paris: La Découverte 2014, p. 60–69. 130 In a comparison of Bourdieu’s studies in Algeria and in his home region, the Béarn in the south of France, Loïc Wacquant goes so far as to describe Bourdieu as a pioneering thinker (pioneering practitioner would be “better term) of “multisited ethnography” avant la lettre. See Wacquant, Loïc: “Following Bourdieu into the field’, in: Ethnography 5/4 (2004): 396. 131 Heilbron, “Practical Foundations”, p. 189.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

123

was established with the help of a modus operandi that integrated societal experiential ruptures into the constitution of sociological objects both epistemologically (by correlating social structures with actors’ experiences) and methodologically (by correlating quantitative and qualitative social research). It was out of this social-anthropological fusion of epistemology and methodology that Bourdieu developed his sociological theory of practice. A similar undertaking, though impelled by different motives and implemented in a quite different way, made waves as a result of Karin Knorr-Cetina’s laboratory studies. Around 20 years after Bourdieu’s sojourn in Algeria, Knorr-Cetina also established a new sociological culture of knowledge whose insertion point she sought in the natural sciences.

3.4.3

“Materialising”: The Experimental Translation of Researchers’ Experience or Knorr-Cetina in the Laboratory

3.4.3.1

Laboratory Pragmatism

John Dewey had defined pragmatism in his programmatic essay on “The Development of American Pragmatism” (1925) in light of the work of Peirce, who was familiar “with the habits of mind, as he put it, of the laboratory”132 and who believed that “an experimentalist” is someone “whose intelligence is formed in the laboratory”.133 The practice-theoretical postulate of continuity, with which Dewey had elaborated the “intricate interweaving of normativity and facticity”,134 gave rise to a specifically pragmatic “theory of inquiry”, which prefigured much of what we are familiar with today as the paradigms of social scientific constructivism and laboratory studies. They now trade under the name of STS, which were originally carried out mainly in the United States in the late 1970s with the help of the laboratory approach, which is my key concern in what follows. Laboratory studies have become established on the international stage as an autonomous research field since the early 1980s. With reference to the school-inspiring book The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, published by Karin Knorr-Cetina in English in 1981, I seek to show in what follows how, in the sociological experimentalism developed here, we might model experiential differences epistemologically and in terms of research practice. Knorr-Cetina’s “logic of production” has contributed a great deal to the pragmatist realignment of

Dewey, John: “The Development of American Pragmatism”, in: J. A. Boydston (ed.), John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 2, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1980 (1925), p. 3. 133 Ibid., p. 4. 134 Hampe, Michael: Eine kleine Geschichte des Naturgesetzbegriffs, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2007, p. 134. 132

124

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

established sociological modes of reflection. My hypothesis here is that this realignment laid the ground for thinking of Dewey’s experimentalism as an explicitly sociological methodology.

3.4.3.2

Contexts of Justification and “Contexts of Discovery”: A New Field of Research

In contrast to the Chicago School of Sociology and the experiential ruptures induced by the Algerian War, as observed by Bourdieu, the process through which the laboratory approach turned into a sociological school does not appear to have been caused by extramural events, such as modernisation, socio-cultural acceleration, war or decolonisation.135 Instead, laboratory studies’ special historical contribution to the sociological experimentalism developed here lies in having taken the concept of the laboratory literally rather than metaphorically: its protagonists immersed themselves in the natural scientific world of production. According to Breidenstein et al. in their introduction to ethnography, “the laboratory studies subverted [. . .] the naturalism of the Chicago School tradition”.136 If we take a second look, however,

135

A corresponding transdisciplinary analysis of the establishment of science studies in this sense would be a project in its own right and has yet to be tackled. A number of very good introductions to STS have now been published, as have a number of anthologies containing the relevant case studies, which can now be described as “classics”. See, for example, Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (eds.): Science Observed. Perspectives on the Social Study of Science, London: Sage 1983; Pickering, Andrew (ed.): Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press 1992; Sismondo, Sergio: An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, London: Blackwell 2004 and Beck, Stefan, Jörg Niewöhner and Estrid Sørensen: Science and Technology Studies. Eine sozialanthropologische Einführung, Bielefeld: Transcript 2012. For the case studies, see Biagioli, Marc (ed.) 1999: The Science Studies Reader, London: Routledge; Hackett, Ed et al. (eds.): The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge: MIT Press 2008. Consonant with the pluralist research style, however, rather than identifying the structural and transdisciplinary reasons for the emergence and establishment of STS regarding a “Zeitgeist”, scholars tend to integrate these reasons into the specific case being investigated. Introductory books limit themselves to interdisciplinary debates relating to: research on science, the philosophy of science, sociology, and social and cultural anthropology. Extra-disciplinary impulses appear to be such an evident component of the entire approach that their integration into a self-reflexive debate—as conveyed by the question: “What made STS so successful?”—seems covered by the statement that the relevance of science and technology to the organisation of social life is beyond question, at least since the digital and genetic revolutions. However, during the period of STS’ emergence, in other words, the early 1980s, a period of great scepticism about technology, this relevance was far from having the status of common sense within the academy. At present, the issue of political epistemology is discussed chiefly regarding STS’s aspiration to intervene in political processes (see Jasanoff, Sheila: Designs on Nature. Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007; Law, John & Karel Williams [2014]: “A State of Unlearning? Government as Experiment”, CRESC Working paper 134, https://hummedia. manchester.ac.uk/institutes/cresc/workingpapers/wp134.pdf, accessed 23 August 2021). 136 Breidenstein, Georg et al.: Ethnografie. Die Praxis der Feldforschung, Vienna, etc.: UVK & UTB 2013, p. 25.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

125

we are struck by a notable fact. The empirical laboratory approach was only taken up in Germany after some delay. Yet, it was there of all places that, within its framework, scholars formulated socially relevant arguments of a more explicit nature than in France, the United Kingdom or the US, which were responsible for laboratory studies’ academic success. After Knorr-Cetina, Latour, Woolgar and others, later trading under the name of STS, had examined Thomas Kuhn’s critique of historical research on science and of the philosophy of science empirically, by carrying out ethnographic studies in research labs (initially mainly US-American ones), German sociologists discussed whether we ought to be thinking in terms of the whole of “society as a laboratory”. This was the title of a 1989 essay by Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes Weyer, in which they put forward an important transdisciplinary interpretation of the meaning and purpose not of laboratory studies as such but of research on science that responds to socio-political experiential differences. They derived this interpretation neither from insights into the interdependencies of nature, knowledge and society, nor from the contemporary, internal academic critique of the established philosophy of science, but instead in light of the then much-discussed technologically induced accidents, the looming ecological crisis and the climate catastrophe.137 Following the economic miracle and scepticism about technology, a number of factors highlighted the destructive anthropogenic consequences of industrialisation, resource depletion and technological risks: dying forests, oil pollution, acid rain, signs of global warming and ozone holes. The uncertainties and risks associated with scientific knowledge were laid bare after the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union, which provided the West German antinuclear power movement with powerful arguments for closing down all the nuclear power stations in West Germany.138 The debate on the “risk society” stimulated by Ulrich

137 This is remarkable in that when it comes to the rationale for the laboratory approach, German sociologists seem to have been far more in the “here and now” of debates on environment and technology and the associated intellectual problems than their Anglo-American counterparts. The relevant introductions to laboratory studies and STS, meanwhile, took as their historical starting point—in near-canonical form—the debates between philosophers of science, historians of science and sociologists of science and the controversies over social constructivism. It almost seems as though social constructivist views were unable to become “common sense” despite extra-academic developments, such as the institutionalization of the artistic and social critique after 1968 in western Europe and the US (see Boltanski, Luc and Èvel Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism, London and New York: Verso 2005) or the now obvious and sometimes disastrous consequences of scientific-technological knowledge. 138 Of course, this awareness may have begun to set in much earlier if we consider the use of gas in the First World War, the first use of nuclear weapons against a civilian target by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) and the successful detonation of a hydrogen bomb during the Cold War (1952). Regarding the ecological crisis, the pioneering study by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962), on the consequences of the insecticide DDT, is considered to have helped pave the way for the emergence of the environmental movement. For an overview, see Passoth, Jan-Hendrik: Technik und Gesellschaft. Sozialwissenschaftliche Techniktheorien und Transformationen der Moderne, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2009.

126

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

Beck, in significant part against the background of Chernobyl,139 was, thus, one, though not the only, context of justification for the argument that when science steps outside the laboratory it results in a “transformation of risk” or the “constitution of risk”: according to Krohn and Weyer, “The dimensions of experimental science are being expanded due to the potential for spatially and temporally large-scale sociotechnological processes to take on the character of experiments”140 Society, thus, becomes a “laboratory”, in the sense of a testing ground for uncertain theories capable of “generating new knowledge”.141 As a result, these authors assert, we can no longer regard science as a subsystem—as understood by Luhmann—that is spared the social consequences of new knowledge. Instead, they argue, science is on an equal structural footing with other societal subsystems: “It is directly involved in the development of society through the production of new knowledge. It has outgrown its (historically hard-won) zone of free development and it is high time that we redefined its relationship not to society but within society.”142 Hence, nothing seems more obvious than to interpret this heightened aspiration to selfreflection, here expressed as both a demand by sociologists directed at natural scientists and the rationale for a new sociological research field, as a response to an experiential difference that may have contributed to the emergence of laboratory studies both within and outside the (natural) sciences. However, it appears that while experiential difference within the framework of the technological and ecological crisis has, in fact, taken place, the pioneers of laboratory studies did not integrate this fact into their theory building. Similarly, in contrast to the case of the Chicago School or Bourdieu’s studies of Algeria, the funding of these studies does not appear to reflect an explicit political desire to generate sociological know-how amid ongoing processes of transformation in order to render it useful to possible forms of political governance. Instead we are left with the impression that the pioneers of laboratory studies were enveloped by an “esprit de temps” within the academy. Apparently, the empiricist critique of established research on science and of the philosophy of science, the increased prestige of ethnomethodology and ethnography,143 and the politically and institutionally stimulating research climate on the west coast of the US, provided sufficient motivation to carry out participant observation in natural scientific laboratories. It was not until the late 1980s that STS scholars began to make a connection more often and more

139

See Beck, Ulrich: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage 1992. Beck wrote the book before the nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union (which took place on 26 April 1986), but it was published just 6 months later (23 September 1986). 140 Krohn and Weyer: “Gesellschaft als Labor”, p. 349. 141 Ibid., p. 357. 142 Ibid., p. 370, original emphasis. 143 In any case, investigating physicists, chemists and biologists in the late twentieth century was a more exotic affair than studying remote tribal societies in Papua New Guinea. The comparison is legitimate: as in the Chicago School and the work of Bourdieu, here too the potential for methodological innovation was rooted in empirical anthropology.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

127

systematically between extra-scientific problems, such as technological disasters and climate change, based on the laboratory context. Hence, the end of the epistemic autonomy of (natural) scientific knowledge, which concurrently rendered its seeming lack of consequences for social, moral, ethical or global political affairs implausible, occurred during a period in which what Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have called the “new spirit of capitalism”, ushered in a reorganisation of the sphere of production, which had gone through the school of the critique of capitalism. The key ideas of this school were: participation in decision-making, transparency and the dismantling of hierarchies. The pioneers of laboratory studies rightly underline how unusual and novel the participant observation approach still was in natural scientific laboratories in the late 1970s. Yet, against the background of the new social movements after 1968 and the ecological crisis,144 processes of structural upheaval also pointed to the need to promote a “democratisation” of the sciences by means of sociological observation. KnorrCetina refers to this development as a “discourse into which the selections of the laboratory are fitted points to variable transscientific fields; that is, it refers us to networks of symbolic relationships which in principle go beyond the boundaries of a scientific community or a scientific field however broadly defined”.145 In this vein, here too, though in a less focused way than in the contexts of emergence of the Chicago School and Bourdieu’s studies of Algeria, the scholarly actors involved sought to translate a socio-political insight concerning the need for reflexive action into an apt research setting. And in the case of Knorr-Cetina’s laboratory study, it was also clearly statistics that provided a relevant epistemic starting point for testing out new methodologies.

3.4.3.3

Organised Experiential Rupture in the Laboratory

Knorr-Cetina developed what she later referred to as “strong constructivism” in The Manufacture of Knowledge. Yet, in contrast to the “strong programme” expounded by David Bloor146 and the British social studies of knowledge, Knorr-Cetina derived the contexts of production of scientific knowledge from complex practices aimed at solving problems. Bloor set out the foundations of the “strong programme” in his book Knowledge and Social Imaginary (1976). He expounds four key assumptions. Firstly, scientific knowledge is based on a principle of causality; secondly, social scientific analysis must proceed without being influenced by whatever asymmetries On the establishment of a “green” justificatory order in the 1990s, see Thévenot, Laurent, Michael Moody and Claudette Lafaye: “Forms of Valuing Nature: Arguments and Modes of Justification in French and American Environmental Disputes”, in: Lamont, Michèle and Laurent Thévenot (eds.): Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000, p. 229–272. 145 Knorr-Cetina, Karin: The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, Pergamon Press 1981, p. 82. 146 See Bloor, David: Knowledge and Social Imagery, London: Routledge 1967, esp. p. 141f. 144

128

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

of domination and power may exist; thirdly, conversely, such an analysis itself must take a symmetrical approach in order to explain points of controversy, in other words, contested truths, by means of equally valid types of cause; and, fourthly, such analysis must be self-reflexive, systematically integrating the contexts of emergence of its own investigative stance. The “strong programme”, therefore, posited the fundamental equality of scientific and other forms of knowledge and called for the decoupling of theories of science and truth.147 While this laid the systematic foundations for laboratory studies, it did not translate these foundations into a methodology for use in empirical studies. The laboratory approach was the first to achieve this, while ANT carried out its own methodological revisions later. Between 1976 and 1977, Knorr-Cetina studied a biotechnology research centre on the west coast of the United States, an institution dedicated to the investigation and development of plant proteins. At almost the same time, Bruno Latour also found himself on the Californian coast, at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, where he was carrying out a laboratory study.148 The biotechnological and biochemical laboratory studied by Knorr-Cetina, dedicated to nutritional development,149 was a government-funded enterprise employing around 330 scientists and 86 other members of staff. Their studies focused on “plant protein research, an area which turned out to include aspects of protein generation and recovery, purification, particle structure, texture,

See Kehl, Christoph and Tom Mathar: “Eine neue Wissenschaftssoziologie: Die Sociology of Scientific Knowledge und das Strong Programme”, in: Beck, Stefan, Jörg Niewöhner and Estrid Sørensen: Science and Technology Studies, p. 109. 148 See Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar: Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979; Sismondo, Sergio: An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, London: Blackwell 2004, p. 51f. and Blok, Anders and Torben Elgaard Jensen: Bruno Latour. Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World, London: Routledge 2012. 149 Unfortunately, I was unable to find any information on why Knorr-Cetina selected this institution, which has partly to do with her study’s presentational form. While “classic” anthropological studies, as well as more recent case studies in STS, tend to begin with a detailed account of the field under investigation, its relevance and character, Knorr-Cetina organised her material in accordance with a pluralist sociology of scientific rationalities. In light of their specific features (practical, opportunistic, comparative, trans-scientific, literary, transformed or interpretative rationalities), these are elucidated and lent plausibility through the material itself. Knorr-Cetina’s fairly abstract mode of presentation still seems influenced by the need to establish a new research paradigm within the social sciences (including the German-speaking variety) and to define it in a programmatic way. This has the tremendous advantage of disposing of the potential criticism of empirical localism through a powerfully articulated theory of scientific knowledge, not least in methodological terms—though this did stop some from making this very criticism (see Pinch, Trevor: “Review of The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina”, in: Technology and Culture 25/1 [1983]: 130). Knorr-Cetina later responded to this criticism by pluralising her fields of study (see Knorr-Cetina, Karin: Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge, Cambridge M.A. and London: Harvard University Press 1999). Conversely, the reader is saddled with the task of reflecting on the socialanalytical potential of this specific case. From an experimentalist perspective, this makes it difficult to recognise, on an ad hoc basis, the experiential ruptures that prompted the researchers under investigation to undertake their studies and, thus, to relate these disjunctures to the sociological method of investigation selected. 147

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

129

assessment of biological value, and applications in the area of human nutrition”.150 This entailed fundamental research that proved relatively unaffected by the contemporary socio-political upheavals or any altered perspective on science.151 On the eve of the genetic revolution of the late 1980s, there was here (as yet) no sign of any field-specific transformation that might have transferred the radical external changes into the situation of the laboratory experiment. Instead, it appears as though the field under investigation was especially apt at bringing out the everyday character of the trans-scientific and trans-epistemic generation of knowledge, that is, the key phenomena with which Knorr-Cetina was concerned. In other words, the work of sociological reflection makes recourse to the diverse and contingent modes of constitution of scientific knowledge per se. From this perspective, natural scientific knowledge stabilizes resource-based relationships by producing criteria of selection and opportunity structures against the background of broader social, cultural and material contexts. This certainly entails integrating experiential differences into the micro-situation of the experiment. But, as KnorrCetina contends, researchers articulate the inferences they make in light of these differences while factoring in “transscientific connection of research”, such as the prospect of procuring materials and research funds, realizability, legitimacy and relevance to the leading figures in the field, or the prospect of achieving wide resonance through a publication.152 The process of physical-material communication concurrently justifies the choice of the sociological research method. Implicit knowledge becomes manifest in the setting of the laboratory and the objects and machines are, so to speak, components of “situational contingent nature” or the process of fabricating this nature. Hence, data collection limited solely to language and the written word entails a one-sided cognitivist focus and can only capture one aspect of the fabrication of natural scientific knowledge.

3.4.3.4

A Methodological Crisis as the Initial Spark for a New “Epistemic Culture”

The Austrian Karin Knorr-Cetina was a young postdoctoral student at the time of her first lengthy stay in the US with a solid background in empirical research on science and well aware of the critique of the common methods of investigation. She describes the influence of the Institute for Advanced Studies (Institut für höhere Studien or IHS) in Vienna, which she attended as a doctoral student in cultural 150

Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 25. Here, the environmental crisis appears essentially as a second-order phenomenon in the form of the reflexive processing of resources, with scientists discussing the topic of energy consumption en passant: “As might be expected, energetic criteria were introduced into the ‘cognitive’ operations of the laboratory with the emergenc of the energy crisis. The emphasis placed on the energyimplications of a research project closely paralleled the apparent degree of the crisis (which was relatively pronounced during my stay in the laboratory).” (ibid., p. 36). 152 Ibid., p. 88. 151

130

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

anthropology and during her additional studies in sociology, in a lengthy autobiographical interview from 2011.153 There, in the late 1970s, she came into contact with Aaron Cicourel, Marina Fischer-Kowalski and philosopher of science Rom Harré, who later wrote the preface to The Manufacture of Knowledge. She describes Cicourel’s influence as particularly crucial. Cicourel, whose sociology is moulded by the phenomenology of Alfred alongside Erving Goffman’s interactionism and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, put forward his famous critique of methodology in 1964 in his magnum opus “Method and Measurement in Sociology”. There, he called for statistics to be embedded in a theory of cognition and epistemology and for it to be provided with a micro-foundation by means of ethnographic methods. Similar to Bourdieu and his INSEE colleagues in Algeria, Cicourel and Knorr-Cetina had had first-hand experience of the widespread lack of reflection, within the contemporary application of mathematical classification systems in the fields of social research and psychology, on the epistemic and cultural factors influencing them, a problem previously more familiar in the context of the confrontation between different cultural systems and, thus, typically seen as part of anthropology. By the early 1950s, the first attempts at contextualization had already begun within US-American statistics, approaches that were tested out in a similar way around 10 years later in France by Bourdieu and his colleagues at INSEE. Aaron Cicourel found one key point of departure for the development of his microgrounded methodology, for example, in the concept of “ecological correlations” articulated by his teacher W. S. Robinson.154 Knorr-Cetina had recognised the need for such a methodology in connection with her own studies. In the 1970s, at the IHS in Vienna, she was involved in an empirical research project funded by UNESCO on the production of science in Europe, a project based on questionnaire surveys. But Knorr-Cetina was not persuaded of the value of the then commonly practised Lisrel method (Linear Structure Relationships), which, as one of the first digital processing programmes for statistical correlation analysis, was considered advanced. She

153

See also a more recent interview (in German) Knorr Cetina, K., Hannes Krämer and René Salomon, R.: “Die Ethnomethodologie umzirkeln: Karin Knorr-Cetina im Gespräch mit Hannes Krämer & René Salomon”, in: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 20/2 (2019), 1–30. 154 “Of considerable interest to me at the time was W. S. Robinson’s (1950) notion of ecological correlations; the difficulty of making inferences about individuals using aggregated census tract data. Robinson’s work sensitized me to the fact that it was difficult to use existing social science statistical methods that relied on linear models to quantify direct observations of dynamic social interaction in socially organized settings. Robinson called attention to what he called the inverse relationship between reliability and validity in the use of isolated interviews and sample surveys. Subsequently, it occurred to me (and others) that interviews should be contextualized ethnographically.” ‘I am NOT Opposed to Quantification or Formalization or Modeling, But Do Not Want to Pursue Quantitative Methods That Are Not Commensurate With the Research Phenomena Addressed’, Aaron Cicourel in Conversation With Andreas Witzel and Günter Mey, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 5/3 (2004), http://nbn-resolving. de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0403412, accessed 23 August 2021.

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

131

regarded the effective correlation output as too meagre, and the gap between the construction of (sociologically often irrelevant) path dependencies and the level of epistemological reflection all too apparent: I went to Berkeley greatly disappointed at quantitative research. I thought to myself, I really ought to carry out a new study to find out why these correlations are like that. But it takes quite a long time to do quantitative studies of that kind. You have to design a questionnaire, you have to test it, you have to carry out the research using the questionnaire, you have to input the data. Of course, at the time this was not automatically translatable into computer variables. You had to code the data and then input it manually. You couldn’t actually calculate Lisrel models at the IHS, because it lacked the computer capacity. You had to make the trip into the city to the computer centre and do the work during the night. So it’s no easy task to do another new six-year study—which you also have to get the money for—in order to test why you have whatever stupid correlations. And this disappointed me, perhaps in part because I always had more of a leaning towards theory. My primary interest was not in testing some specific variable and finding out whether it is causally efficacious, but in understanding contexts theoretically, understanding them conceptually. I didn’t manage to do that at all in this study, because we got stuck at the level of analysis and actually understood nothing. In those cases in which we seemed to understand something, where we had finally sifted out correlations through data restrictions, etc., we didn’t know why we had ended up with them.155

In contrast to both the cognitivist philosophy of science and the “strong programme”, which was based chiefly on discourse analysis, Knorr-Cetina entered the laboratory herself in order to subject the sociological analytical practice with which she was familiar to an operational procedure. Cicourel and Harré supported her plans, which turned into a successful application to the Ford Foundation to carry out research in Berkeley in the mid-1970s. In light of her experiences with the politically free-spirited and internationally oriented IHS in Vienna, Knorr-Cetina regarded this as a promising opportunity to take a practical approach to the methodological and theoretical problems that had remained unresolved in Vienna within an international and unorthodox research setting.156 The Institute for the Study of Social Change, today the “Center for Research on Social Change”, part of the University of California at Berkeley, locates its historical context of emergence, as depicted in a video on the institute’s homepage, explicitly in the US-American movements of the 1960s and early 1970s: Vietnam protests, Knorr-Cetina, in: Jesser, Andrea: “Interview mit Karin Knorr-Cetina aus dem Eigenprojekt PionierInnen der Sozialwissenschaft”, Vienna, 19 March 2011, unpublished document from the author’s private papers, p. 3–4, original German version slightly edited by the present author. 156 “I studied in Austria, in Vienna, and then I went to the Institute for Advanced Studies. That was an important point in my development and career, because I got to know people there who were not from Austria but from other countries and had taught at the IHS. That was very important. So I did actually know a few important Americans, who were quite renowned, before I left Austria. And that was also the appeal of the Institute for Advanced Studies. [. . .] It was also an interesting time in other ways: of the left-wingers of the day, who were important in the 68 movement, some were at the institute and we always had great discussions about all sorts of things. But academically it was above all the influence of, or the chance to get to know, people from other countries, who put on events there. And that was important, particularly in Austria.” Knorr-Cetina, in: Jesser, Andrea: “Interview mit Karin Knorr-Cetina”, p. 1. 155

132

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

black power and the civil rights movement. 1976, the year in which Karin KnorrCetina arrived in Berkeley, also saw the foundation of the institute, which asserts its determination to combine “scholarly inquiry and intellectual transformation”.157 Ethnographic studies there are fused with social engagement. Hence, the achievements of the protest and participatory movements have not only received a form of academic consecration but also articulate the aspiration to help solve public problems by means of social scientific expertise. The institute’s founders and present-day members of staff underline that the investigations in clinics, hospitals and schools occur in a collaborative and interdisciplinary context that also allows students and postdoctoral scholars a high degree of freedom in the planning, design and realisation of their projects. Less concerned with creating a particular intellectual school than with innovation, the scholars working here have programmatically reactivated key research premises of pragmatist experimentalism and the Chicago School, a commitment that could only be conducive to testing out a new research approach, such as laboratory studies. Knorr-Cetina puts it like this: So Berkeley motivated me to do something different. I was of course familiar with qualitative research. I had already done courses in qualitative research and Aaron Cicourel had talked about qualitative research at the IHS. I was familiar with that and I wanted to test it out and see whether it might be possible to understand science differently and whether you could achieve more through observation. I had the time for this at Berkeley and the ability to concentrate on it and so I simply tried to get myself into a laboratory, a research centre, and observe what went on there. [. . .] I bore the risk, so to speak, of taking it on. And when it came to this willingness to take risks, to do something crazy, something I myself didn’t believe in, the milieu in Berkeley played an important role. Because in the American universities doing something crazy is quite feasible; you’re encouraged to do so. That was part and parcel of the milieu. You also saw that others were doing crazy things too, so off I went.158

Her enthusiasm for the climate of inquiry at the American universities was, in part, a response to a continental-European academia in which adapting to existing paradigms was the royal road to a successful academic career. This unorthodox AngloAmerican research style is typical of the laboratory approach and of the STS to which it gave rise. This approach included Berkeley Institute scholars’ taken-forgranted practice of tackling, through participant observation, fields of study previously seen as lying outside a given discipline. In this sense, they pursued an engaged form of science associated with a major investment of time and a willingness to throw oneself completely into the field under investigation. The prerequisite here was a genuinely questioning stance, which is, in turn, the vital precondition for empirical exploration in which the social order is understood as a perpetual process of “ordering” rather than simply being presupposed. The focus of Knorr-Cetina’s study in the sociology of science, then, lay not on the “search for truth”, but on problem-solving action, which is ideally embraced by the

157

See the video: http://crsc.berkeley.edu/history, accessed 23 August 2021. Knorr-Cetina, in: Jesser, Andrea: “Interview mit Karin Knorr-Cetina”, p. 4 and p. 6, original German version slightly edited by the present author.

158

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

133

largest possible community of scholars.159 However, following Peirce and Dewey, because, in this context, scholars are neither searching for “truth as such” nor solving “problems as such”, their interaction with the objects in the experiment does not necessarily result in reflection. Knorr-Cetina’s ethnography confirms Dewey’s hypotheses: even decisions in the laboratory are often made routinely, that is, in the first instance, they reflect certain “habits”, in the sense of customary practices. To shine a spotlight on these practices ethnographically directs one’s attention to the experiential differences within research: “The selectivity” states Knorr-Cetina, “incorporated into the ‘normal’ course of scientific action is rarely noticed unless something interferes with the ‘natural’ sequence of events, or an ‘anomaly’ creates problems in the procedure.”160 The interaction, elaborated by Dewey, between the epistemological analysis of natural scientific inquiry and insights into its socially conditioned nature161 finds its sociological counterpart in Knorr-Cetina’s study. Accordingly, similar to Latour, she selected an ethnomethodological approach distinguished by a mix of qualitative methods, in which, in addition to interviews and material analysis, participant observation figures as a key tool of knowledge production. The experimental character of this sociological procedure and, thus, its affinity to Dewey’s logic of inquiry becomes apparent in an essay from 1981. Explanations in ethnomethodology are also not produced in light of a priori presuppositions about the “social order”: In ethnomethodology [. . .] the assumption that social behaviour is guided by rules, which become manifest in dispositions and expectations, is in the first instance suspended. “Ordered” social activities are instead treated as phenomena that are constantly produced and reproduced through various practices carried out by those involved.162

This approach augments the descriptive endeavour of classic participant observation with an empirical constructivism that consciously factors in the constructed nature of the empirically-based generation of theories.163 Knorr-Cetina bases herself on pragmatism and particularly on Peirce’s concept of the “context of discovery” to justify her research approach.164 It is this context of discovery that provides researchers with the opportunity to observe and investigate science ‘in the making’, and here, Knorr-Cetina traces back the scientific “fact” to its Latin origin of “facere”, to make. She composed the book The Manufacture of Knowledge with a focus on the 159

See Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 41. Ibid., p. 89. With the word “natural” Knorr-Cetina is alluding to the terms “normally”, “naturally” and “logically” used by the scientists themselves. 161 Dewey, Logic, p. 26f. 162 Knorr-Cetina, Karin: “Anthropologie und Ethnomethodologie. Eine theoretische und methodische Herausforderung”, in: Schmied-Korwazk, Wolfdietrich: Grundfragen der Ethnologie. Beiträge zur gegenwärtigen Theorie-Diskussion, Berlin: Reimer 1981, p. 119. 163 See Knorr-Cetina, Karin: “Theoretischer Konstruktivismus. Über die Einnistung von Wissensstrukturen in soziale Strukturen”, in: Kalthoff, Herbert, Stefan Hirschauer and Gesa Lindemann (eds.): Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008, p. 51. 164 Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 2. 160

134

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

scientific feats of integration performed by heterogeneous entities and epistemic subjects, linking this with a critique of empirical objectivism. This critique, according to Knorr-Cetina, adds another aspect to the constitutive role which both pragmatism and scepticism attribute to scientific investigation, i.e. that the experimenter is a causal agent of the sequence of events created, and that conjunctions of events are not provided for us, but created by us. [. . .] Rather than view empirical observation as questions put to nature in a language she understands, we will take all references to the “constitutive” role of science seriously, and regard scientific enquiry as a process of production.165

Ethnographic experiential knowledge contributes to the investigation of natural scientific knowledge production in three ways. Firstly, by investigating the character of scientific knowledge produced in light of feats of construction that can be gleaned from the types of selection and rationalisation observed (human-machine interactions, discourse, written texts, and so on); secondly, by recording and exploring the contribution of technologies and materialities; and thirdly, by reflecting in a practical sense—through physical presence—on the situatedness, indexicality and locality of knowledge. Furthermore, because it does not operate primarily at the level of research “results”, ethnography makes it possible to not only survey the logics of production characteristic of research but also bear witness to the fact that scientific objects are subject to unceasing transformation.166 The observation of transformations without an experientially rich observational method seems unviable. In line with this, Knorr-Cetina calls for the elimination of the separation between theory and experience, a separation that has gone unquestioned by various schools of thought, ranging from the non-empirical philosophy of science to Habermas’s theory of communicative action.167 The idea here is that their linkage is simultaneously realised at the practical level in the researcher’s method of investigation. In this vein, laboratory studies exemplify Dewey’s practice-theoretical thesis of continuity, in which the two aspects of experimentalism, as social trope and investigative strategy, come into play methodologically: “In many ways”, as Knorr-Cetina states elsewhere, “the notion of a scientific laboratory in sociology of science stands for what in history and methodology of science has long been the notion of ‘experiment’.”168

165

Ibid., p. 3. See Knorr-Cetina, Karin: “Theoretischer Konstruktivismus” p. 158. 167 See Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 141. 168 Knorr-Cetina, Karin: “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory. On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science” in: Pickering, Andrew (ed.): Science as Practice and as Culture, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press 1992, p. 113. 166

3.4 The Modi Operandi of Experience: Situate, Correlate and Materialise

3.4.3.5

135

Ensuring the Thesis of Continuity Through the Materiality of Experience

As “interpretive work”, Knorr-Cetina’s methodological “laboratory pragmatism” lent concrete form to Dewey’s notion of an experimental interpretive strategy. In the laboratory, it is not the metaphysical goal of “finding the truth” that is the order of the day, but rather innovation, which becomes evident when an experiment is successful and in “methodological ‘how-to-do-it’-projections.”169 Thus, researchers who limit their studies of science to its cognitive products cannot capture the essence of scientific reasoning. This is congruent with Dewey’s thesis of the experiment as a practical end in itself, its local and reflexive initial situation, its capacity for structuration and its necessarily suggestive and, thus, revisable format, which is crucial to reorienting action.170 We can see here the affinity between ethnographic “field science” as a sociological practice of knowledge generation171 and the constitutive interdependence of induction and deduction within the experimental practice of inquiry.172 And yet, as Knorr-Cetina states with critical reference to Heidegger, every practice is itself constituted by interpretation and communication. As a result, she contends, Habermas’s basic distinction between labour and interaction also reproduces an outmoded dichotomy that leaves instrumental action to the natural sciences, as if this action were exempted from the practical conditions of its constitution: “Yet, while science is seen to be founded upon human practice via interests, it is not considered to be part of this practice.”173 Regarding early STS, it was beyond doubt that the social environment in the developed industrial society is organised scientifically and technologically. From the late 1970s onwards, laboratory studies not only constituted a new field of empirical research—the scientific laboratory as the locus of knowledge production—but also, as Knorr-Cetina underlines in the preface to the new edition of her book, as “an approach based upon the logic of production”.174 It was not until the laboratory studies that researchers investigated “natural science as a craft”.175 Rather than adding the social to the methods for producing natural scientific facts as a residual

169

Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 4. See Dewey, Logic, p. 492. 171 In this context, Knorr-Cetina refers to a “methodological relativism”, which she deploys in order to achieve the reflexive decentring of residual sociological categories. See Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 17f. 172 In an article on the kinship between the plural forms of modelling characteristic of the laboratory’s epistemic contributions, on the one hand, and those of the experiment, on the other, Knorr-Cetina does not include the ethnographic method itself in her comparison of different experimental approaches (representation, processing of partial phenomenal aspects, semiotization) (see once again Knorr-Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory”). 173 Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 142. 174 Knorr-Cetina, Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis, p. XI. 175 Amelang, Katrin: “Laborstudien”, in: Beck, Stefan etc.: Science and Technology Studies, p. 154. 170

136

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

category,176 they explored the social in light of the activity of research itself. The laboratory itself, thus, became a theoretical concept.177 Here, researchers committed themselves to a social constructivist stance that investigated the “constructedness” of the social in correlation with its composite material nature. From this perspective, science and technology play a role in the formatting, characterisation and transformation of our social environment. By investigating the preconditions for the production of scientific knowledge, we gain insights into how such formatting comes about and what it tells us about the constitution of society, along with its inherent normative truth claims, organisation and management. But this requires empirical observation of knowledge-manufacturing processes as they emerge, and an analysis of the way in which natural scientists “construct” the relationships between human beings, nature and technology within the everyday reality of research. Just how much the method selected—the ethnography of science—simultaneously reflected an epistemological stance regarding the relationship between the natural and social sciences was underlined by Knorr-Cetina in an essay of 1983: If natural science reality is an upshot of a methodical practice which ethnographic studies of science depict as reflexive and constructive (decision-impregnated, transformational, artifactual), as socially occasioned, subject to an indexical logic, and embodied in discourse which includes its own referent, then a large portion of the presumed distinction between the two sciences disappears.178

3.4.3.6

Summary

The modus operandi of “materialising”, implemented by Knorr-Cetina at the level of research practice, directs our attention to a (logic-of-production) reflexivity that is triggered by the technologies and objects deployed in research. Science and technology become trans-scientific phenomena whose effects are reworked socialscientifically. The laboratory studies, thus, made an impact in three ways: firstly, their ethnographic interventions affected the natural sciences, secondly, they explored scientific knowledge as the practical explication of what had previously been implicit scientific reflection, and, thirdly, they overcame the traditional cognitivist-anthropocentric studies of science through empirical-experimental methods of investigation. Rarely have sociological methods of investigation been so close to the understanding of experimental action in the laboratory context and, simultaneously,

See Schimank, Uwe: “Die unmögliche Trennung von Natur und Gesellschaft. Bruno Latours Diagnose der Selbsttäuschung der Moderne”, in: Schimank, Uwe and Ute Volkmann: Soziologische Gegenwartsdiagnosen I. eine Bestandsaufnahme, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2007, p. 158. 177 Knorr-Cetina, Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis, p. XIII. See on the impact of the laboratory as an epistemic concept within STS Guggenheim, Michael: “Laboratizing and de-laboratizing the world: Changing sociological concepts for places of knowledge production”, in: History of the Human Sciences 25/1 (2012): 99–118. 178 Knorr-Cetina, “New Developments in Science Studies”, p. 171. 176

3.5 Interim Conclusion: The Epistemology of Experimentalism

137

engaged in testing out a genuine sociological experimentalism, one that lends concrete form to Dewey’s critique of cognitivist spectator theories with the help of a practice-theoretical approach. Knorr-Cetina comprehended knowledge production based on interdependent experiential differences executed in the laboratory through intentional transformations of a problematic situation into a deproblematised one. These transformations rendered locality and situativity the prerequisites for research in which the process of selection, with a view to facilitating problem-solving action, engenders inductive epistemic effects. The relationship between the natural and social sciences is produced, in addition, via a general narrative ordering structure. To the extent that Knorr-Cetina was able to show that “nature” does not exist in the laboratory but is, in fact, materialised there in the first place, her thesis ultimately culminates in the notion that “the methods and procedures [of natural and technological scientists, T.B.] are sufficiently akin to those of social science to cast doubt on the common distinction between the two sciences.”179 She, therefore, confirms Dewey’s ontological thesis of continuity and makes it the prerequisite for a sociological experimentalism, as subsequently practised within STS.

3.5

Interim Conclusion: The Epistemology of Experimentalism

In “test run I”, I discussed three sociological programmes as variants on a sociological experimentalism, variants that made their epistemological contributions to an external description of sociological research with the aid of ethnographic studies. Alluding to examples, I discussed a concept of experience that, as envisaged by Dewey, generates reflexivity when experiential differences are inserted between the processes of (theoretical) thinking and (practical research) action. All three programmes aspired to translate the epistemological rejection of excessively rationality-driven or purely empiricist forms of knowledge into sociological research practice. From this vantage point, reflexive research experience is only ever materialised, firstly, against the background of specific historical and/or local events, secondly, at the level of moves and strategies within the politics of science, and, thirdly, at the level of efforts to get to grips with methodology. Consonant with the two aspects of experimentalism, the modi operandi of “situating”, “correlating” and “materialising” always simultaneously contribute to manufacturing research experiences, as generated based on antecedent experience (Fig. 3.2). This happens in the Chicago School of Sociology through the epistemological privileging of the situation, which is foregrounded through both the journalisticinvestigative epistemic style of the “assignment” and the primacy of the local exploratory study that seeks to identify new issues for investigation. The translation of the concept of ecology into sociology, as established by the Chicago School, is 179

Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 137.

138

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

Fig. 3.2 The modi operandi of experience

Experience

situate

correlate

materialise

part and parcel of this. In analogy to the biological concept of ecology, Park noted that not individuals, but attitudes are interacting, to maintain social organisation and enable social change.180 Urban ethnography scrutinizes these interactions through participant observation and, thus, exposes itself to investigative situations which, as Lindner observed, also modify the attitudes and values of the researchers involved,181 and, according to Park, ought to do so. This postulate comports with the Thomas theorem, which, according to Hartmut Esser, elucidated “why human subjectivity is so important to explaining objective social processes”.182 The sociological unit of observation is the spatially circumscribed and geographically determinable situational unit of the interdependent forms of communication characteristic of finite social groups (communities). This situational unit provided the humanecological framework for the experimental action of both the actors observed and the researchers. This unit also provides the methodological foundation for the production of spatial and social correlations, and for the decision as to which methods are selected for which research question: quantitative methods to explore what Park called the “ecological order”, and qualitative ones for the “cultural order”.183 This human ecology was based on the assumption, shared with Dewey, of constant change. This change is stabilized by the principle of transition, as established by Darwin, both regarding the constitution of objects and the observer, through a continual process of the translation (in Dewey’s words: “coordination” and “transaction”) of social situations. The potential for social research-based knowledge is also environment-dependent. Where Dewey deployed the categories of environment and situation in order to anchor his thesis of the continuity of thinking and acting within social space, the theorem of human ecology translates this imperative into a sociological experimentalism. The combination of journalistic and sociological epistemic styles, by means of the ethnographic method, becomes the imperative, within research practice, of a new sociological school.

See Park, “Die Stadt als räumliche Struktur und als sittliche Ordnung”, p. 97. Unfortunately, I didn‘t get the copy from the English original text “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order” in: Publications of the American Sociological Association, Vol 20, 1925: 1–14. 181 See Lindner, The Reportage of Urban Culture, p. 144f. 182 Esser, Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen, vol. 1: Situationslogik und Handeln, p. 64. 183 However, according to Lindner, the explicit methodical translation of social ecology was carried out not by Park but by Burgess (see Lindner ibid., p. 55f). Vivien Palmer’s role in this is probably still to be established. 180

3.5 Interim Conclusion: The Epistemology of Experimentalism

139

A similar novel combination in terms of professional ethos, though proceeding from quite different motives, was established in Bourdieu’s Algeria studies through, as Tassadite Yacine remarks, a unique ethno-sociology. Its methodological definition included the object-focused and research-practical correlation of the action formations observed, which provided the rationale for Bourdieu’s key category of habitus. In this sense, the habitus represents the conceptual counterpart of Dewey’s thesis of the continuity of experience and practice. In Distinction, Bourdieu substantiates the notion of praxeological continuity by means of the concept of habitus: “To speak of habitus is to include in the object the knowledge which the agents, who are part of the object, have of the object, and the contribution this knowledge makes to the reality of the object.”184 The habitus, as incorporated social history, encapsulates the conflicts surveyed in Algeria between time-bound (“traditional” versus “modern”) action regimes. Despite what his experience in Algeria had taught him, however, Bourdieu opted to privilege the genealogical ahead of the anticipatory aspect of the habitus concept in his later studies of Occidental societies. Here, we can discern the difference between Bourdieu’s and Dewey’s notions of the correlativity of praxeological knowledge: similar to Mead, Dewey presupposed that knowledge is acquired not chiefly by drawing on previous experiences but through their active redefinition. In other words, this was an anticipatory concept of knowledge geared towards the future, which explains its orientation towards solutions. Dewey insisted on the “operational a priori” of correlative knowledge for the purposes of redefining past experiences. Conversely, over the course of his oeuvre, Bourdieu became increasingly reticent when it came to the question of anticipation and redefinition as the driving force of practice. This problem inspired most of the critique of both the concept of habitus and Bourdieu’s sociological epistemology. The experimentalist Bourdieu is undoubtedly to be found principally in his earlier works.185 While the Algerian studies proceeded through the modus operandi of a genealogical correlating of research and actor experiences, Karin Knorr-Cetina’s laboratory study emphasises the redefinition of given facts. Knorr-Cetina observes her laboratory actors through the modus operandi of materiality. She classifies their forms of practice through complex “decisional translations” or “decisional structures”, which are generated by means of technologies and artefacts. Her work lends plausibility to the notion of the “denaturing” of nature through natural science186 in light of the material laboratory context, which, concurrently, requires the “objectification” of nature—in the literal sense of the transformation of nature into (research) 184

Bourdieu, Pierre: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Harvard: Harvard University Press 1999, p. 467. 185 For an (updated) account on the similarities and differences between the two research approaches, see Bogusz, Tanja: “From Crisis to Experiment. Bourdieu and Dewey on Practice and Political Cooperation”, in: Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki and Anders Buch, London & New York: Routledge 2018, p. 156–175. 186 See Knorr-Cetina, “Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor als Ort der ‚Verdichtung‘von Gesellschaft“, p. 87.

140

3 Test Run I: What Is Experience? Experimentalist Sociologies as Theories of. . .

objects. What we are dealing with here are sociotechnical decisions with a generally uncertain outcome. Yet, it is this very indeterminacy that we can consider a “sine qua non for the emergence of new information”.187 These methods of selection affect, in addition to the choice of living organisms, above all, the choice of objects: substances, filters, centrifuges, microscopes or the scholarly article. Basing herself on Mead, Knorr-Cetina describes the everyday selection methods that typify scientific decisions “as situated in transscientific fields” through hypothetical variations on their consequences, which ultimately lead to “assure consistency”.188 According to Knorr-Cetina, the operational redefinition in the laboratory oscillates between habitual structures and structures of opportunity. Sociological experimentalism generates epistemological input through the physical co-presence of researchers within social space, in which specific events disrupt the habitual flow of experience (James). This also means that these events affect not only the bodies of the group investigated, that is, the natural scientists’ bodies (as an instrument) in the case of the laboratory studies, but also the ethnographically participating bodies as an instrument of research.189 This opens up two levels of epistemological reflexivity within an experimentalist framework: a) exogenously and b) endogenously determined reflexivity. Both levels are intertwined with one another in the empirical research situation. Exogenously determined reflexivity includes those factors that impact on the sociological research setting from outside. Processes of social upheaval in all three programmes pointed to the need for, as in Bourdieu’s studies in Algeria, the ethnographic approach, in the sense of experience-based research. The scope of this exogenously produced reflexivity and its influence on the implementation of the various research projects varied. By contrast, endogenously determined reflexivity is fuelled by the dynamics of the scientific field, in other words, intra-scientific debates and coalition-building.190

187

Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 90. Ibid., p. 91. This recalls Arnold Gehlen’s reception of pragmatism, which he expressed through the concept of “experimenting test action”. See Gehlen, Arnold: Urmensch und Spätkultur, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2004, p. 12f. 189 See Knorr-Cetina, “Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor als Ort der‚ Verdichtung ‘von Gesellschaft”, p. 87. The classic biological and anthropological “discovery” literature features examples galore of such physical effects, most of which relate to exceptional situations involving geographically and climatically unaccustomed working conditions. This may include unusual illnesses and the way actors deal with them, as impressively evinced by the testimony of “explorers” Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin and Bronisław Malinowski. In particular, we know that Darwin constantly felt sick on board ship. During my own research trip with marine biologists in Papua New Guinea, I once had to vomit at sea. The biologists present acknowledged this half-ironically, half-appreciatively, with the words: “Now you are a real scientist!” On the problem of Western ethnographers’ fixation on texts, see Clifford, James and George Marcus: Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press 1986, p. 12. 190 See Bourdieu, Pierre: “Méthode scientifique et hierarchie sociale des objets”, in: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1/1 (1975): 4–6 and Bourdieu, Pierre: “The Specificity of the 188

3.5 Interim Conclusion: The Epistemology of Experimentalism

141

The category of experience in sociological experimentalism is linked with a specific conception of sociological reflexivity. Hence, reflexivity is generated by means of experiential differences through the modi operandi of situating, correlating and materialising. Their cause may be endogenous or exogenous in origin. For the most part, the two are interwoven. Observed experiential differences trigger reflections on the part of actors that flow, within the context of research, into the construction of research objects. Via the temporal delimitation and determination of the experiential difference, approaches that undertake this determination in light of genealogy (Bourdieu) differ from others that do so with a view to anticipation (Knorr-Cetina). Genealogy and anticipation in the urban research of the Chicago School converged in the “situation”, which took inspiration from the journalistic epistemic style. The Algeria studies rendered plausible the historicisation and comprehension of enduring incorporation for methodological and political reasons. Meanwhile, by contrast, the primacy of the redefinition of given situations and processes evinces the laboratory study’s clearer proximity to the model of investigative knowing, in the sense of anticipation. This makes the culturalization of the experiment and, thus, as I emphasised at the start of this book, a “culturalised experimentalism”, an innovation for sociology. Therefore, regarding experimentalism, the epistemological starting point for the sociological acquisition of knowledge is reflexivity, in the form of the sociostructural analysis of the conditions of social research, an analysis that is mindful of researchers’ dispositions as materialised within this research. Consequently, as in the case of the actors observed, the experiential difference observed becomes the trigger for reflexivity in the carrying out of participant observation. We have, thus, primed the category of experience as a heuristic precondition for the analytical role of the core concept that I will now discuss in the following “test run II”, with the help of the category of “testing” and in light of three sociological programmes. What I call the “social-theoretical effects of experimentalism” is at issue here.

Scientific Field and the Social conditions of the Progress of Reason”, in: Biaglioli, Mario (ed.): The Science Studies Reader, London: Routledge 1999, p. 82. Bourdieu dedicated his final lectures at the Collège de France to the topic of a “science of science and reflexivity” (see Bourdieu, Pierre: Science of the Science and Reflexivity, London: Polity Press 2004). On this, see the critical commentary by Hacking, Ian: “La science de la science chez Pierre Bourdieu”, in: Bouveresse, Jacques and Daniel Roche (eds.): La liberté par la connaissance. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Paris: Odile Jacob 2004, p. 147–162.

Chapter 4

Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Why is an actor defined through trials? Because, there is no other way to define an actor other than through its action and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the character that is made the focus of attention [. . .]. This is a pragmatist tenet [. . .].—Bruno Latour1

4.1

Heisenberg and the Random Universe

Culturalised experimentalism was introduced into the field of the natural sciences through laboratory studies. It was preceded by the application of the experimentalist way of thinking to the natural sciences and beyond. Thomas Kuhn described the fact of the experiential rupture within “normal science” as an ultimately productive anomie that expresses “violations of expectation”.2 This may lead to a paradigm shift if, as brought out by Michel Foucault borrowing from Georges Canguilhem, it plays itself out “in the true” of science,3 that is, if it is located within the established discourse and, thus, represents a productive rather than a total anomaly.4 It is productive because it is recognised as a testing situation that contributes to the advancement of shared epistemic interests. In other words, the category of testing

Latour, Bruno: “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, in: Le Grand, Homer Eugène (ed.): Experimental Inquiries. Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, Dordrecht, etc.: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990, p. 59. 2 See Kuhn, Thomas S.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996, p. xi. 3 See Foucault, Michel: “The Order of Discourse”, in: Young, Robert (ed.): Untying The Text: A Post Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981. 4 On the productivity of the concept of anomie in sociological theory and its application to the field of cultural production, see Bogusz, Tanja: Institution und Utopie. Ost-West-Transformationen an der Berliner Volksbühne, Bielefeld: Transcript 2007. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2_4

143

144

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

focuses on the constructedness, sociality, contextuality and co-textuality5 of knowledge. Hence, this social-theoretical constructivism simultaneously attains a certain status within theories of culture because it sheds light on human-environment interactions. However, “the culturalization of the natural sciences” is neither, as often assumed, limited to the entry of ‘cultural’ elements into the sciences, nor to studying natural scientific action as a social field on an equal footing with others. Instead, if we adhere to Dewey’s theory of inquiry, since the early twentieth century, constructivism, as an element in the attainment of knowledge, has helped to revolutionise the natural sciences themselves.6 This prefigured the suggestion, later formulated by Karin Knorr-Cetina, to reconsider “the routinely made and ritually cited distinction between the natural and the social sciences in light of new conceptions concerning natural science research and methodology”.7 The culturalisation of the natural sciences through philosophy-of-science constructivism was consonant with an idea of Werner Heisenberg’s that had also influenced Dewey’s theory of inquiry. This pertains, at least if we trace back the culturalisation of the natural sciences—in the form of philosophy-of-science constructivism—to the insight that the constitution of objects can never be evaluated independently of prevailing environmental conditions and, thus, from the way in which it is manufactured. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which he put forward in 1927, integrated the process and the materiality of active observation into the physical-experimental production of knowledge and theory building. Dewey, meanwhile, utilised the findings of quantum mechanics to critique both traditional epistemology and rationality-driven postulates regarding the acquisition of knowledge à la Kant: “Heisenberg’s principle compels a recognition of the fact that interaction prevents an accurate measurement of velocity and position for any body, the demonstration centering about the role of the interaction of the observer in determining what actually happens.”8 Conversely, the problem of classical logic was its unwillingness to acknowledge that experiments always “reorganize prior conditions”. Instead, according to Dewey, too many scholars had been content merely to see in them “a change in our own subjective or mental attitude”: “The act no more 5

On the nexus of co-textuality and contextuality, see Beck, Stefan: Umgang mit Technik. Kulturelle Praxen und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungskonzepte, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1997, p. 341f. 6 Luhmann mentions theoretical biology and cybernetics to make a similar argument, though it leads to different consequences than those I suggest here. See, for example, Luhmann, Niklas: Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1998, p. 413f. 7 Knorr-Cetina, Manufacture of Knowledge, p. 149. Knorr-Cetina also underlined that the goal cannot be to “argue for a re-unification of the respective fields of research with respect to their concrete methods and techniques. What is at stake here is a reconsideration of the routinely made and ritually cited distinction between the natural and the social sciences in light of new conceptions concerning natural science research and methodology” (ibid.) Latour sums up this observation in his study of Louis Pasteur as follows: “There is no essential difference between the human or social sciences and the exact or natural sciences, because there is no more science than there is society.” Latour, Bruno: The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge, etc.: Harvard University Press 1993, p. 148. 8 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p. 161.

4.1 Heisenberg and the Random Universe

145

entered into the constitution of the known object than travelling to Athens to see the Parthenon had any effect on architecture.”9 Dewey refers to this epistemology as “compensation for the impotency that attached to it in contrast with the force of executive acts”.10 The interplay of observation and the constitution of objects in Heisenberg’s postulate, however, is relevant chiefly because observation is not mere contemplation but comes into play as an agent of inductive testing. Over the course of the twentieth century, this hypothesis has taken hold in the theory of social differentiation developed by Niklas Luhmann, in STS and in French neopragmatism in quite different ways. Philosophers of science, such as Kuhn, and sociologists of science using ethnographic methods expanded the field of observers and their observers. Extra-scientific events, such as the technological and ecological crises of the 1970s and 1980s, multiplied these observations through public pressure on the agencies responsible for these crises to justify their conduct. In the first instance, Luhmann tried to get to grips with this proliferation of observers by distinguishing between “observation and operation”, a distinction that was supposed to provide a means of writing an external description of sociological thinking. Building on the work of Luhmann, I understand ‘testing’, from the observer’s perspective, as a ‘reality test’ that ratifies and, thus, redefines a shared present. In the course of experimental action, this is also the prerequisite for a (temporary) deductive closure. The category of testing attained a core methodological function within STS and in the pragmatist sociology of justification and critique contra those social theories that lay claim to universal validity. Their problem, as Dewey himself had already remarked, is that they are unable to resolve the contradiction between a supposed telos and the factual reality of unpredictable and constant change: “a universe whose essential characteristic is fixed order and connection has no place for unique and individual existences, no place for novelty and genuine change and growth. It is, in the words of William James, a block universe.”11 Dewey called the “assumption of the proper ubiquity of knowledge” a major “intellectualistic fallacy.”12 Today, now that the epistemological critique of universalism is part of the standard repertoire of social scientific thinking, it can even be found in the physics so valued by Dewey. Thus, according to US-American human scientist Alan Lightman, astrophysicists were engulfed by a ‘faith crisis’ in 2013 as a result of the discovery of so-called ‘multiverses’. This discovery appeared to pull the rug out from under the assumption that the universe is unique and self-contained. Adhering to the Darwinian, evolutionary notion of the unpredictability of the development of life, which was so crucial for the pragmatists, some scientists even made the case for so-called ‘random universes’. Astrophysicists Alejandro Jenkins and Gilad Perez, similar to Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, work on the assumption

9

Ibid., p. 171. Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 167. 12 Ibid., p. 175. 10

146

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

that the foundations of the laws of nature require fundamental rethinking. Their findings culminate in the hypothesis that, in addition to our universe, other universes exist with comparable complex structures, but whose internal organisation rests upon quite different laws.13 According to Alan Guth, one of the pioneers of cosmological theory, this means that the physicalist dream that all natural phenomena can be traced back to fundamental principles has come to an end.14 It is true that the postulate that universes exist in addition to the one we know goes back to the 1980s. But new evidence points to the far more disquieting postulate that our universe is just one of an infinite number of ways of generating life. Furthermore, this has led some scientists to conclude that the elements that led to life here did so not on the basis of law-like regularities, but randomly. Lightman captures the momentous consequences for those physicists who have built their lives as researchers on a single theory when it comes to interpreting the universe’s natural laws (such as the ‘theory of eternal inflation’ or ‘string theory’), by stating simply that “We are an accident”.15 For astrophysicists, this means that they have to believe in something that cannot (yet empirically) be proved.16 Lightman quotes Alan Guth: “There will still be a lot for us to understand, but we will miss out on the fun of figuring everything out from first principles.”17 As Dewey would have it, this still leaves us with rather a lot, because, according to him, the unsettling of first principles is what challenges us to engage in inquiry, a challenge arising from testing situations. Hence, testing situations give rise to epistemic objects that exist as constructed, in other words produced, subject matter.18 Scholars had already begun to explore this philosophy-of-science constructivism empirically through laboratory studies and STS by the late 1970s. Applied to sociology, this means that the debate on multiverses may be symptomatic of the plurality of social worlds and actors’ capacity to generate these worlds inductively out of local problems, while being unable to determine them teleologically in advance. In order to obtain an empirical understanding of the production of such worlds, early STS studies observed techno-scientific testing situations and controversies. From this perspective, the ‘test’, the ‘trial’ or the ‘controversy’ represents the lynchpin of the social-theoretical acquisition of knowledge, which, as I demonstrated in ‘test run I’, rests upon the epistemological prerequisite of an experiential difference or experiential rupture. In early STS, the epistemological status of trialling was initially bound up with its establishment as an observational See Jenkins, Alejandro and Gilad Perez: “Leben im Multiversum“, in: Spektrum der Wissenschaft/Highlights 3 (2013): Raum, Zeit, Materie, pp. 74–82. 14 See Lightman, Alan: “Das Zufallsuniversum. Der kosmische Würfelwurf oder die Glaubenskrise der Naturwissenschaften”, in: Lettre International, Winter 2013:116. 15 See Lightman, Alan: “The Accidental Universe”, in The Best American Essays 2012, edited by David Brooks and Robert Atwan, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston and New York, 2012, p. 207–217, here p. 215. 16 See Jenkins and Perez, “Leben im Multiversum”, p. 82. 17 Lightman, “The Accidental Universe”, p. 217. 18 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p. 168. 13

4.2 The Testing Situation as a Stimulus for Experimental Knowledge Production

147

category. Here, the trialling situation defined the controversial moment at which the scientists observed come to a decision about the operationalisability of a hypothesis. Through ANT, this procedure was integrated into the constitution of research objects. The pragmatic sociology of critique as conceived by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, building on this, then developed a model that explained, in terms of social theory, the category of testing by means of the concept of critique. In the following ‘test run II’, I present Luhmann’s methodology, STS, ANT and the pragmatic sociology of justification regarding their contributions to sociological experimentalism. Firstly, however, I elucidate the modi operandi of the category of testing in light of their compatibility with experimentalism. These are based on the second important principle of experimentalism according to Dewey: revisability.

4.2

The Testing Situation as a Stimulus for Experimental Knowledge Production

What are testing situations? From a pragmatist point of view, testing situations generally speaking comprise those moments at which routines or “habits” are disrupted and sequences of action interrupted. The sociological experimentalism that I develop in this book aligns only to a limited degree with this reading, which envisages a broad concept of testing situations. The experimentalism I expound may certainly refer to everyday mishaps, such as tripping over a stone, and macrosocial events, such as political revolutions. But if the testing situation is to tally with the epistemological principle of experimentalism—namely, reflexivity—something more than a mere disruption is required. A situation becomes a testing situation only if it triggers reflections that aspire to generate knowledge. I, therefore, define a testing situation both in light of experiential differences and as a stimulus for experimental knowledge production. This essentially means the production of social theories in the present test run. ‘Doing theory’, in contrast to the application of theories to empirical phenomena, has a long tradition within qualitative social research, which has seen nothing less than a ‘surge of theory’ over the last 15 years. While, in the past, scholars often dismissed with a weary smile the efforts of those who sought to contribute to theory production based on qualitative methods, today we are seeing a proliferation of research proposals, articles, anthologies and dissertations on this topic. In the associated programmes, theory is regarded as a product manufactured by society and its effects. In addition to pragmatism and grounded theory, philosophy-ofscience constructivism was a key source of inspiration for this conception of theory. Knorr-Cetina highlights the analytical critique of the idea of ‘given facts’: here, the productive character of theorising as a ‘technology of discovery’ takes precedence over a ‘general’ social theory, that is, a generally valid theoretical construct that may be applied to each and every empirical phenomenon: “On this view sociological theory is first of all a feature of society rather than of science [. . .] The notion of

148

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

theory as a feature of society means that in the first instance even basic sociological concepts and models fall within the sphere of analysis, appear to be anchored within it and must be traced back to it.”19 Historically, we can identify the roots of this approach in ethnomethodology and grounded theory, whose own theoretical references exhibit implicit20 or explicit links with pragmatism. Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss emphasise that the goal in grounded theory is to “to ground the theory in reality”.21 Jörg Strübing describes this approach to “data as a way of representing a reality ‘under construction’”,22 in whose manufacture sociologists explicitly find themselves involved. This theory-testing and, concurrently, theory-generating approach is consonant with the experimentalist premise of comprehending the practice of theorising simultaneously as an investigative strategy and an empirically observable social trope. In line with this, Strübing states that: “The pragmatist logic of research and especially the model of ‘inquiry’ in the work of Dewey were never understood by their originators as concepts exclusive to a purely qualitative social research, but were instead always developed as general theory-of-science models for every kind of research with an empirical connection.”23 Hence, social theories produced in this way can ‘only’ ever be middle-range theories, which are, in turn, subject to empirical testing situations. The associated departure from grand theories, however, is offset by the aspiration to develop theories in a way that is closely informed by empirical reality, theories with openended outcomes. Stefan Hirschauer captures the experimentalist approach to this form of practised theory building when he writes: “Theories have only really had experiences if they themselves emerge from them changed.” A similar approach has been provided by Richard Swedberg’s concept of “theorizing”.24 What theories’ experience-bound nature or the practice of ‘doing theory’ mean is that this practice must be revisable. The principle of revisability, as found in the experimentalist conception of theory, is also an intrinsic component of the concept of testing: a test would not be a test if the hypothesis that preceded it merely awaited confirmation. Instead, the test must anticipate the alteration of the presuppositions that have flowed into it—without knowing exactly what form this alteration will take—as well as anticipating the alteration of those elements involved in the test. Experimentalist social theories, thus, anticipate their own revisability. Theoretical closures are caserelated and temporarily necessary to enable researchers to deal meaningfully with Knorr-Cetina, Karin: “Spielarten des Konstruktivismus. Einige Notizen und Anmerkungen”, in: Soziale Welt 40 (1989): 92, original emphasis. 20 See Emirbayer, Mustafa and Douglas W. Maynard: “Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology”, in: Qualitative Sociology 34 (2011), pp. 221–261. 21 Corbin, Juliet and Anselm Strauss: “Grounded Theory Research: Procedures, Canons, and Evaluative Criteria”, in: Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19/6 (1990), p. 420, and throughout. 22 Strübing, “Pragmatismus als epistemische Praxis”, p. 293. 23 Ibid., p. 308. 24 Hirschauer, Stefan: “Die Empiriegeladenheit von Theorien und der Erfindungsreichtum der Praxis” p. 176; Swedberg, Richard: The Art of Social Theory, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014. 19

4.2 The Testing Situation as a Stimulus for Experimental Knowledge Production

149

specific problems as ‘ends-in-view’. Yet, at the same time, they integrate an evolutionary knowledge culture as envisaged by Dewey, a culture that is aware of its future redefinition without being able to lay down in advance precisely what this will involve. What this means for sociological experimentalism is that the category of testing intervenes at the level of the fusion of empirical reality and theory in order to anchor revisability securely and permanently within the genesis of theory. Recent debates within social theory have brought the category of testing up-todate in a wide variety of ways and to programmatic effect. Laboratory studies in particular have highlighted the link between experiments and theories through concepts of ‘trialling’ and ‘testing’. Agreeing implicitly with Dewey, Ian Hacking contends that the laboratory paradigm cannot evade this link simply because of its premier role in both the generating and constant trialling of theories: “The laboratory sciences are of necessity theoretical”,25 as Hacking puts it. In his study of Louis Pasteur, Bruno Latour brought the concept of ‘trials of strength’ into laboratory studies, a concept that refers to the empirical resistance of things and ideas.26 This resistance or persistence is performed, not least, by material artefacts—which are, thus, understood as contributing to the genesis of theory as well.27 According to Latour, this resistance generates information about the object under investigation, which he summed up in the following formula: “Whatever resists trials is real.”28 This analytical realism inherent in the concept of testing is also a feature of the ‘sociology of critique’ that draws on the work of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. This school of sociology combines the study of testing situations in the pragmatist sense with studies of controversies. Scientific-technological controversies provide a key empirical point of departure for a whole spectrum of sociological theory building for both STS and the newly prominent ‘sociology of valuation’29 that we can group under the heading of ‘sociologies of testing’.30 Hence, the fusion of empirical reality and theory is conceptualised here as ‘doing theory’, which guarantees revisability by always also understanding empirical Hacking, Ian: “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences”, in: Pickering, Andrew (ed.): Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago & London: Chicago University Press 1992, p. 36, original emphasis. 26 See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p. 151. 27 See Latour, Bruno: “Circulating Reference. Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest”, in: Latour, Bruno: Pandora’s Hope, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1999, p. 34. 28 Latour, Bruno, The Pasteurization of France, p. 158. 29 See, for example, Lamont, Michèle: “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation”, in: Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), pp. 201–221; Krüger, Anne and Martin Reinhart: “Theories of Valuation. Building Blocks for Conceptualizing Valuation between Practice and Structure”, in: Historical Social Research 42/1 (2017), pp. 263–285; Berthoin-Antal, Ariane, Michael Hutter and David Stark (eds.): Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites of Dissonance, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015; Heinich, Nathalie (2020): “A Pragmatic Redefinition of Value(s). Toward a General Mode of Valuation”, in: Theory, Culture and Society 37/5 (2020), pp. 75–94. 30 For another recent account, see Marres, Noortje and David Stark: “Put to the test: For a New Sociology of Testing”, in: The British Journal for Sociology 71/3 (2020), pp. 423–443. 25

150

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

testing situations as theoretical interventions. This is largely consonant with the state of research, outlined above, in ‘theoretical empirical knowledge’. I elucidate the three modi operandi of ‘testing’ in what follows to provide a more precise understanding of these interventions and the specific social-theoretical effects of experimentalism. What we will find is that not all modi operandi are inevitably linked with empirically informed sociologies. It is possible for social theories to be constructed ‘purely theoretically’ in such a way that they factor in or facilitate their own external description in order to ensure revisability. I shed light on this through the modus operandi of social-theoretical ‘preparing’ with the help of Niklas Luhmann’s attempts to get to grips with philosophy-of-science tools for the external description of sociological theorising. I understand the modus operandi of ‘preparing’ as a key stage in experimentalist theory building that, due to the potential for its external description, also allows us to make interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary connections—a topic I discuss in ‘test run III’. I then go on to flesh out the modus operandi of ‘trialling’ with the aid of exemplary studies from STS and ANT. Trialling is based on the theoretical integration of irritant events, non-humans, artefacts and technologies and the practice of placing them on the same footing as other aspects of a revisable form of theoretical development, aspects formerly perceived as the preserve of language and cognition. Finally, I demonstrate through the analytical model of the ‘sociology of critique’ how actors contribute to designing theory when, through the modus operandi of ‘modelling’, their critical competencies lead to the charging of experience within a theoretical model that, as envisaged by Hirschauer, leaves room for conceptual changes both empirically and theoretically. Hence, testing situations may function as a stimulus for a social-theoretical experimentalism at three different levels: the theory-of-science, sociotechnical and socio-political levels.

4.3

The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

The principle of revisability has differing consequences for social theory within the research programmes outlined above. Before turning to this issue, I must, at least, give some indication of the non-academic impulses for the establishment of this principle; I present them in more detail in ‘test run III’. If experiential ruptures or experiential differences within society influence the reconfiguration of the social sciences, then the testing situation is the moment at which the shift of research perspectives and corresponding regimes of action first becomes evident. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 represents such a paradigmatic testing situation in the shape of a technological crisis. As well as heightening the sense of living in a ‘risk society’, one that must reckon with the unintended consequences of scientific knowledge, this event raised social-theoretical awareness of the latent uncertainties that ongoingly pervade social coexistence. Such events laid the ground for the question of how

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

151

social order is created, constructed and construed in the first place and what the criteria for its stability might be. The technological crisis, and the ecological crisis along with it, gave rise to public critiques in the form of social protest movements, prompting Luhmann to isolate the fields of ‘ecological communication’ and ‘protest’ from the basic premises of systems theory and subject them to social-theoretical examination. Furthermore, these crises reminded scholars and others that the fact of scientific knowledge has a counterpart within social and cultural criticism, in the sense that every science must always in part be a critique of how-things-are by putting existing knowledge to the test. Thus, the intended experiment, with its rules of procedure, is only seemingly the counterpart of the technological accident because the accident, along with the attendant public critique, results in a formally comparable revision of present realities, as in the case of the laboratory experiment.31 In light of this and other factors, as sociological contemporaries saw it, it made sense to develop theories of society not just envisaging a ‘risk society’ but also ‘society as a laboratory’. From a present-day perspective, it no longer seems a very long way from this to ‘laboratory pragmatism’ or to what Luhmann called “methodological pragmatism”. When societal testing situations cause the focus to shift from the fact of the ‘social order’ to the practice of ‘social ordering’, even the breakdown of this practice is valuable from a constructivist perspective.32 Against this background we can reconstruct the criterion of the revisability of the experiment, which, borrowing from Dewey, boils down to three modi operandi: ‘preparing’, ‘trialling’ and ‘modelling’. With the help of the three sociological programmes presented earlier—which I conceive of here explicitly as ‘social theories’ for reasons I will explain later—I will define these modi operandi in advance in social-theoretical terms. Their interplay gives rise to a form of experimental investigative action that I define as the active transformation of uncertain situations in order to find solutions to problems. The three modi operandi not only relate to testing in the sense of an observational category (as in the case of the theories of society outlined above). They also simultaneously define the way in which we can mobilise testing as a sociological practice of the constitution of objects. This is the key theme of the present test run, which works on the assumption that an experimentalist social theory is composed out of the procedures of ‘preparing’, ‘trialling’ and ‘modelling’. At first glance, then, it seems disconcerting that each is allocated to its own theoretical programmes. In principle, we are dealing in all three cases with social theories that foreground testing, theories that organise revisability in accordance with all three modi operandi. Nonetheless, each of them has made a particularly incisive contribution See again Krohn and Weyer, “Gesellschaft als Labor”, p. 351. See Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 244f. Hence, Krohn and Weyer’s statement that failed experiments are not analysed because they occurred due to unpredictable disruptions (see Krohn and Weyer, “Gesellschaft als Labor”, p. 353) not only contradicts their own postulate of accidents as “trials” of natural scientific theories, which evoke (new) questions about nature, but also the new testing formats resulting from accidents, such as the “stress test” of nuclear power stations in Germany following the nuclear accident in Fukushima of 2011. 31 32

152

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

to the principle of revisability, a contribution we can specify by relating it to a given modus operandi—just as we saw earlier in ‘test run I’. Preparing As Foucault and Kuhn have shown, the establishment of new world-views inevitably entails a corresponding pre-formatting of the epistemic context within which these world-views are located. Dewey referred to this as the “the indeterminate situation” or “suggestion”, which I have identified with the results of antecedent tests. Expressed through the concept of ‘preparing’, such pre-formattings entail the potential to adopt an observing, distancing stance towards existing knowledge.33 In Niklas Luhmann’s social theory and particularly in his theory of science, this potential is, firstly, synonymous with producing the prerequisites for an external account of sociological reasoning. Secondly, distanced observation enables one to make reference to existing insights into what is presently being observed. By the same token, in the absence of such reference, it is not possible to translate a new research approach back into a traditional system of thought. Similar to Dewey, Luhmann rejected universally valid interpretive claims and, thus, laid the ground for extending revisability to the sociological observer. Because, as Luhmann sees it, the social system functions autopoietically; we cannot excise the observer from it: “This concept rules out thinking of science (let alone sociology) as occupying the position of an external observer that might observe and describe society in a way that is inaccessible to society itself. This modifies every notion that we might associate with ‘sociological enlightenment’, including every claim to authority that could be derived from a privileged access to reality.”34 In addition to a critique of the externality of critical theories, with which Luc Boltanski was also concerned in On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (2009),35 what Luhmann was trying to do here was not really to put forward a moral argument but rather to integrate the position of sociological observer functionally into the process of observation. This observer position takes up antecedent testing situations and prepares for future tests. According to Luhmann, constitutive problematiques always pertain to “problems that have already been solved [. . .], otherwise they themselves would not be possible. In fact, because they are constructed self-referentially, no rationale can be provided for them either. But this means that every responding theory must go through an additional test to determine whether it is capable of including the conditions of possibility of its core problem as well. The rationale is, as it were, supplanted by the self-reference test.”36 What Luhmann refers to as a “self-reference test”, I elucidate here through the See for the notion of “preparation” versus “prevention” considering health crises such as pandemics Keck, Frédéric: “A Genealogy of Health Diseases and Social Anthropology (1870–2000)”, in: Medical Anthropology Quartely 33/1 (2018), pp. 24–41. 34 Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 621. 35 See Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, p. 4f. 36 Luhmann, Niklas: “Wie ist soziale Ordnung möglich?”, in: Luhmann, Niklas: Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1981, p. 196. 33

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

153

experimentalist procedural stage of object-constitution in the sense of ‘preparing’. In light of Luhmann’s definitions of ‘observation’, ‘operation’ and ‘recursivity’, I discuss the social-theoretical importance of the modus operandi of this preparing as the prerequisite for a sociological experimentalism. Trialling Building on the laboratory studies and borrowing critically from the principle of symmetry found in the ‘strong programme’, the criterion of revisability was established within STS through the key conceptual role of trials and controversies. The idea here is that the testing situations that unfold in scientific laboratories and networks result in the operational structuring37 of uncertainties. When it comes to understanding the scientific appropriation of the world, such testing situations furnish us with a particularly useful starting point for ethnographic observation and participation because the material, and ethical and structural uncertainties of inquiry become manifest in the controversy.38 Within STS, the epistemic status of testing was established in historical studies and fleshed out methodologically in investigations of the present day. The paradigmatic historical studies here are the book published in 1985 by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer on Robert Boyle’s invention of the air pump in the seventeenth century and Bruno Latour’s 1984 study on the ‘discovery’ of lactose by Louis Pasteur in the nineteenth century, along with his book Science in Action (1987). Through their emphasis on experimental trials, these studies highlight the sociotechnical interdependencies that helped to establish new paradigms in the Western natural sciences. But there is more to this than just contextualization. In accordance with the principle of symmetry, in the first instance, all those involved in the trial have an equal epistemic status—from the pipette to the French state, from the air pump to the English gentlemen who take part in the experiment as witnesses. In contrast to conventional accounts, these components form sociotechnical networks without an epistemic centre in the form of the brilliant discoverer or inventor. Through the practice of trialling, these networks concurrently manifest the fragility of their composition, the contingency of their results orientation and the always temporary stability of the practice of securing results. Beyond this, subsequent ethnographic research on science integrated the modus operandi of the testing of the observational category into the social scientific investigative method. This approach is especially evident in actor network theory (ANT), which

Rather than “structuring”, in the context of STS it seems more appropriate to refer to “infrastructures”, which underlines the socio-material relationality of social structures. See Niewöhner, Jörg: “Perspektiven der Infrastrukturforschung: care-full, relational, ko-laborativ“, in: Wieser, Matthias and Diana Lengersdorf (eds.): Schlüsselwerke der Science and Technology Studies, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2014, p. 341–352. For the time being, I will retain the classic concept of structure. 38 See Pinch, Trevor and Christine Leuenberger: “Studying Scientific Controversy from the STS Perspective”, paper presented at the EASSTS conference Science, Controversy and Democracy 2005, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265245795_Studying_Scientific_Controversy_ from_the_STS_Perspective, accessed 26 August 2021; Fabiani, Jean-Louis: “Controverses scientifiques, controverses philosophiques. Figures, positions, trajets”, in: Enquête. Anthropologie, Histoire, Sociologie 5 (1997), Paris: EHESS, pp. 11–34. 37

154

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

also rose to prominence as the ‘sociology of translation’. The goal here was to integrate the criterion of revisability into one’s own research setting. Modelling Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot borrowed the category of testing from STS in an attempt to understand how, despite heterogenous socio-cultural positions and attitudes, actors manage to place public critique successfully. For the first time, they systematically expanded the concept of critique—which had, for the most part, been the preserve of political philosophy and political theory—regarding its practical function as a producer of social testing situations. The ‘pragmatic sociology of testing’ or ‘of justification’—‘of critique’ in what follows—developed a method to investigate competent feats of construction that, within a dispute or controversy, lead to the collective ratification of relevant political and epistemic issues. The model of regimes of action and justificatory orders developed by Boltanski and Thévenot along with their Paris-based research group the Groupe de Sociologie Morale et Politique in the early 1990s foregrounded a specific point within experimental action: the point where researchers transition from ‘trialling’ to ‘preparing’, when they conclude their testing and make deductive inferences in light of it that they then model in such a way as to facilitate a capacity for action. At the same time, this model provides an approach to practising social-theoretical modelling in a way that the authors themselves exemplify in their book On Justification. Economies of Worth (1991). In a marked departure from the traditional social-theoretical nomenclature, they chose not to operate with social classes, strata, milieus or fields. Instead, much like STS, though with different consequences, they opted for a methodology of the relationing of local and translocal action orientations. This approach was based on ethnomethodological and symbolic-interactionist methods, while looking beyond their analytical scope, which is limited to situations. They, thus, turned the modelling of the social into a social theory focused on actors’ competencies. It is in this spirit that I present the category of testing, with the help of the following three socialtheoretical programmes, as both social trope and as a method of the socialtheoretical constitution of objects.

4.3.1

“Preparing”’: Luhmann’s Theory of the Science of Sociology

In what follows, I discuss the social-theoretical contribution of the category of testing from the perspective of the external description of sociological inquiry and argumentation. We can locate Niklas Luhmann’s contribution to sociological experimentalism in his construction of analogies—something he had in common with Dewey—between the evolutionary development of biological life, on the one hand, and society, on the other. Against this background, Luhmann developed criteria for a theory of the science of sociology that is consonant with the modus operandi of preparing within experimentalism. The social-theoretical ‘self-reference test’ that he

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

155

posited, in the sense of reflection on the conditions of possibility for sociological knowledge, emphasises the analytical preparation of what Dewey referred to as the vital preliminary step towards testing situations. In this way, Luhmann also prepared his own contribution in a certain sense by placing it in an agnostic relationship to ‘society’ as a source of sociological knowledge production. In this connection, I will show that and how Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation put a constructivist slant on the epistemic status of the revisability of social development, which is also the core criterion of the category of testing in experimentalism. Few if any social theorists of German-speaking provenance have translated natural scientific methodology into social theory with the radicalism of Niklas Luhmann. Instead of neo-Kantianism, Weber’s ideal types or hermeneutics, Luhmann’s epistemological benchmarks were theoretical biology, mathematics and cybernetics. Perhaps more than anyone else, then, Luhmann answered Dewey’s call for a post-humanist epistemological fusion of social and natural sciences39— making more than a few enemies within his own disciplinary guild in the process. We might describe Luhmann’s undertaking as a response to a state of affairs expressed by Dewey as follows: “The problem of institution of methods by which the material of existential situations may be converted into the prepared materials which facilitate and control inquiry is [. . .] the primary and urgent problem of social inquiry.”40 In this respect in particular, Luhmann’s theory of science exhibits systematic features in common with Dewey’s theory of inquiry. As far as I am aware, this common ground has not been investigated either with respect to Dewey or pragmatism in general. The few existing commentaries focus on comparing the action theories put forward by Luhmann and Dewey.41 One likely reason for this is that Luhmann himself presumably perceived Dewey as a social theorist only to a limited degree.42 Paradoxically, it may be that Dewey’s relational and processual theory of knowledge, geared towards evolution theory, ran counter to the Germanlanguage development and establishment of social theory and, therefore, showed up

39

Dewey, Logic, p. 485. Ibid., p. 487. 41 See, for example, Beckert, Jens and Hans Joas: “Action Theory”, in: Turner, Jonathan (ed.): Handbook of Sociological Theory, New York: Plenum 2001, p. 269–285. 42 For example in Luhmann’s much-discussed article “Das Handeln und die Spezifikation seiner Zwecke” (1968). Here, Luhmann uses Dewey to back up his thesis that “the dispute over whether the end justifies the means goes back to a substantive fixing of goals, to a relic of the old truth claim” (Luhmann, Niklas: “Das Handeln und die Spezifikation seiner Zwecke”, in: Luhmann, Niklas: Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1999, p. 47, see also ibid., p. 45). In Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Luhmann praises pragmatism as the “only epistemology worth mentioning” (p. 260). He is referring here to his analysis of philosopher Nicholas Rescher, of German origin, who had published a book in 1977 entitled Methodological Pragmatism. A SystemTheory-Approach to the Theory of Knowledge. But in this case, it is not Dewey who is the key source but Quine, Peirce and James. It is presumably this methodological pragmatism that Luhmann has in mind, which he even refers to elsewhere as “the epistemology of the [twentieth] century” (Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 509, original emphasis). 40

156

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

only weakly on Luhmann’s ‘radar’—though Luhmann did discuss the affinities between his and Dewey’s work, resulting from their shared distance from the mainstream, here and there.43 Furthermore, the two authors’ analytical styles were very different. While Dewey’s theory of inquiry was closely linked with the goal of exercising a positive influence on US society, Luhmann established his agnostic theory of science by distancing himself from political progressivism, for which the tone was largely set in Germany by the critical theory initiated by Adorno and Habermas.44 The latter in particular perceived in pragmatism—especially the Meadian variety—an important point of anchorage for the epistemological deepening of critical theory.45 Nonetheless, in the context of the historical Frankfurt School, Dewey’s work was initially subject to harsh criticism.46 As a result of the more positive reception by Habermas, Dewey’s work was appropriated in a way that failed to honour the fundamental epistemological differences between Habermas’s Kantian and Dewey’s Darwinian theoretical foundations, while Dewey’s critique of externalised spectator theories of knowledge was airbrushed out.47 In this light, we may surmise that the epistemological affinities in the work of Luhmann and Dewey regarding the Darwinian inheritance will have predominated rather than the German-speaking sociological tradition. Both rejected the neo-Kantian postulate of value neutrality as expounded by Max Weber and replaced it with constructivism. The result was that theory-ofscience constructivism in the work of both Luhmann and Dewey led inevitably to a postulate of the necessary revisability of all knowledge, a revisability that they called for in line with their processual conception of societal differentiation. This, in turn, prompted both of them to shift away from what Kant-sceptic Dewey called “spectator theories of knowledge” and led Luhmann to a theory of “polycontextural [. . .] complexity”48 that always claimed to account methodologically for the possibility of its own external description. On the other hand, there are surely few sociologists of a comparable stature to Luhmann who have been less interested than him in providing the sociological 43

But only here and there, for example, in a footnote in which Luhmann makes positive reference, among other things, to Dewey’s Logic, though he then adds that the theories discussed in that book are not “theories of reflection in the ambitious sense put forward here” (Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 504f.). It is unclear just how Luhmann read Logic or just what the basis was for his critique of the supposedly missing epistemological substance. 44 See Habermas, Jürgen and Niklas Luhmann: Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1971. 45 See Habermas, Jürgen: Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason, Boston: Beacon 1989, p. 1f. Luhmann considered Habermas’s interpretation of the Meadian notion of intersubjectivity theoretically underdetermined. See, for example, Luhmann, Niklas: “Die Lebenswelt – nach Rücksprache mit Phänomenologen“, in: Preyer Gerhard, Peter Georg and Ulfig Alexander (eds.): Protosoziologie im Kontext. “Lebenswelt“und “System“in Philosophie und Soziologie, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 1997, p. 283f. 46 See once again Hartmann, “Vertiefung der Erfahrung”. 47 See ibid., p. 439 and Hetzel, Andreas: “Zum Vorrang der Praxis“. 48 Luhmann, Niklas: Theory of Society I, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2012, p. 13.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

157

concept of experience with an epistemological foundation. Luhmann’s post-humanistic Darwinism would presumably still have associated the concept of experience with those humanistic traditions whose inability to sensibly locate their own observer position he never tired of subjecting to vitriolic ridicule. And unlike Dewey, the sociologist Luhmann built on the conceptual conditions of such external descriptions in order to produce a social-theoretical revisability by already determining the prerequisites for knowledge at the level of the constitution of objects. Here, then, I mainly discuss Luhmann’s contribution to a theory of the science of sociology. In line with this, my starting hypothesis is that Luhmann’s contribution to sociological experimentalism lies in a specific characterisation of the moment of preparing the testing procedure. We can merge the category of testing with Luhmann’s systems-theoretical conception of science. As Luhmann stated in Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, science is in a significant part a “switchover from irritation to structures”.49 The testing moments that are constitutive of this, however, have specific preconditions. Luhmann’s postulate of the interdependence of observer position and the constitution of objects, a postulate that is in implicit agreement with Dewey, can be traced back to a similar though not identical practice of drawing on Darwin’s theory of evolution and specific principles of theoretical biology. Experimentalism and the Sociological Theory of Evolution I brought out the significance of evolutionary theory to the emergence of pragmatism in the United States in the late nineteenth century already in the first part of this book. For Peirce and James, both of whom had been members of the intellectual school headed by the Socratic Chauncey Wright, there was no doubt that Darwin’s insight into the non-originality and processuality of biological life placed a fundamental question mark over the epistemological foundations informing the work of Kant, Hegel, Hume and Mill. Wright, who corresponded with Darwin, had placed the latter’s “unchangeable laws of change”50 at the centre of the debates going on at the Metaphysical Club, which Louis Menand described as something approaching the birthplace of pragmatism. In light of On the Origin of Species, the circle of thinkers around Wright rejected the idea of upholding causal epistemic principles without putting them to the test in the context of empirically efficacious processes of transformation. For James, the theory of evolution provided the basis for dropping, in epistemological terms, the concept of consciousness in favour of that of experience, which he believed could reconcile rationalism and empiricism.51 Mead, meanwhile, perceived in the theory of evolution an injunction to engage in methodical reflection on knowledge and declared the pragmatic theory of truth to be an experimental matter.52 49

Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 58. Chauncey Wright quoted in Menand, The Metaphysical Club, p. 210f. 51 By contrast, Luhmann did not abandon consciousness, but removed it from social communication systems and placed it in the “environment”. See Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 282. 52 See Mead, “A Pragmatic Theory of Truth”, p. 87f. With their characterisation of Darwin’s natural history as an “ecological experiment”, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Peter McLaughlin have shown 50

158

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Dewey took up this consequence of pragmatism—possibly the most significant one—by combining social-philosophical experimentalism with natural scientific epistemic styles. “Rather than applied ethics”, as Matthias Kettner states of Dewey, “what Dewey calls for first and foremost is applied science.”53 In his essay on the ramifications of evolutionary theory for philosophy, Dewey had identified lines of continuity between embodied knowledge and the biological interplay of change and continuity and derived from this pragmatism’s main theoretical concern. From a sociological perspective, I have shown that and how based on this hypothesis of continuity, Dewey laid the foundations for a sociological experimentalism, foundations that are based on three core categories: experience, testing and co-operation, which are, in turn, linked respectively with the principles of reflexivity, revisability and capacity for structuration. Their interdependence is based on the principles of evolutionary non-originality and continuity, and this interdependence provides the means of translating these principles into social space. Here, we can draw clear parallels with the sociological theory of evolution expounded by Niklas Luhmann. “Society is the outcome of evolution”, states Luhmann in his magnum opus Theory of Society.54 Luhmann’s key reference authors, the biologists and neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and Francsico J. Varela—without making any direct references to him as far as I am aware— agree with Dewey’s epistemological thesis of continuity. Luhmann quotes them as follows: “There is no discontinuity between the social and the human, or between their biological roots.”55 Luhmann developed his theory of social systems in analogy to theoretical biology but also by reaching explicitly beyond Darwin. For this reason alone, his project, which began more than half a century after the establishment of pragmatism in the United States, pursued different objectives in many respects. A discussion of Luhmann’s ideas about evolutionary theory and its reception would take a book in its own right. My first step here will be to relate his evolutionary concept of the social to the three core principles of sociological experimentalism, focusing on his notion of the interrelationship between ‘variation’, ‘selection’ and ‘restabilization’ in his theory of functional differentiation. Through their interplay, we can discern analogies between these three “evolutionary

just how closely the pragmatists geared themselves towards Darwin’s own research practice. They comment on Darwin’s pigeon breeding experiments, which were crucial to his notion of the indeterminacy of evolutionary development, as follows: “An experiment is not only an intervention in nature, it is the practical realization of a theoretical model.” Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg and Peter McLaughlin: “Darwins experimental natural history”, in: Journal of History and Biology 17/3, (1984), p. 353. They also state: “Darwin’s point is the possibility in principle of an experimental approach to the phenomenon of evolution. The ‘laboratory’ that Darwin found in the fields and stalls of England provided the starting point.” Ibid., p. 357 (original emphasis). 53 Kettner, “John Deweys demokratische Experimentiergemeinschaft”, p. 63. 54 Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 251. 55 Maturana, Humberto and Francisco J. Varela: The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston and London 1998, quoted in Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 28.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

159

Table 4.1 Analogous sequences: experimentalism and the sociological theory of evolution Dewey/Experimentalism Experience (reflexivity) Testing (revisability) Co-operation (capacity for structuration)

Luhmann/sociological theory of evolution Variation Selection Restabilization

functions”,56 as he called them, and the three aforementioned core categories of sociological experimentalism as inspired by Dewey (Table 4.1). Experience [Reflexivity]: Variation Just as, in Dewey’s work, experience is the prerequisite for testing situations that (re)orient actions, borrowing heavily from Darwin, Luhmann conceptualises ‘variation’ as a prerequisite for selection, for example, for decisions about what action to take. But as with experience in the work of Dewey, Luhmann’s ‘variation’ is based on key presuppositions. Firstly, experience is the result of antecedent testing situations and instances of co-operation. Secondly, experience facilitates reflexivity, which makes it testable. ‘Variation’ plays a similar role. On the one hand, ‘variation’ is the result of processes of selection and restabilization that have already taken place. On the other hand, ‘variation’ furnishes us with opportunities for selection. In contrast to ‘experience’ in the work of Dewey, Luhmann does not associate ‘variation’ directly with reflexivity, because he locates reflexivity outside social systems. However, this changes nothing about the analogous epistemic function of ‘experience’ and ‘variation’ within the two intellectual programmes. Dewey refers to experience as follows: “Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events”, which corresponds with the simultaneously active and passive aspect of experience.57 Similar to variation in the work of Luhmann, experience may be the start or end point of a sequence of events. The “salient trait” of experience, Dewey emphasised, is its “connexion with a future”.58 Testing [Revisability]: Selection Similar to ‘variation’, Luhmann also describes ‘selection’ as an event in the course of evolution. At the same time, ‘selection’ is the mediating link between ‘variation’ within social systems and their ‘restabilization’.59 Selection is based on variation and is dependent on it. According to Luhmann, variation and selection are “coupled only ‘by chance’”.60 Selection refers to the formation and use of expectations and allows deviation from initial conditions.61 The proximity to Dewey’s experimentalist principle of testing is plainly apparent. It is the trialling situation that induces the

56

Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 300. Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, p. 11. 58 Ibid., p. 7. 59 See Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 300f. 60 See Ibid., p. 303. 61 See ibid., p. 259. 57

160

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

reinterpretation of experiences—which implies expectations. In contrast to the classical theory of evolution, Luhmann asserts that ‘selection’ as a function (or event) tells us absolutely nothing about whether it is successful or not, in other words, whether or not it leads to long-term processes of stabilization. Luhmann saw a problem in Darwin’s work, namely that ‘selection’ is supposed to be responsible both for the dynamism and stability of ecological systems. Yet, recent theories of evolution have shown that: “Selection does not necessarily guarantee good results. In the long run, it has to pass the stabilizability test.”62 From this perspective, in contrast to variation/experience, selection—and, thus, testing situations as well—are never without consequence. Dewey also did not content himself with the idea of the interdependence of experience and the testing situation. Dewey underlined the openendedness and revisability of testing situations in every field—be it the scientific experiment, the everyday testing situation or the formation of public spheres. He could afford to do so because he worked with a non-teleological concept of ‘closure’ that prevented revisability from degenerating into an infinite regress. This is also the locus of the constructivist congruence in the social theories put forward by Dewey and Luhmann. However, while Dewey underlined the contingency of this process, in Luhmann’s systems, theory selection was the prerequisite for differentiation and, thus, for the boundaries and self-referentiality of autopoietic systems. Co-operation [Capacity for Structuration]: Restabilization From Luhmann’s perspective, the “stabilizability test” that he mentions and that Dewey defined in the context of the testing situation as the principle of revisability, also leads to the restabilization of social systems. This, however, is a process that, despite its continuity with the two preceding sequences, proceeds in an entirely autonomous way. While processes of selection increase the complexity of social systems, restabilization ensures the integration of structural changes into a system whose operations are structurally determined, according to Luhmann.63 Hence, the function of restabilization is congruent with the function of capacity for structuration, which is assigned to co-operation as understood in Dewey’s experimental conception of democracy. With Kettner, we might understand Dewey’s analogy between ‘co-operation’ and ‘restabilization’ as an attempt to “reach agreement about the preconditions for regenerating democratic forms of government”,64 which aligns with Luhmann’s systems-theoretical notion of structuration. Restabilization, like co-operation, may be found at the end or beginning of a sequence. Luhmann described stability as an “initiator of variation”,65 just as Dewey conceived of co-operation as the outcome of antecedent testing situations and the resulting

62

Ibid., p. 259. See Ibid., p. 301f. 64 As Kettner states with reference to the Dewey-Lippman debate. See Kettner, “John Deweys demokratische Experimentiergemeinschaft“, p. 46. 65 See Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 259. 63

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

161

processes of stabilization. What both authors had in mind here were social theories of the political, ones free of the “absolutistic character of philosophy”.66 They criticised the tendency to comprehend evolutionary theory in an unhistorical way.67 Here, similar to Luhmann, Dewey, who referred to structuration-capable forms of restabilization as “social co-operation”, did without a normative, let alone harmonistic, concept of democracy. However, Luhmann was more concrete in putting forward systems-theoretical criteria for restabilization, which Dewey left to case-specific empirical studies. For both Dewey and Luhmann, the “unchangeable laws of change” (C. Wright) were the only acceptable laws that could explain both biological and social life. Luhmann, thus, emphasises: “We can [. . .] not know (not observe) whether variations lead to the positive or negative selection of innovation; and just as little whether restabilization of the system after positive or negative selection will succeed or not. And the very proposition that one cannot know, cannot calculate, cannot plan characterizes a theory as an evolution theory.”68 Although Dewey was also capable of using the aspect of the non-original and uncertain regarding the benefit of experimentalism, his work failed to make any reference to methodological ramifications beyond holism. Luhmann introduced these ramifications based on his distinction between system and environment, whose irritative potential he declared a source of evolutionary reorientation. While Dewey put emphasis on the holistic continuity of the three core principles of experimentalism that I have elaborated, distancing himself from Darwin, Luhmann added a proviso, namely, the need to distinguish between variation, selection and restabilization if we are to think about continuity—in the sense of unpredictable events that at some point lead once again to restabilization—in constructivist terms. From Luhmann’s perspective, this distinction implies a potential for “improbabilities [. . .] to be transformed into probabilities”69 that goes beyond Darwin’s theory of pure adaptation.70 Luhmann places the temporal-historical process at the centre of his evolutionary social philosophy and, thus, implicitly links up again with Dewey’s thesis of continuity: “[. . .] the process concept stresses continuity, not discontinuity, because otherwise the identity and distinguishability of a specific process could not be established”.71 In line with this, both perspectives are in

66

Dewey, The Public and its Problems, p. 194. See Dewey, The Public and its Problems, p. 196; Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 345f. 68 Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 258. 69 Ibid., p. 253. 70 See Luhmann, Niklas: Ökologische Kommunikation. Kann die moderne Gesellschaft sich auf ökologische Gefährdungen einstellen? Wiesbaden: VS 2008, p. 24.; Corsi, Giancarlo: “Evolution”, in: Corsi, Giancarlo, Claudio Baraldi and Elena Esposito: GLU: Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997, p. 53. 71 Luhmann, Theory of Society II, p. 342. 67

162

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Fig. 4.1 Evolutionary identification of society with life in the work of Luhmann and Dewey

Experience Variation Testing Selektion Cooperation Restabilization

accord in replacing the principle of causality with that of circularity,72 as the following graph illustrates (Fig. 4.1). On the premise that we can combine a social-theoretical experimentalism geared towards Dewey with the epistemic foundations of systems-theoretical constructivism, the question that now arises is what the consequences might be for the sociological constitution of objects. What is at issue here is the practice of socialtheoretical reasoning, in the sense of the preparing of research, which is also the first stage of sociological testing. This is not the same as a proposition about whether sociological research is ‘theory led’ or ‘empirically led’. Instead, the idea here is that, in the spirit of Deweyan ‘inquiry’, all research implies philosophy-of-science prerequisites.73 The analogy established by Luhmann and Dewey between biological life, scientific research and societal development has specific consequences for the preparation of the testing or verification of sociological theories. In what follows, I seek to flesh out Luhmann’s associated ideas concerning a corresponding theory of the science of sociology. Preparing the Ground for the Sociological Constitution of Objects: Observing and Operating Luhmann describes scientific observation as an “empirically conditioned operation”.74 This differs from other sociological concepts of observation in its radical turn away from fundamental metaphysical assumptions about given facts. A priori postulates are replaced by the core evolutionary argument of processuality, whose dynamics are determined by variation, selection and restabilization. This corresponds with the processional sequentialization of experience, testing and co-operation founded in experimentalism. Hence, in the course of the testing

Luhmann, thus, states: “Evolution theory does indeed operate with causal assumptions, but it renounces explaining evolution in terms of causal laws.” Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 254. 73 See also Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean Claude Passeron: “In an experimental science, a simple appeal to experimental proof is a mere tautology if one does not, at the same time, explicate the theoretical principles which are the basis of genuine experimentation [. . .].” In: Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean Claude Passeron, The Craft of Sociology, p. 11–12. 74 Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 76. 72

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

163

process, that is, the core phase of the experiment, ‘preparing’ is congruent with the moment of induction, which, in turn, builds on antecedent results flowing from the temporally limited interplay between induction and deduction. Luhmann, building on the work of George Spencer Brown, puts forward a similar yet different argument when he states: “It is not a metaphysically presupposed difference in essence that serves to close the circle, but rather a temporal succession. [. . .] [Observation] uses a distinction to designate something it has distinguished.”75 According to Luhmann, then, an operation is, first and foremost, the execution of a distinction between two aspects, in other words, a selection that is temporally conditioned. Every system has a central, binary decisional or oppositional system (or even “binary code”, as Luhmann puts it with reference to digital technology), towards which it gears its reproduction. Luhmann identified a specific binary code for every societal subsystem that he considered relevant. In the case of the subsystem of science, this is the binary pair of ‘true’ and ‘false’.76 For Luhmann, science, and, thus, sociology as well, is distinguished chiefly by (ultimately paradoxical) operations of, as Luhmann puts it, the “reduction of self-generated complexity”77 through selection. On the one hand, the sciences produce complexity by constantly generating new problems within their subsystem, which the latter is required to deal with. Both Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the theory of multiverses can only receive a positive response within the scientific community if the latter is geared up for innovations, if it is, as it were, ‘epistemically prepared’ for them, by establishing consensus about shared questions. In other words, these innovations must be ‘within science’ if they are not to be dismissed as absurdities. This epistemic resonance comports with the function of variation and experience in Dewey’s and Luhmann’s social theories respectively. On the other hand, if they are to be able to examine specific configurations of problems in a focused way, theories now require appropriate preparation. Social theories, then, are linked with society in a dual sense. From the perspective of a sociological experimentalism, they must, firstly, feature an empirical focus on a social issue, while secondly, and concurrently, they form part of the societal subsystem of science, within which they are expected to produce solutions to problems. Decisions, therefore, are not infinitely realisable but are, in fact, restricted to the operative realm of possibility that the societal system offers at a particular point in time. Just as selection can occur based only on given variations, testing situations are generated by given experiences. This applies especially to science and, thus, also to sociology. Luhmann derives from this the urgent need for a theory of the science of sociology. He articulates this aspiration in his essay on the question “Wie ist soziale

75

Ibid., p. 79. For a critique of this proposition, see Knorr-Cetina, “Zur Unterkomplexität der Differenzierungstheorie”. 77 See Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 278; Stichweh, Rudolf: ‘Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998’, in: Kaesler, Dirk (ed.): Klassiker der Soziologie 2. Von Talcott Parsons bis Anthony Giddens, Munich: C.H. Beck 2007, p. 243. 76

164

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Ordnung möglich?” (‘How is social order possible?’) of 1981 as follows. The goal is absolutely not to “spare sociology scrutiny by the theory of science or to present it in contrast to the natural sciences in the manner of a ‘humanities’ discipline; on the contrary, we ought to be contemplating ways of providing a sociological rationale for the theory of science. And only secondarily can we consider how we might assign sociology as a science to such a theory of science.”78 But how is this possible if sociology is simultaneously part of the societal subsystem of science and part of society as a whole, given that the latter is its object of investigation? Here, Luhmann once again draws a parallel between evolutionary theory and social theory: “The scientific elaboration of a theory of unpredictable changes requires the admission of self-reference in evolution theory as in systems theory.”79 According to Luhmann, the admission of self-reference is facilitated by the distinction between observation and operation regarding the sociological constitution of objects, which I understand here, building on Dewey, as the stage of ‘preparing’. Hence, Luhmann conceptualises operations not primarily in terms of action theory, let alone practice theory, but as the realising of decisions, in other words, of selections. As such, operations are subject to the condition of their simultaneity with the world in which they operate. This also makes them blind to the conditions under which they operate. Conversely, observation is not subject to this condition. Luhmann states in Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (1990): “Knowledge of society is also an operation in society. As the operation of observing and describing, it has, when it takes place, an effect, a result. But at the same time, when it takes place, it is also observable that it is taking place. Every operation thus has a dual effect: it has an effect that corresponds with (or fails to fulfil) its function, and as a result exposes itself to observation.”80 In this sense, Luhmann’s “naturalized epistemology”81 is congruent with the two aspects of the sociological experimentalism developed in the present book. In methodological terms, this prompts Luhmann to conclude that we must make a distinction between ‘observation’ and ‘operation’. Just as Luhmann replaced ‘action’ with ‘communication’, observation does not primarily refer to the sensory performance of human observation, but rather to something along the lines of ‘purposive intervention’. This is bound up with the overall construct of systems theory, which builds upon the distinction between ‘system’ and ‘environment’. Within this framework, psychological systems are decoupled from social systems. Thus, as Elena Esposito remarks, “organism and consciousness [become] autonomous and separate autopoietic systems”.82 Luhmann, Niklas: “Wie ist soziale Ordnung möglich?”, in: Luhmann, Niklas: Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1981, p. 198. 79 Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 424. 80 See Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 690. 81 See Schützeichel, Rainer: Sinn als Grundbegriff bei Niklas Luhmann, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2003, p. 230. 82 Esposito, Elena: “Operation/Beobachtung”, in: Esposito, Elena, Claudio Baraldi and Giancarlo Corsi: GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997, p. 125. 78

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

165

Luhmann, thus, takes William James’s claim to bracket consciousness off from the question of the potential for knowledge—historical pragmatism’s post-humanistic turn—to the systems-theoretical extreme, as it were. If the autopoiesis is disrupted because a new system emerges as a result of observations geared towards the difference between system and environment, self-observation is possible that, according to Luhmann, may, in special cases, also produce reflexivity.83 Hence, ‘observation’ may take a variety of forms and we may also describe it as integration in an experiment’s preparation stage, because observation ‘does’ more than a pure operation, it adds elements to the event. Only observation is capable of also discerning the other side of the binary code that must always be constitutively disregarded by the operation. Rudolf Stichweh comments: “On these premises it follows that every observation is an operation because it must be carried out operationally, but on the other hand it also follows that in social systems there are many operations that we would not refer to as observations because they simply occur or take place without articulating their difference from the contrasting side.”84 Luhmann, thus, distinguishes the observation from the operation regarding its capacity to yield reflexivity, because, in contrast to the pure operation, which does not reflect upon itself, observation can also “see” or “represent” that which given actors have opted not to do.85 But even as an observer of observers, in other words, in the case of the second-order observation typical of the sociological observation of society, “one does not take up a hierarchically superior position”, as Luhmann underlines. Similar to other observers, sociological observers carry out communicative operations of distinguishing and designating.86 Just as we can only observe something that has already been observed, the distinction antecedent to observation—which means that this specific thing is observed rather than something else—builds on distinctions already made. This brings us back full circle to the interdependence of ‘variation’ and ‘selection’ (Luhmann) and ‘experience’ and ‘testing’ (Dewey). Hence, observation and operation must be open to revision in order to ensure their own continuance. In this sense, we can understand the process of observation (within a differentiation theory framework) as both the prerequisite for and modus operandi of a social-theoretical preparing of testing situations. The modus operandi of trialling, which I will be taking a closer look at in the section below, would then be defined as an event that produces experiential differences not only when it comes to the experiment’s diffusion into the world but also for the observer themself. This was not of much interest to Luhmann regarding sociological experiences but is significant if we consider his claim of the empirical capacity inherent in observation’s and operation’s

83

Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 83f. For a critique of the lack of theoretical reflexivity in Luhmann’s “early” work, see once again Knorr-Cetina, “Zur Unterkomplexität der Differenzierungstheorie”. 84 Stichweh, “Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998”, p. 251. 85 Ibid.; cf. Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 81. 86 See Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 87.

166

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

difference-theoretical function. My interpretation is that based on this premise, experiential difference would be prepared by observations that are open to revision, observations that point to operations to come. Revisability and Recursivity: Criteria for the External Description of Sociological Thinking Revisability in Dewey-inspired experimentalism functions to render permanent the unsettling, as realised in science, of established stocks of knowledge. Revisability is the functional correlate of Dewey’s notion of the “quest for certainty”, which is triggered only by constitutive uncertainty, on which scientific experiments build. Uncertainty triggers testing situations that generate experiential differences, which, in turn, lead to new knowledge. Dewey’s holistic concept of experience, which may be applied to anything from everyday micro-social situations to highly complex research processes, rests on this thesis. Luhmann, who is concerned not with experience but with differentiation, emphasises that: “An observer is constitutively uncertain because [she or he] cannot distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar, self-referential and other-referential sources of uncertainty (or only by implying the other side). [. . .] If we observe observation, we realize that the observer infects the world with uncertainty and thus adds an element of disorder to it.”87 Because Luhmann—very much in line with pragmatism—integrates uncertainty as a component of the social-theoretical constitution of objects, he too requires a criterion for the constitutive contribution of the resulting uncertainty that, building on Dewey, I have referred to here as the principle of revisability. Consonant with his evolutionist notion of ‘autopoietic’, in other words, self-reproducing social systems, Luhmann’s criterion is ‘recursivity’. Luhmann states that science is “a recursively operating system”.88 He borrows the term from mathematics, in which recursivity refers to the “repeated application of the operation to the result of the same antecedent operation”.89 Its function is to “close [the social] system at the operational level”.90 This prompts Stichweh to conclude that recursivity helps to stabilize social systems.91 According to Armin Nassehi and Georg Kneer, recursivity in Luhmann’s work designates a “process of reproduction”.92 This throws up the question of the relationship between recursivity and revisability regarding Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation, on the one hand, and the preconditions for a theory of the science of sociology, on the other. In

Ibid., p. 520f. This “observation” applies nolens volens particularly to participant observation, which initially triggers insecurity on the part of the observed wherever it is practised, which is why a great deal of effort must always be made to provide reassurance in order to make observation possible in the first place. 88 Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 275. 89 Ibid., p. 275. 90 Ibid., p. 276f. 91 See Stichweh, “Niklas Luhmann 1927–1998”, p. 248. 92 Kneer, Georg and Armin Nassehi: Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme. Eine Einführung, Munich: Fink-Verlag (UTB) 1997, p. 50. 87

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

167

light of the criterion of recursivity, what conclusions does Luhmann come to about the practice of sociological theorising? And what is the ‘preparing’ effect of this principle for the testability and, thus, the external description of sociological observations? Luhmann’s assumption that science, like every other social system, is characterised by recursivity, boils down to a methodological heightening of revisability as envisaged by Dewey. In line with his point of departure in evolutionary theory, Dewey certainly made an analogy between science and society, between the natural scientific experiment and the ‘experimental democracy’ he studied. Unlike Luhmann, however, he did not regard it as necessary to make a clear distinction between the stages of sequentialization. In his Logic, Dewey had failed to define the functional locus of closure that makes it possible to guarantee a capacity for action. Instead, he contented himself with describing reflexivity, as a response to experiential ruptures resulting from testing situations and revisability, in terms of the anticipation of future actions. As he saw it, this was chiefly a matter of the transformation and requalification of a problematic situation. The functional closure within the experiment was supposed to mediate between an antecedent hypothesis and experimental practice. As assessments of practice, “propositions”, thus, marked the key turning points of a processual heuristic of inquiry. Irrespective of Dewey’s lack of clarity regarding the epistemic contribution of researchers’ experience, which I have already examined, it is by reading Luhmann that we can clearly see how revisability may be prepared in social-theoretical terms. In Dewey’s work, the emphasis is on the notion that knowledge must be open to revision to facilitate its future unsettling and, thus, its capacity to generate new testing situations. For Luhmann, meanwhile, the recourse (of a kind understandable for observers) to antecedent closures is also crucial. It is this recourse that prepares all the entities involved for the start of a new operation. In fact, recourse to antecedent closures is only possible because every system—and, thus, the system of science as well—acts within what Luhmann calls a “structure-determined way” that, nonetheless, remains “de facto unpredictable”.93 Similar to the subsystem of science, social systems are structurally determined because it is only ever possible to deal with problems that have already been formulated. At the same time, they remain unpredictable because neither the results of research nor the increases in complexity generated by epistemic procedures can be determined in advance. Luhmann’s rejection of a priori, causalist and biological-reductionist approaches, thus, emerges as compatible with the ‘operational a priori’ of pragmatist experimentalism. The potential for recourse to antecedent closures presupposes the necessity—to use my own terminology rather than Luhmann’s—for contextualization of the observer’s standpoint, which integrates the above-mentioned unpredictable structural determinism into observation. This would be Luhmann’s conclusion regarding the practice of sociological theorising in light of the observation of recursivity. It follows from this that there can be no “free-floating position (of a 93

See ibid., p. 279.

168

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

subject, for example) outside of all reality”94 either for the natural sciences or the social sciences. Luhmann turns revisability—specified as the criterion of recursivity—into the sociologisation of epistemology,95 an approach that he links elsewhere with the aspiration to “substantiate theories of science sociologically”.96 We have now ascertained the theory-of-science contribution of systems theory to sociological experimentalism. However, in Luhmann’s work as in Dewey’s, it remains an open question how the verifiability and, thus, the external description of sociological observations is supposed to proceed if there is no integration of the epistemic contribution of researchers’ experiences. Observation’s constructive contribution to the constitution of objects, as conceded by Luhmann, indicates the profound chasm between his theory of differentiation and Weber’s postulate of value freedom.97 For Luhmann, rejecting value freedom does not result in voluntarism. Instead, he propels his scientistic agnosticism further in the direction of an analogy between sociological and natural scientific epistemic styles, as is also characteristic of Dewey’s experimentalism. From a pragmatist perspective, we would also have to add: observation changes not only the observed world but also the observer, and, thus, the potential density of experience or variation within the process of observation. The call articulated within sociological experimentalism for the epistemic integration of the observer’s position tallies with Luhmann’s critique of the theoretical underdetermination of the concept of the life-world (Lebenswelt): “A full description of the object [cannot] ignore its observability and its difference from observation [. . .]. This inevitably means that the meaning of all objects is given polycontexturally, that is, it cannot be projected onto one single context because the issue of observability would still arise with respect to this context as well.”98 However, in constructivism, observability means nothing other than the fact, and here Luhmann quotes Maturana, that we “literally [produce] the world in which we live by living it”.99 According to Luhmann, sociology has failed to adapt itself sufficiently to this problem of the continuity between the observer’s position and the constitution of objects. It has, thus, denied itself the necessary tools to produce an external description of its activities. For this reason alone, he criticises sociology’s self-understanding as a “crisis science”. As he states in his book Theory of Society (originally published in German in 1998): “Insofar as it has established itself as a ‘science of crisis’, it has become mired down in its own theoretical crises. Insofar as 94

Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 71. 96 Luhmann, “Wie ist soziale Ordnung möglich?”, p. 198. 97 Luhmann, thus, remarks on the issue of the constitution of values and hierarchization: “relations of value status [. . .] cannot be extricated from the causal context of reality, since changes in reality change the urgency of needs and thus the system of precedence governing values. The value order thus demands nothing less than elastic opportunism.” Luhmann, “Das Handeln und die Spezifikation seiner Zwecke”, p. 40. 98 Luhmann, “Die Lebenswelt – nach Rücksprache mit Phänomenologen”, p. 271. 99 Ibid., p. 284. 95

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

169

it has engaged in ‘empirical’ research to maintain its scientific status, it has not succeeded in producing a theory of society, for to do so it would have had to gear its logic, its concept of cause, its methodology to autology, and thus to self-implication. [. . .] But this would have required abandoning all fixed points, including history and values.”100 Luhmann’s critique of the crisis science, then, did not lead to an experiential science. However, his call for the epistemic integration of the sociological observer position set the benchmark for a theory of the science of sociology that fits neatly with a sociological experimentalism based on Dewey. Summary I have elaborated Luhmann’s contribution to the sociological experimentalism developed in the present book at three levels. Firstly, Luhmann sociologised Dewey’s analogy between biological life, science and society and, thus, rendered it productive for an evolutionary theory of the science of sociology. Secondly, there is a clear congruence between the evolutionary sequentialization in Dewey’s experimentalism and Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation. The functional equivalents of ‘variation’/‘experience’, ‘selection’/‘testing’ and ‘restabilization’/ ‘co-operation’ form the epistemological background to this congruence. We may, therefore, designate experimentalism as a constructivist theory of science and, thus, social theory of sociology. Thirdly, in the spirit of the factor of ‘preparation’ examined here regarding the sociological testing procedure, a factor that is simultaneously the sense and purpose of this theory of science, I brought out the parallels between the criteria of ‘revisability’ (Dewey) and ‘recursivity’ (Luhmann). Within their different programmes, both have the function of identifying the sociological constitution of objects with processes observable within nature and science. Luhmann’s theory of differentiation lends Dewey’s criterion of revisability concrete form through the criterion of recursivity. Luhmann’s social-theoretical modus operandi constitutes the process of the theory-of-science preparation of the constitution of objects. This preparation consists of the analytical integration of the observer into the object of observation. For Luhmann, however, ‘self’ does not mean an acting subject but, instead, refers to the entities that appear as observers (of observers). However, regardless of the fact that Luhmann bade farewell to the concept of action at the switchover stage in the theory of social systems, replacing it with the concept of communication, he concretized the criterion of external description. The creation of analytical instruments for its external description, thus, becomes a normative component for a theory of the science of sociology. There is perhaps no other comparable programme that differs so radically in this respect from the (neo-)Kantian models and is so clearly congruent with Dewey’s evolutionary social philosophy. What Luhmann stated about the sociological method applies to both: “Methods [. . .] enable scientific research to surprise itself.”101 Hence, from the perspective of a sociological

100 101

Luhmann, Theory of Society II, p. 337f. Luhmann, Theory of Society I, p. 13.

170

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

experimentalism, we must not only prepare and deploy selection and testing situations in a specific way; they must also have appropriate consequences at the level of theory building. There is, however, no denying the differences from Dewey’s experimentalism. Luhmann conceived of his systems theory a-empirically and was indifferent to the development of a normative concept of experience. When it comes to Dewey’s theory of democracy, Luhmann would presumably have wished to ask the latter about the prerequisites for co-operation as a result of social differentiation. Nonetheless, Luhmann prepared the social-theoretical analytical tool that enables us to state that and how sociological investigations constitute objects by organising second-order observations. In addition, he insisted that this constitution of objects must always be carried out from an integrated standpoint, one from which observations themselves can be observed. Just as Dewey sought to establish the prerequisites for the “inquiry of inquiry” with his Logic, Luhmann’s aim was to provide the foundation for an uncompromising theory of the science of sociology. This project, which sociologists have long had access to but to which they have paid hardly any attention,102 can now be continued by means of a sociological experimentalism. In what follows, I work on the assumption that a theory of the science of sociology, which is still to be developed, can benefit from the empirical sociology of science, which has two goals. Firstly, empirical research on science combines methodological reflections with the sociological contribution to the constitution of objects. In other words, the study of science and technology has tested out empirically and implemented the principle of revisability. Secondly, this branch of research has made testing, trialling and crisis situations in science and technology the analytical point of departure for its work, thus, rendering itself an indispensable point of reference for sociological experimentalism. This brings us to the second modus operandi that ensures social-theoretical revisability, that of ‘trialling’. Science and technology studies and ANT have been key sources of stimulus regarding the transformational efficacy of science and technology, which theories of modernity certainly addressed but whose consequences they related almost exclusively to observational categories but not to sociological practice itself. STS and ANT also raised questions about the relationship between sociological methodology and social theory. In a 2004 essay, John Law and John Urry, thus, asked “So what of research methods? Our argument is that these are performative. By this we mean that they have effects; they make differences; they enact realities; and they can help to bring into being what they also discover.”103 As the following section shows, STS and ANT differentiated epistemically between the 102 In the late 1960s, Bourdieu was still hoping that structuralism had laid the foundations for such a “sociological theory of science” (see Bourdieu, Pierre: “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge”, in: Social Research 35/4 (1968), pp. 681–705. The Craft of Sociology presents the co-ordinates of such a theory of science, though in contrast to Luhmann’s work, these are informed by the French-Kantian emphasis on (self-)critical reason (see Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, The Craft of Sociology, p. 1–12). 103 Law, John and John Urry: “Enacting the Social”, in: Economy and Society 33/3 (2004), p. 392f.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

171

observer position and the constitution of objects—in order to ensure their continuity—in a way that differs markedly from systems theory.

4.3.2

“Trialling”: The Experiment as Event—ANT as Methodological Pragmatism

With the help of the category of ‘testing’, STS provide a methodological updating of the dual role of experimentalism as prefigured by Dewey. On the one hand, STS integrates all the environmental conditions of research, including the material, anthropological and structural contexts of scholarly knowledge. On the other hand, classic and contemporary STS studies thematize their ethnographic-anthropological heritage by paying attention to their own contribution to the social scientific findings of research on science. In contrast to Bourdieu’s Algeria studies, however, the goal here is essentially to irritate conventional habits of investigation rather than to engage in reflection in the spirit of (self-)critical social research. And unlike Luhmann’s theory of differentiation, STS scholars do not think through the external description of sociological interventions from a systems-theoretical perspective. Instead, they adduce the principle of symmetry, which de-hierarchizes and integrates researchers’ and actors’ (‘actants’) knowledge analytically with a view to their capacity for the structuring of uncertainties. From an STS perspective, science and technology are sites of ‘sociotechnical constellations’104 where uncertainties are transformed into testing situations that actors process in a way that is too complex to be reduced to straightforward power asymmetries. In line with this, STS and ANT are distinguished by their research-practical critique of cognitivism and the excessive emphasis on linguified action as found in classic approaches. In what follows, I present STS and ANT as a ‘methodological pragmatism’,105 while also discussing the epistemic status of revisability and suggesting that it points us towards an empirically explorative social theory in the spirit of the sociological experimentalism developed here. Scientific and Sociotechnical Testing Situations Under Observation The core thesis in this section builds on the proposition developed in ‘test run I’, namely, that the studies of science and technology of the 1970s and 1980s introduced a novel methodological pragmatism into the social sciences. This methodological pragmatism assumes that we must always reflect on theoretical gains simultaneously at the level of epistemology and a methodology geared toward

Rammert, Werner: “Technik in Aktion: Verteiltes Handeln in soziotechnischen Konstellationen”, in: Christaller, Thomas and Josef Wehner (eds.): Autonome Maschinen, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag 2003, pp. 289–315. 105 See Luhmann, Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 509. 104

172

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

research practice.106 Karin Knorr-Cetina’s laboratory studies and the theory-ofscience constructivism she developed were crucial to this insight. So far, sociologists have translated this core pragmatist idea in a variety of ways. Along the spectrum of pragmatist explanatory heuristics, this idea extends from the emphatically microsociological grounded theory to the sophisticated macrosociological social philosophy of Hans Joas. The latter, however, has moved far away from engagement with the basic research-practical assumptions of pragmatism in the spirit of Dewey. The virtue of Joas’s work has been to counter the overdue sociologisation of pragmatism in the German-speaking world by establishing an epistemologically motivated theory of action, though this allowed the experimental foundation of this theory to recede into the background. Yet, as ‘methodological pragmatism’, we can conceptualise this foundation as an empirically exploratory middle-range explanatory strategy, whose relationship with theory, which German scholars have often regarded as overly loose, is marked, following Dewey, by a high degree of social-theoretical stabilization. As yet, ANT does not enjoy the status of a social theory in the German-language reception, though more and more scholars are aspiring to change this.107 Science and technology studies rejects explanatory sociological logics of interpretation on the grounds that they cannot be derived and justified based on empirical exploration.108 Consequently, STS scholars frequently reduce theory per se to a secondary matter if not to the a priori development of knowledge, something they are keen to break away from.109 However, this boundary-drawing leads scholars to squander or overlook completely the potential to develop theories informed by pragmatism both within STS and ANT, as well as in their reception. This is where the shift towards experimentalism espoused in the present book comes in. We may assume that a social-theoretical confirmation of the reciprocity between action and knowledge concurrently feeds back into theory building itself by potentially enabling us to honour the criterion of revisability. To this end, in what follows, I address the field in which the specific practice of theoretical exploration within STS got off the ground. What happens if methodological pragmatism enters the paradigmatic site from which Dewey’s theory of inquiry derived its explosive social-theoretical power and epistemological density, in other words, if the natural scientific laboratory itself becomes the object of social scientific debate? Let us turn once again to the so-called laboratory studies, the founding field of the STS approach. 106 The following section addresses some of the key points made in an essay of mine published in 2013 (see Bogusz, Tanja: “Experimentalismus statt Explanans? Zur Aktualität der Forschungstheorie John Deweys”, in: Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie 2 (2013): 239–252. 107 As it happens, exponents of ANT themselves do not seek to attain such a status for ANT and, in some cases, distance themselves explicitly from any such objective. 108 See Law, John: “On Sociology and STS”, in: The Sociological Revue 56/4 (2008), p. 631f. 109 See, for example, Mol, Annemarie: “Actor-Network-Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions”, in: Albert, Gert and Steffen Sigmund (eds.): “Soziologische Theorie kontrovers”, special issue of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50 (2010), pp. 253–269.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

173

Converging on Experimentalism: Laboratory Studies Science and technology studies began to emerge and become established institutionally in the Anglo-American and French academy when a number of scholars concretized the laboratory concept (by developing a pragmatics of research). Let us recall: in the Chicago School of Sociology and Pierre Bourdieu’s Algeria study, the laboratory concept still functioned as a spatial metaphor for the originary sites of innovative sociological methodologies that facilitated experience-based inquiry. The analogy with natural scientific experimental knowledge could be defined as an anthropological constant, according to which knowledge always rests upon location-related experiential differences. Such experiential differences were operationalised in these settings as an expression of the contingency of social life in general (at the level of observation) and through the transformation of ignorance into knowledge in particular (at the level of the sociological constitution of objects). For Dewey, there was no doubt that this anthropological constant exists because, as he believed, it came into play in every form of appropriation of the environment and acting upon the environment. Thus, as I have already discussed with reference to the writings of Knorr-Cetina, the laboratory represented Dewey’s (ultimately socialtheoretical) basic assumption because experiential differences are induced by testing situations that lend plausibility to a change of action regime. Comparison with Luhmann has shown that, according to Dewey, these changes rested on the premise of the fundamental revisability of life itself, a premise Dewey took from Darwin’s theory of evolution. From this perspective, science and technology represent paradigmatic fields of investigation for processes of social transformation. This way of thinking in terms of social ecology was taken up by the Chicago School of Sociology. It is also present in ANT, as set out by Sergio Sismondo: “Science and technology are done in rich contexts that include material circumstances, social ties, established practices, and bodies of knowledge. Scientific and technological work is performed in complex ecological circumstances; to be successful that work must fit into or reshape its environment.”110 While such processes, in socio-political and theory-of-society terms, have been treated so far chiefly as generators of uncertainties or contingencies, the testing situation inherent in them—the trial— forms the true social-theoretical core of experimentalism. In Luhmanian terms, we might state that the test, in the form of the trial, is that which makes an impact, through selection, as a ‘specific operation’111 of experimentalism. Hence, in addition to “habits” and routines, according to Dewey, it is the test or trial that facilitates the structuring of uncertainties by comprehending the fundamental open-endedness of social life not as a terrible burden but as a normal and everyday challenge characteristic of human existence in the world.

110

Sismondo, An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, p. 69. See Corsi, Giancarlo: “Kommunikation”, in: Corsi, Giancarlo, Baraldi, Claudio and Elena Esposito: GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 91.

111

174

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Without referring directly to Dewey, STS have lent empirical plausibility to Dewey’s ideas through the historical and contemporary observation of such trialling situations, by selecting the natural scientific laboratory as their concrete field of investigation. “What was new”, according to Katrin Amelang with reference to the studies of Knorr-Cetina, was that they “observed natural science in practice, while describing and analysing in detail the local modalities and forms of practice of the natural scientific production of nature and knowledge in the laboratory”.112 Having emerged from scholars’ attempts to distance themselves from the philosophy of science, STS made the case for a production-oriented form of research on science. Law, thus, remarks ironically: “[. . .] STS started by looking at the ‘scientific method’ and showed that scientists don’t usually follow philosopher’s rules”.113 Michael Lynch’s study Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory (1985), for example, emphasised the shift away from an a priori conception of science in favour of an ethnomethodologically based form of sociological participation in the neuroscientists’ workplace. In his review of the book, Trevor Pinch states: “This means that in the case of science the sociologist has to become a scientist, or at least grasp the technical issues and practices which characterise scientific work as work.” (Fig. 4.2).114 In addition to Knorr-Cetina’s book The Manufacture of Knowledge (1981) and Lynch’s text, pioneering laboratory studies include Laboratory Life (1976) by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar and Sharon Traweek’s Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energetic Physics (1988). The mode of ‘trialling’ is the empirical pivot of these and many other laboratory studies because the practical verification of hypotheses with the aid of technological artefacts is part of the everyday business of the natural scientific and sociotechnical production of knowledge. The fact that the generation of ‘natural’ facts must always struggle with conflicting materialities and discourses predestined the laboratory studies to pay special attention to those situations in which scientific conflicts are played out.115 The trialling stage within the experimental situation of the laboratory is, so to speak, culturalised through the event-like character of the techno-scientific controversy underpinning it and, thus, rendered accessible to sociological investigation. This turns science into a cultural practice, in a sense. In Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar had already placed emphasis on the conflictual character of scientific work116: “[W]e showed that reality was the consequence of the settlement of a

Amelang, “Laborstudien’” p. 145. Law, John: “STS as Method” (2015), accessed on John Law’s homepage “Heterogenities”, http://heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2015STSAsMethod.pdf, 26 August 2021. 114 Pinch, Trevor: “Review of Michael Lynch (1985): Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul”, in: Sociology of Health and Illness 9/2 (1987), p. 219f. 115 See Sismondo, An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, p. 98–109. 116 See Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 81f. 112 113

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

175

Fig. 4.2 Bruno Latour in the team of Roger Guillemin at Salk Institute, California in 1976 © Bruno Latour

dispute rather than its cause.”117 Later they added: “Scientific activity is not about ‘nature’, it is a fierce fight to construct reality.”118 Karin Knorr-Cetina underlines: “Even science can only draw on data that is subject to competing interpretations.”119 Controversies are testing situations manufactured by those involved, situations that both bring to light and seek to eliminate uncertainties (not least) within the relevant scientific or technological community.120 In the essay ‘Pour une sociologie des controverses technologiques’ (1981), which is of considerable importance to this strand of research, French sociologist Michel Callon identified selection criteria for a corresponding empirical sociology of testing: “The sociologist should begin with the search for a controversy whose outcome is open, in which negotiations take on a great number of forms, possible choices are still up for discussion, a large and diverse group of actors are involved and no

117

Ibid., p. 236, original emphasis. Ibid., p. 243, original emphasis. 119 Knorr-Cetina, Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis, p. 250. (the English version of the book [e.g. The Manufacture of Knowledge] occasionally differs from the German translation, so I refer here to the German book). 120 Callon, Michel: “Pour une sociologie des controverses technologiques”, in: Fundamenta Scientiae 2/3–4 (1981), p. 385, translated from my German translation. 118

176

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

decision has yet been made on what to exclude.”121 Strikingly, no sociological theoretical programme decides in advance which empirical objects are to be allocated to the investigation. Instead, heuristic parameters determine whether, and if so, how, the empirical object can be rendered accessible to investigation. In the 1970s, Callon turned his attention to the plan adopted by the French electricity company EDF to use electric cars, a topic that sparked controversy between scientists and technicians. One of his conclusions, which was highly provocative for the sociology of the day, was that one ought to forget everything taught by sociology, in other words, in the first instance, one ought to place a question mark over all categories “that prompt us to describe an already premade world with its science, its culture, its institutions and its technology, rather than a world in the making. As we will see, the actors at the epicentre of technological controversies, the place where technology takes on form, are far braver than sociologists or economists, in that they do not hesitate to question and reassemble all the ‘fundamental’ concepts that we use to describe society.”122 As we will see, the pragmatist sociology of critique set out by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot embraced precisely this perspective in the late 1980s. The Experiment as Event Experiments are crucially important in not only scientific controversies but also the everyday business of science as a means of ratifying scientific knowledge. Hence, according to Sismondo, the experiment is located between the textualized and material worlds of science.123 However, from an experimentalist perspective, we must add that the testing character of the experiment generates not only ‘new things’ but also experiential differences. Dewey’s experimentalism placed emphasis on this connection between experiential difference and difference of quality: “In fact, two phases of inquiry accompany each other and correspond to each other. In one of these phases, everything in qualitative objects except their happening is ignored, attention being paid to qualities only as signs of the nature of the particular happening in question: that is, objects are treated as events. In the other phase, the aim of inquiry is to correlate events with one another. Scientific conceptions of space, time and motion constitute the generalized system of these correlations of events.”124 These correlations, which make the experiment a knowledge-inducing event, were confirmed empirically in STS, which demonstrated that and how all the objects involved in the experiment undergo a process of transformation. Finally, events in ANT are related to one another in several stages. In his definition of the experiment, Bruno Latour addresses the concept of the event, which designates the moment of 121

See ibid., p. 384. Ibid., p. 383. 123 Sismondo, An Introduction into Science and Technology Studies, p. 101. 124 Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, p. 101. Enlarging on the same theme, he states that the “relations of events [. . .] connect, through relevant operations, the discontinuities of individualized observations and experiences into continuity with one another”. Ibid., p. 117. 122

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

177

knowledge in the work of James and Dewey: “[A]n experiment is an event. [. . .] The list of inputs does not have to be completed by drawing upon any stock resource, since the one drawn upon before the experimental event is not the same as the one drawn upon after. This is precisely why an experiment is an event and not a discovery [. . .].”125 In addition to contemporary laboratory studies, the investigation of the production of scientific facts also gained traction within the field of the history of science. Latour explains with reference to his study of Louis Pasteur’s activation of yeasts: “It is always admitted that science grows through experiment; the point is that Pasteur is also modified and grows through this experiment, as does the Academy, and, yes, as does the yeast. They all leave their meeting in a different state than which they went into.”126 Thus, the trial, as the beating heart of the experiment, is an event that changes both scientists and the entities involved. It, thus, fulfils the criterion of revisability both regarding the empirical phenomenon under investigation and when it comes to the scientific constitution of objects. With reference to three studies, we will see that initially scholars contested more than what an experiment actually is, in other words, what forms of practice we can understand as part of what, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, taking inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein, referred to as an “experimental form of life”.127 Above all, regarding the issue of integration, they disagreed over the status of the scientific controversy. Is it just human beings that argue or are things and technologies also involved in the controversy? How are the latter mobilised in order to turn a controversy into a scientific fact and what enables this ‘fact’ to continue to circulate as such, in a relatively unquestioned way, beyond the laboratory? Which theory of society and political dimensions are bound up with the observation of experimental methods of investigation in the laboratory and beyond? It was out of these questions that STS developed its own special method, anchored in a genetics of theory, which became known as the ‘sociology of translation’ or ‘ANT’. Case Study of Shapin & Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) Both the laboratory studies and the history of the natural sciences have shown that experiments concurrently document and seek to end the contested status of the production of scientific facts. Controversies, thus, articulate the social interleaving and culturality of scientific action. It, therefore, seemed to make sense that controversies in early STS studies were a key point of departure for the investigation of sociotechnical action sequences. The natural scientific experiment was the litmus test that revealed the controversy as the socio-material networking of scientific factfinding, as Latour underlines: “Experiments do words with things and things with words through instruments, inscriptions and controversies.”128

Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 65, original emphasis. Ibid., p. 66, original emphasis. 127 See Shapin, Steven and Simon Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985, p. 22. 128 Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 63. 125 126

178

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

These multiple roles of the experiment within science are a historical product. But how did this come to be? An attempt at an answer was provided by historians of science Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their book Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life from 1985. These authors investigated how and why the experiment managed to become established as the central form of scientific practice. With this in mind, they studied the heated debate between the Anglo-Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle and his English counterpart Thomas Hobbes concerning Boyle’s chemico-physical vacuum pump experiments in the mid-seventeenth century. To this day, Boyle is considered to be the inventor of the scientific experiment. While historians tend to regard Boyle as a natural scientist but not (also) as a theorist of society, Hobbes has suffered the reverse fate: his success as a theorist of society, according to these two authors, overshadowed Hobbes’s epistemological contribution to illuminating what experiments and, thus, ‘good’ science are—precisely because he was outdone by Boyle. Shapin and Schaffer propose an unusual reading of this state of affairs. They establish a symmetry between the two authors by reading Hobbes as an epistemologist and elaborating the theory-of-society implications of Boyle’s ‘experimentalism’. To take Hobbes, who is believed to have failed within the canon of epistemology, seriously as a theorist of science is congruent with the benchmark of the “strong programme” mentioned earlier, as envisaged by British philosopher of science David Bloor. One of the premises of this programme is that it is appropriate to interpret even those views delegitimised within the history of science as a contribution to the stabilization of scientific truths.129 Hence, in this approach, STS’s symmetrical method initially becomes manifest at the level of epistemic de-hierarchization. Starting with the ‘success story’—in other words Boyle’s enforcement of the experimental paradigm within the history of science—Shapin and Schaffer identify three central forms of practice through which physical experimentalism in early seventeenth-century England blossomed into a key source of methodological orientation within scientific practice, one that appears to retain its validity to this day. According to these authors, what we are dealing with here is a combination of material, literary and social technologies130 that helped Robert Boyle and his supporters, in their dispute with his adversary Thomas Hobbes, to separate the space of scientific experimentation from the political sphere—and concurrently to render the ‘experimental way of life’ compatible with the liberalisation characteristic of English Restoration era politics. This separation between nature, politics and the social, so the common narrative would have it, laid the foundation for scientific autonomy and authority. At the same time, it was precisely this structural independence of Boyle’s experiments that, according to Shapin und Schaffer, contributed to the political stabilization of England in the 1660s. How might we understand this apparently contradictory outcome?

129 130

See Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imaginary, p. 7. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 25.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

179

The authors ask, “What is an experiment?”, or to be more precise: “Why does one do experiments in order to arrive at scientific truth?”131 Their answer is that Boyle established a set of conventions that combined the independence of the scientific field with the safeguarding of what we would refer to today as ‘objectivity’. Optical witnessing was as crucial to this,132 as was the practice of public experimentation. The neutralisation of nature tallied with a ratification of scientific facts ad hominem, as if these facts were generated not through experiments but by nature itself. This impersonal style, which was wholly new in the seventeenth century, exemplified a practice of the management of controversies that also served well as a template for the political realm in Restoration era England. Boyle, thus, fostered a specific idea of making democratic compromises for the settling of contentious issues because the integrity of experimental action could be presented as verified and, in that sense, secure as a result of the presence of the gentleman scientist. Finally, the recording of experiments was deployed as another key means of routinizing and legitimising knowledge production. The replicability of experiments with a view to reverifying or modifying their results, a trait so central to the natural scientific form of knowledge, became a fundamental prerequisite for the experimental epistemic style. Boyle succeeded in placing this “objectifying resource”133 within the English community of gentlemen scientists. As Schaffer and Shapin put it, Boyle’s “New Experiments134 did [. . .] exemplify a working philosophy of scientific knowledge. [. . .] [I]t showed the new natural philosopher how he was to proceed in dealing with practical matters of induction, hypothesizing, causal theorizing, and the relating of matters of fact to their explanations.”135 Thomas Hobbes disputed virtually every element of the premises established by Boyle. He did not believe it possible to neutralise nature through experiments as the latter were human-made. The political implications of the experiment left him even more disgruntled: at the end of the day, the supposed ‘public’ consisted of a small and select circle of academics. Even more implacably, Hobbes took up the cudgels against the procedure itself. If natural scientists were now becoming natural philosophers as well and, moreover, sought to separate theories from empirical facts, they had not only failed to achieve their objective but represented a threat to the political community. For Hobbes, the air pump was not a reliable philosophical instrument136 because the question of knowledge was inseparably linked with the question of social order. Yet, it was Boyle who won the day: “The experimental philosopher could be made to provide a model of the moral citizen, and the experimental

131

Ibid., p. 3. See also Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison: Objectivity, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007. 133 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 77. 134 Boyle, Robert: New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and its Effects, Oxford: Robinson 1662. 135 Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, p. 49, original emphasis. 136 Ibid., p. 150. 132

180

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

community could be constituted as a model of the ideal polity. [. . .] Here was a functioning example of how to organize and sustain a peaceable society between the extremes of tyranny and extreme individualism. Did civic philosophers and political actors wish to construct such a society? Then they should come to the laboratory to see how it worked.”137 Despite this successful attempt to separate and link nature, culture, politics and the social concurrently, in light of their study, Shapin and Schaffer conclude that, ultimately, Boyle came out on top in his conflict with Hobbes only because his experimentalism was politically opportune. To sum up their view: Hobbes was right. Questions of knowledge can always be traced back to matters of political order.138 A number of critics within STS assailed this conclusion, their critique making a significant contribution to establishing ANT and, thus, bolstering the impact of the methodological pragmatism outlined at the start of this section. Objections by Haraway and Latour: The Experimentalist Critique of Shapin & Schaffer Two main criticisms were made of the conclusion reached by Shapin and Schaffer, criticisms that were subsequently significant to the establishment of ANT. A feminist STS critique took aim at the uncritical perpetuation of the narrative of patriarchal, god-like scientific objectivity. The symmetry critique, meanwhile, asserted that the authors had failed in their aspiration to produce a symmetrical study. In her essay ‘Situated Knowledge. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ (1988), leading US-American STS scholar and biologist Donna Haraway called the narrative of objectivity a “god trick” that contributed to the perpetuation and stabilization of a fictitious and outmoded view of science. By contrast, according to her, STS scholars and natural scientists must not only acknowledge but also integrate the local situatedness and specific contextuality of their scientific work methodologically—an imperative also underlined by Dewey in Logic. Once again, then, methodological issues were being addressed regarding the investigation of scientific controversies, methodological issues operating at the boundary of observational category and the social scientific constitution of objects. Haraway writes: “I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims.”139 Haraway raises the question of whether the narrative of the “star wars”, in the form of the reproduction of scientific controversies—which always revolve around disputes between “famous [western] men”—does not, in fact, reproduce those historically legitimised universalities that STS had sought to oppose in an attempt to expose the situational, local and constructed character of scientific knowledge.

137

Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 344. 139 Haraway, Donna: “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective”, in: Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988), p. 589. 138

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

181

Conversely, Bruno Latour takes Shapin and Schaffer to task in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1990) for failing to apply the principle of symmetry on an equal basis at every level of investigation and, thus, of failing to think it through to its logical conclusion: “The authors offer a masterful deconstruction of the evolution, diffusion and popularization of the air pump. Why, then, do they not deconstruct the evolution, diffusion and popularization of ‘power’ or ‘force’?”140 As Latour sees it, the authors’ conclusion that Boyle’s victory over Hobbes could ultimately be explained—echoing Hobbes—through an asymmetrical analysis of power, contradicts STS’s aspiration to maintain symmetry even when the historical judgement has already been made. In this view, the dual ‘test’—on the one hand, the establishment of the experiment by Boyle (observational category) and, on the other, the establishment of a symmetrical approach within the scholarship on science (the constitution of objects)—is one-sided, failing to get past the production of an analytical observational category. In accordance with the experimentalist approach developed here, however, the constitution of objects must also be integrated into the trial. Because the history-of-science experiment stops at the constitution of objects, it no longer fulfils the criterion of revisability. To honour this criterion would be to place the constitution of objects—conceptualised here as the symmetrical investigation of Hobbes’s construction of order, power and authority—on an equal footing with observation. Instead, Shapin and Schaffer’s confirmation, at the end of their book, of the historical narrative is converted into Hobbes’s late triumph over his adversary. The residual category of ‘political order’ becomes the all-encompassing explanans of what had been a fine-grained investigation and, thus, reduces the resulting findings in a priori fashion once again. Hence, from an STS perspective, there is much more at stake here than the capacity of scientists to construct plausible narratives and solid social networks. If, in light of its status as a metaphor for experimental epistemic forms, the laboratory— and, within it, the experiment, as the central source for ratifying the politics of knowledge—becomes the site par excellence of material, linguistic and social processes of communitization, a place where the micrologics of political action are also generated paradigmatically, then both the history of science and the world of today become the arena of epistemic shifts. In this sense, it would be wrong to take the various critiques to mean that STS is not interested in the problem of order. But rather than persisting with the observational category, STS scholars investigate political orders through the practice of experimentation as processes of social stabilization. This makes it possible to integrate the sociological constitution of objects as well. This integration within STS led to the establishment of ANT, which created the artisanal preconditions for a sociological experimentalism. Conversely, the reflexive integration of object-constitution, as demanded by Haraway and other feminist STS scholars, struck only a very partial chord. While in some studies it is once again the (male) scholars, following a successfully concluded

140 Latour, Bruno: We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993, p. 27.

182

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

testing situation, who function as the indispensable passageway for the emergence of new knowledge,141 other studies place more emphasis on socio-material, globalhistorical and gender-specific contingencies and the symmetrical contribution of those involved in testing.142 These divergences remain controversial within STS. This prompts me to ask the following question. What Is a Trial? On the Fabrication of ANT Knowledge In line with the analytical model proposed here, the experiment functions as a test or as a hypothesis-testing trial. The criterion of revisability could not be honoured without such a trial. When applied to sociology, the trial guarantees the openendedness that is missing in heavily theory-led and a priori investigative models. The trial also expresses the dual function of experimentalism as social trope and investigative strategy. The trial contributes to the construction of social reality just as it intervenes in theories about this reality. Bruno Latour integrated four trialling stages into his workshop report, the ‘Inquiry on modes of existence’, all of which are intended to subject the observational categories he developed—more or less contemporaneously with their construction—to collective and public reflection.143 This amounts to the updating of a key pragmatist principle, according to which the practical consequences of theoretical hypotheses must already be anticipatable in the research design.144 There are two key prerequisites to understand how this methodological pragmatism is understood and implemented empirically within ANT: firstly, compliance with the principle of symmetry and, secondly, the introduction of so-called ‘actants’ into the investigation. In light of this and drawing on the work of Bloor,145 the ANT reception identified three premises that are of importance to the analytical formatting of trialling situations. Firstly, the principle of symmetry places all entities involved in the practice observed, that is, human and non-human actors (actants), and the study of their acts of mutual constitution, on the same level of importance. But these entities are de-substantialized, in the sense that it is not them but their acts of mutual

For a critical take on this, see Leigh Star, Susan: “Power, Technologies and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions”, in: Law, John (ed.): A Sociology of Monsters. Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London: Routledge 1991, p. 26–56. 142 This applies in general to the writings of John Law and in particular to his study discussed later. On the associated debate, see Sismondo, An Introduction into Science and Technology Studies, p. 71 and esp. Law, “STS as Method”, p. 10; I share the view he articulates there. I will not be going into the debate on feminism within STS and ANT. 143 Latour, Bruno: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2013; French: Enquête sur les modes d’existence. Une anthropologie des modernes, Paris: La Découverte 2012. Mentioning both the English and the original French title is no affectation, but might be telling: the term “enquête” (inquiry), so central to Latour’s experimental approach, is missing in the German translation of the title (Existenzweisen. Eine Anthropologie der Modernen, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2014). 144 See Peirce, Charles Sanders: Lectures on Pragmatism/Vorlesungen über Pragmatismus [English/German], Hamburg: Meiner 1973, p. 6. 145 See Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 7. 141

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

183

constitution, in other words, the relationships between them, that are analysed. This gives rise to another important principle of symmetry as privileged by ANT. What requires explanation is not that which is considered to be integrated but that which is excluded.146 In the case of Shapin and Schaffer’s study of Boyle versus Hobbes, this was the investigation of the latter’s epistemological contribution to the establishment of the experiment as both a scientific research practice and a model of political ordering—despite the fact that Hobbes was defeated in his dispute with Boyle. Secondly, a processual analytical strategy must be pursued throughout the investigation. Residual categories are not accepted. Law, therefore, remarks on the concept of the subject: “The aim is to avoid starting out with the agent as a knowing subject and thus to treat it as an effect rather than a cause [. . .]”.147 He remarks in an essay on the relationship between sociology and STS with reference to the concept of ‘social actors’: “[T]his means that they cannot be used to explain anything. Everything in the web is revisable. Everything is uncertain. Everything is relational. And nothing is foundational.”148 Thirdly, the rejection of residual categories leads to the assumption of emergent facts: “This is the message of recursion: that, to adapt Anthony Giddens phrase, the social is both a medium and an outcome.”149 It is the method rather than the theory that takes centre stage. But because this method points to forms of theory building and because it fulfils the criterion of revisability, the development of theory by ANT scholars is also a good model for the concept of theory found in sociological experimentalism. It is one of STS’s characteristic features that it refuses on principle to engage in the production of theoretical programmes that might serve as the basis for empirical studies. Instead, ‘doing theory’ takes the form of exploratory field research, in light of which scholars demonstrate the epistemic validity of an analytical model by means of ethnography, participant observation and discourse or sequential analysis. It was particularly important in early STS studies to ascribe quasi-sociological competencies to the sociotechnical interactions observed and those acting within

I go into the theory-of-society consequences of these postulates in ‘test run III’. I feel reinforced in embracing them above all by the writings of Teresa Koloma Beck on the normalisation of war and violence (see Koloma Beck 2012) and our discussions of the ‘othering’ of non-Western societies. Based on modern social classification systems, actors often assume a radical difference, which becomes self-reinforcing: if we think that life in Papua New Guinea or Afghanistan is inevitably radically different than our own, then it naturally becomes more difficult to even begin to imagine collaboration on equal terms. We are left with forced adaptation with questionable outcomes. Thus, symmetry always entails a loss of interpretive power. This is presumably why it is so controversial. The pressing need for reflection within STS as well in this respect is evident in the current debates on the post-colonial sciences of technology (see Law, John and Wen-Yuan Lin: “Provincialising STS. Postcoloniality, Symmetry and Method” (2015), accessed on John Law’s homepage “Heterogenities” http://heterogeneities.net/publications/LawLinProvincialisingSTS201 51223.pdf, 27 August 2021. 147 Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 113. 148 Law, “On Sociology and STS”, p. 632. 149 Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 15. 146

184

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

them, and, in this way, to push for the de-hierarchization of sociological knowledge, thus, challenging sociology’s interpretive sovereignty. In order to do conceptual justice to this methodological innovation, scholars sought to capture the sociomaterial hybridity and epistemic equality of non-human participants—also referred to, borrowing from Serres, as “quasi-objects”—through the term ‘actor’ or ‘actant’. The benefits of integrating non-human actants inevitably prompt the integration of the sociological constitution of objects into observation—not so much as critical self-reflection, nor as the purely numerical addition of another observer, but for the sake of symmetry. These are not the preconditions for but rather the effects of forms of social association, as Sergio Sismondo remarks: “Strictly speaking, all of the actors of ANT are actants, or things made to act. Thus agency is an effect of networks, not prior to them.”150 Interestingly, this perspective resembles a kind of mimicry of the dehumanisation of natural scientific observation as pursued in Boyle’s work—but here it is not ‘nature’ that speaks but rather actants that communicate with one another, including the sociologists who observe and help construct them. This kind of assemblage of participants that are not centred on rationality highlights STS’s astonishing realism. Science is a ‘messy’ affair—as anyone who has ever taken look at a natural scientific laboratory is well aware. Thus, it is all the more fascinating from an STS perspective that, and how, scientists in trialling situations manage, time and again, to reach compromises and produce highly stable infrastructures, knowledge orders and indeed ‘actants’ within the framework of scientific facts. Actants become manifest in the course of the experimental trial stage or ‘trial of strength’. Latour elucidated this with reference to the lactose created by Louis Pasteur: “In his laboratory in Straßbourg, Pasteur is designing an actor [. . .]. How does he do this? By defining trials for the actor to show its mettle—a metaphor coming from another trial of strength. Why is an actor defined through trials? Because, there is no other way to define an actor other than through its action and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the character that is made the focus of attention [. . .]. This is a pragmatist tenet [. . .].”151 In what follows, I will substantiate this pragmatist tenet privileged by ANT through a discussion of two other classic works: Michel Callon’s study of scallops off the coast of Brittany (1986) and John Law’s book Organizing Modernity (1994). We will see how a methodological pragmatism is activated here that may ultimately be productive, as a theory-generating methodology, for sociological experimentalism.

150 Sismondo, An Introduction into Science and Technology Studies, p. 72. The point Sismondo makes here is important regarding the often-made criticism that ANT attributes “agency” to things. In fact, it is neither human subjects nor things to which agency is ascribed. Both are effects of networks or specific concatenations of networks. 151 Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 59. Instead of perturbed, the original text says “pertubated”. I took the liberty to adjust the word into—to the best of my knowledge—correct English.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

185

Case Study: Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation’ (1986) Drawing on prominent laboratory studies of the time, Michel Callon published an article that reconstructed the formation of a specific infrastructure as a social experiment, one that is dedicated to the development of a new practice and that stabilizes this practice step by step. This article, one of the most cited in the ANT literature, led to the canonisation of the precept of symmetry, while also introducing the concept of the actant within STS. As usual within STS, the methodology, in the form of a thick description, is applied to a specific empirical case, in light of which the use of the methodology itself can be understood. Due to its exemplary arrangement into four research stages, this study also allows us to make a direct link with Dewey’s experimental ‘logic’. What is the case at issue here? Researchers established in the late 1970s that there had been a dramatic decline in the number of scallops, a delicacy on the European market, along the Atlantic coast of France. This problem affected, first of all, the molluscs themselves, then the fisherfolk along the Bay of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, whose livelihoods were under threat. The authorities brought in marine biologists who were tasked with determining the causes of the decline and putting forward concrete solutions. This made the case into a scientific problem as well. Callon’s thesis is that by means of four stages of “translation”, the scientists managed to turn themselves into an indispensable factor in this process: Stage 1: “problematisation” Stage 2: “interessement” Stage 3: “enrolment” Stage 4: “mobilisation” In the case of the scallops, the first stage of “problematisation” combines stages I and II of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry (I: “The indeterminate situation” and II: “Institution of a problem”). The fisherfolk of the Saint Brieuc coast ascertain that there is a risk of their catch disappearing. Three researchers appear who wish to trial a particular technique to develop and manage mussel production in order to solve the problem. At this point, the situation is still characterised by numerous questions: Will the mussel larvae ‘take the bait’? Will the fisherfolk be persuaded to take part in the undertaking? The second stage of ‘alliance formation’ (interessement) stabilizes the hypothetical identification of the elements of the infrastructure by inviting them to take part. Akin to Dewey’s stage III (“determining of a problem-solution through the increasingly controlled development of ideas”), the problematisation is made more concrete: “Interessement is the group of actions by which an entity (here the three researchers) attempts to impose and stabilize the other actors it defines through its problematization”.152 The three groups and problems are now joined by the other scientists-specialists, who localise an epistemic deficit. Callon, Michel: “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation. Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay”, in: Biagioli, Marc (ed.): The Science Studies Reader. London: Routledge 1999, p. 71.

152

186

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

The third stage, “enrolment”, describes an actional group in which the invited entities do, in fact, participate in the infrastructure as announced. The fisherfolk not only declare themselves willing but provide the logistical means of collecting the mussel larvae. To this end, specially developed collectors are placed on the sea-floor. This process is comparable with stage IV, which Dewey defines as that of “reasoning”. The hypothesis proposed can only be materialised and anticipates specific conclusions by admitting the entities selected, “until it receives a form in which it can investigate and direct an experiment that will disclose precisely those conditions which have the maximum possible in determining whether the hypothesis should be accepted or rejected”.153 The fourth stage, “mobilisation”, bears the hallmarks of the true experiment, in that the preceding hypotheses are subjected to a test or trial. The manipulation of the participants included now occurs in terms of verification or refutation. Here the “operational character of facts-meanings”, emphasised by Dewey, becomes clearly apparent as a result of trialling actions. In Callon’s work, everything boils down to the reliability of the ‘allies’ and he underlines acts of if-then co-ordination. If the mussel larvae enter the collectors, then their reproduction is possible. If the representatives of the fishing community speak and act on behalf of the community, the experiment can be carried out and continued. If the experiment succeeds, this will furnish the scientists with new knowledge and they can prove themselves and make their mark as representatives of their discipline. If all of this happens, then the symmetry is perfect.154 Callon goes on to identify various possible controversies and failures, as well as the potential need to modify the operations planned. As the specific contribution of the explanatory strategy he has set out, he underlines the absence of a priori categories and the symmetrical focus on the translation, that is, on the formal restructuration of those involved through continuous stabilization of their selves and of the infrastructure they have constructed. Here, Dewey’s operational thesis of the mutual reconstitution of the object and the observers participating finds its methodological expression. At the same time, Callon outlines a sociopolitical experiment that we might view as a prime example of Dewey’s processual conception of democratic development.155 Below, I again summarise the convergences between the experimental trialling/testing stages in the work of Dewey and Callon (Table 4.2). Given its radicalisation of the symmetrical analytical method and its epistemic de-hierarchization of the participating entities, ANT may be described as the methodology that most emphatically sociologises Dewey’s experimentalism. The ANT has also swept aside the last anachronisms—some of them due to historical factors— of Dewey’s conception of science, while in no way diminishing its epistemological far-sightedness. Because the stage models involved in both cases are not linear but circular and processual in character.

153

Dewey, Logic, p. 115f. Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 77. 155 More on this in “test run III”. 154

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

187

Table 4.2 The four experimental testing stages following Dewey and Callon Stage I II III IV

Dewey Determination of a problem Determining of a problem-solution Reasoning Operational character of facts-meanings

Callon Problematisation Interessement Enrolment Mobilisation

As Callon underlined, the model of the sociology of translation is not a matter of retelling a narrative of scientific success. Instead, the ‘mobilisation’ of the participating actants (stage IV, the ‘operationalising’ in Dewey’s work) represents the stage at which one first discovers who has succeeded in gaining allies and winning over the other actants. While, as Callon sees it, the scientists in Brittany were ultimately able to get themselves established as conduits within the transitions between the stages, it took the successful mobilisation of specific actants—above all the scallops—to convince the fisherfolk, the villagers, the local politicians and their scientific community of their approach: “This mobilization or concentration has a definite physical reality which is materialized through a series of displacements”, as Callon contends.156 However, the larvae refused to co-operate with the scientists, the collectors and the other actants: they became ‘dissidents’ and ignored the collectors. Disappointed by this outcome, the fisherfolk joined the boycott. They started fishing again without official permission, hoping to quickly haul in a large catch. Temporal regimes clashed: the protracted, processual character of scientific research collided with the fisherfolk and their families’ acute need for social reproduction. This prompted the scientists to conclude that what the region needed was a long-term programme of support and education. What matters here, as Callon underlines, is not so much the outcome of the experiment but rather the translational processes between the four stages. Thus, in discussing the contribution made by those involved to constructing and resolving the problem, rather than drawing on residual sociological categories, Callon foregrounds the symmetrical relationships they maintain with one another and with the problem. Callon might have been channelling Chauncey Wright, the ‘Cambridge Socrates’ and teacher of the early pragmatists, when he states: “This methodological choice through which society is rendered as uncertain and disputable as nature, reveals an unusual reality which is accounted for quite faithfully by the vocabulary of translation.”157 Thus, trialling situations are assessed in light of their capacities to provide collective solutions to problems. The vocabulary of translation elucidates how it is empirically possible to specify and localise those moments that contribute to stabilizing or ending the testing situation.158 Here, in contrast to Shapin and Schaffer’s Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation’” p. 78. Ibid., p. 81. 158 The proximity of Callon’s heuristic to ethnomethodological sequential analyse is obvious. For a prime example, see Scheffer, Thomas: “Zug um Zug und Schritt für Schritt. Annäherungen an eine 156 157

188

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

study of the air pump, the epistemic symmetry of all those involved is maintained until the end of the investigation. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Callon believes that the ANT model can capture real existing social asymmetries: “The repertoire of translation is not only designed to give a symmetrical and tolerant description of a complex process which constantly mixes together a variety of social and natural entities. It also permits an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and to represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized.”159 In the third ‘test run’ in the present book, I will be revisiting and fleshing out Callon’s model in light of my own empirical study centred on marine biologists. In what follows, meanwhile, I address another ANT study that seeks to establish how we might develop theories; this approach emerges as particularly compatible with Dewey’s conception of theory. Case Study: John Law, “Organizing Modernity” John Law published an organisational study in 1994 based on 3 years of ethnographic research in a state-funded research centre for nuclear technology, the Daresbury Laboratory in Warrington, England, which is located between Manchester and Liverpool. Law is concerned with the sociotechnical production of a modern scientific organisation, which he investigates from the vantage point of “relational materialism”.160 Similar to Callon, Law does not organise the empirical material he gleaned from his participant observation in Daresbury in accordance with an analytical strategy laid out theoretically in advance. Instead, he does so in light of the themes and forms of practice that he encountered in the field. The focus here is on “Networks and Places”, “Histories, Agents and Structures”, “Irony, Contingency and the Mode of Ordering”, the relationship between “Contingency, Materialism and Discourse”, and “Rankings” that are applied to the laboratory from outside and activated by it. “Dualisms and Gradients” are also at issue. Finally, Law is concerned with “Enterprise, Trust and Distrust”. With Foucault, Law reflects on the material architectures underpinning both the logistics of production and the firm’s hierarchy, while also, following Weber, considering both heroic and unheroic professional ethics. Paper, printers and corridor chat become participants in a modern firm’s feats of construction, a place in which the ethnographer also comes to the fore repeatedly as the co-constructer of this modernity. Reflections on methods and theory are blended together, always coalescing around specific observed objects or phenomena. In this emphatically practice-theoretical way, Law brings out modes of ordering that he derives from infrastructural and constitutional forms of production inherent both in

transsequenzielle Analytik”, in: Kalthoff, Herbert, Stefan Hirschauer and Gesa Lindemann (eds.): Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2008, p. 368–398. 159 Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 82. 160 Law combines this approach with a “pragmatic sociology” (see Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 95).

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

189

Fig. 4.3 John Law ethnographizes a Norwegian salmon farm in 2015 © John Law

inquiry and organisation-specific action. This action is always envisaged as experimental, in that Law, similar to Dewey, investigates inquiry and other forms of everyday action within the firm regarding the co-ordination of experiences and qualities. In this way, Law can show that it is not despite but because of the fact that action builds on uncertainty that the necessary performativity is generated to keep such a complex institution up and running. The methodological starting points for this thesis of contingency are the ANT-typical symmetrical, anti-reductionist, recursive heuristic, as exemplified in Callon’s work and, a crucial theme in the present book, sociological self-reflexivity as set out by Haraway. But Law’s key goal here is to qualify and limit both the socio-analytical and social-theoretical generalisability of sociological knowledge. Nonetheless, he also makes it clear that: “[T]heoretical modesty is not incompatible with theoretical boldness. [. . .] [I]t might [. . .] treat data, theory and method as all going together in some selftesting, self-exploring, but suitably modest form of inquiry.” (Fig. 4.3).161 John Law is grateful to Sjølaks A/S and its employees for their support and kindness to himself and Marianne Lien during their joint fieldwork for the project ‘Newcomers to the Farm; Atlantic Salmon between the Wild and the Industrial’. This project was funded by the Norwegian Research Council, through the program ‘Miljø-2015’ (NRC 183352/30).

Law demonstrates how theoretical stabilization occurs in ANT through the corroboration of ethnographic data. By ordering this data progressively with respect to its distinguishing features, he produces a theory of a contingent modernity whose key characteristic he identifies as the active reconstruction and redefinition of problematic situations both by those under observation and by the observer. This is an analysis of the modern world whose explanatory power, to echo Luhmann, lies in answering the following question: “How does an observer construct what [she or he]

161

Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 97 (original emphasis).

190

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

constructs in such a way as to be able to add further observations?”162 “Organizing Modernity”, thus, becomes a practice that we can only discern as a principle—one stabilized through qualitative experiential differences—in the context of the narrative synchronisation of the everyday practical and social scientific constitution of objects. In this way, Law produces a social theory of modern organisations by means of a case study.163 His scepticism, typical of ANT, of models that put the theoretical cart before the empirical horse inspires a fusion of qualitative and analytical elements that might undergird a research practice in which theoretical output always has an effect on its producer: “[S]ociology would be understood as a discipline composed of (theoretically freighted) practices for producing descriptions of reality and the realities that correspond with those descriptions. Sociology would be understood, in other words, as a set of devices for doing reality.”164 The production of such preparatory practices, as evident in the auto-ethnographic reflections that Law repeatedly integrates into his work, thus, contributes not only to triggering experiential differences on the part of the observed but also on the part of the observer themself. “Pragmatogony”: Or Methodological Pragmatism in STS and ANT The “quest for certainty” for John Dewey in the history of epistemology, had ultimately given the a priori and an epistemology that was distant from practice and centred on rationality, the status of a general standard. In ANT, such as the organisational study by John Law, by contrast, a quotidian-practical logic of coping with uncertainty amid the workflows of a research laboratory becomes a sociological observational category, one that is simultaneously integrated symmetrically into the sociological constitution of objects. This is the prerequisite for a sociological experimentalism that was already intimated in Dewey’s work but that he alluded to only vaguely in his statements on social research. In Callon’s work, we saw how a testing situation becomes an event that triggers experimental processes of translation that, as in Dewey’s theory of inquiry, are designed to process uncertainty productively. Once again, we can discern a theory-of-society parallel between Dewey’s experimentalism and the concerns of ANT, something I will be going into in detail in the second subchapter in “test run III”. At the start of the twentieth century, Dewey was searching for potential means of mediation, within the context of research practice, between the contemporary consequences of the Industrial Revolution and a highly dynamic young democracy. The processes of geopolitical transformation which had been occurring since the 1980s and the scientific-technological dissolution of boundaries as a result of the digital revolution point to an analogous epistemic desideratum and, thus, to the fundamental plausibility of a pragmatist renaissance

162

Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, p. 63. See Law, “On Sociology and STS”, p. 638. 164 Ibid., p. 639, original emphasis. 163

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

191

in the present era. The STS has been attempting to meet this need since the late 1980s.165 However, STS scholars have linked this desideratum only indirectly with the attempt to analyse present realities by taking stock of new uncertainties in the style, for example, of Ulrich Beck in Germany, with his theory of the “risk society” and the associated debates. Instead, they and ANT scholars in particular have pursued a “methodological pragmatism”. This by no means implies a distance from theory as is plainly apparent in the studies produced by Callon and Law. In fact, consonant with the context of emergence of STS, its exponents emphasise the experimental character of theory development. Without beating about the bush, this pragmatism emphasises the instrumental starting point of the pragmatist epistemology: experimentalism rather than explanans. Methodology and social theory are inextricably linked in STS. To reduce methodology to issues of method would amount to a radically one-sided view of STS. But how was pragmatism or Dewey’s theory of inquiry itself received in STS? It would be wrong to think in terms of a uniform, let alone systematic, reception history of pragmatism within STS. To the extent that we can find references to pragmatism in the writings of STS scholars, they are often inconsistent and not always positive. Notable exponents of STS have sometimes read Dewey as a rationalist whose thinking is distant from empirical reality,166 and, at worst, have misunderstood him as a positivist, or have accused pragmatism of being anthropocentric.167 However, it is generally positive references that predominate—even if STS scholars rarely make explicit statements in this regard. To date, it is notably Noortje Marres who has led the field in exploring and systematising pragmatism’s, and especially Dewey’s potential for STS and ANT.168 Bruno Latour has engaged with pragmatism chiefly via the ‘radical empiricism’ inspired by the work of William James and via the writings of Alfred North Whitehead. John Law associates the contingency-focused STS approach explicitly with a “pragmatic sociology”: “A modest and pragmatic sociology tends to pull in the direction of contingency.”169 Law also contends that: “For the pragmatist, the distinction between reason and force 165 See Sismondo, An Introduction into Science and Technology Studies; Belliger, Andréa and David J. Krieger (eds.): ANThology. Ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, Bielefeld: Transcript 2006; Beck et al. (eds.), Science and Technology Studies. 166 For example, in his introduction to STS—subsequent to remarks on rationality-centredness in the work of Mumford and Heidegger and with reference to none other than Dewey’s Quest for Certainty—Sergio Sismondo writes: “Even the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (e.g. 1929), who argues that science is simply theoretical technology [sic!], and that all rational thought is instrumental, sees technology (in the ordinary sense) as applied science. The view that technology is applied science tends toward a form of technological determinism.” Sismondo, An Introduction into Science and Technology Studies, p. 9. 167 See Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 78f. 168 See Marres, “The Issue Deserves More Credit”, Marres, Noortje: “As ANT is getting undone, can Pragmatism help us re-do it?” in: Blok, Anders, Ignacio Farias and Celia Roberts (eds): The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, London and New York: Routledge 2020, p. 112–120. 169 Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 96.

192

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

is not given in the nature of things. Rather it takes the form of a set of ethical and moral commitments that have to do with practice.”170 Beyond this, Law describes the pragmatist sociology of Mead and symbolic interactionism as “close to [. . .] actor-network-theory”.171 Unlike Latour, who reproaches the pragmatists for their alleged distance from material reality (chiefly, we may assume, with James in mind),172 Law associates pragmatism directly with the integration of non-human actors into sociology: “[A] pragmatic sociology concerned with ordering and inequalities will attend to materials, we could say that it will be relationally materialist.”173 Law’s references to pragmatism are numerous and positive, above all when it comes to issues of methodology.174 It is plainly apparent that pragmatism and STS are in accord when it comes both to epistemology and methodology regarding their emphasis on contingency, focus on practice and rejection of a priori theories, laid down in advance, for explaining empirical phenomena. What, though, is the exact nature of the relationship between STS and the sociological experimentalism developed in the present book? In his essay “The Force and the Reason of Experiment” (1990), borrowing from Michel Serres, Bruno Latour refers to “pragmatogony”,175 in order to elucidate, with reference to non-human entities and in light of a variety of historical and ethnographic examples, the scientific and prescientific principles underlying the stabilization of the social. Latour’s core anthropological thesis is that: “No society of humans exists without the non-humans to hold it together.”176 He links four different public experiments177 that are simultaneously deployed as instruments of justification in order to bring together specific social collectives. The suffix ‘-gony’ (from the Greek and Latin) suggests “origin”, “genesis” or “production”. The non-human “thing” (from the Proto-Germanic*þingą or “assembly”) emerges in the experiment 170

Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 95. 172 See Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 78f. 173 Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 95. 174 See Law and Urry, “Enacting the Social”, p. 396. 175 See Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 74. On pragmatogony as a concept, see also Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg: Toward a history of epistemic things, p. 26 and p. 113. In the latter, Rheinberger, referring to Ian Hacking and Jean Baudrillard, defines pragmatogony as “representation as rooted in and emerging from practice”. Latour refers to Serres, Michel: Statues, Paris: Éditions Francois Bourin 1987. 176 Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 73. 177 Experiment 1: according to legend, the mathematician Archimedes demonstrated the law of the lever to King Hiero II and the ordinary folk of Syracuse (in present-day Sicily) in the third century BCE by launching a ship from a dry dock; experiment 2: during the Baudin Expedition of 1801, which aimed to map the coast of Australia, zoologist François Péron demonstrated a dynamometer to a group of aborigines; experiment 3: in 1858, chemist Louis Pasteur gathered a group of scholars in his laboratory in Strasbourg and demonstrated the existence of a novel microbacterial yeast substance; experiment 4: a public ceremony performed by the Mundang people (it is unclear from the text whether the ethnography in question was carried out in Chad, Nigeria or Cameroon, where this people lives) to test collective cohesion. 171

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

193

as the core element of testing, which leads to the act or “pragma”. Latour sums up the origin of the experiment, as the basic act of social gathering, as follows: Thus, the first origin of a thing is a collective assembled to accuse and probably to sacrifice. Serres calls “pragmatogony” the slow movement that leads through a series of substitutions from a purely social and collective definition of the “thing” that requires more and more “objects” to hold it together. You start with a collective, you end with a collective plus a nature, plus technique. You start with a judiciary cause; you end with a scientific cause. You start with an accusation, you end with a causation.178

In this statement, the linkage of a variety of entities reveals the basic idea of ANT, which consists of a practice of translation between human and non-human actors, natures and technologies. The meaning and purpose of translation become apparent in the experiment and testing situation, in other words, the modus operandi of “trialling”. Certainly, as John Law stated above, the social is understood here as a contingent practice of perpetual construction, yet, it is neither random nor arbitrary, as this would strip the experimental arrangement, as the infrastructural prerequisite for collective testing formats, of all meaning. This “relational materialism”, which is activated just as much by the participants as by the actor-network theorists observing them, becomes visible as the experiment is carried out. In this way, STS and ANT operate simultaneously with a broad and a narrow concept of the experiment. It is broad because, as in the work of Latour, it is charged with macropolitical significance (and, in this sense, it shows a marked concordance with Dewey’s democratic experimentalism). It is narrow because it acknowledges the trial as the pivotal local element that grants ontological importance to the experiment as a social apparatus of experience and knowledge—on the condition that it integrates an empirically exploratory methodology that is the exact opposite of theoretical deduction.179 The studies by Callon, Law and Latour are, thus, exemplary of a “pragmatogony” that might not only enable us to fuse the observational category and the constitution of objects conceptually but, with the help of a methodological pragmatism, also allow us to fulfil the social-theoretical criterion of revisability that I emphasise in the present work. This requires a more detailed explanation. The Experiment as a Vehicle for the Genesis of Theory: On the Principle of Revisability in ANT The critique of the attempt to explain Boyle’s ‘victory’ over Hobbes through the residual categories of “political order” and “power” illustrates how ANT scholars have sought to stress the methodological importance of revisability. This critique is closely linked with the radicalisation of the precept of analytical symmetry. Hence, it is far less important here that, through “pragmatogony”, assemblies are stabilized by means of a “*þingą”, in other words, an assemblage of both human and non-human actors as well as quasi-objects, than how ANT reconstructs this stabilization. The Latour, “The Force and the Reason of Experiment”, p. 74. The “objects” in inverted commas refer to Serres’s notion of “quasi-objects”. According to him, these cannot be regarded as the equivalent of human-natural “subjects”; both human and non-human elements are inherent in them. 179 See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, p. 176. 178

194

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

integration of actants of all kinds is the epistemic prerequisite for symmetry and it probably caught the attention of ANT sceptics only because what lies behind it is a far more radical call for complete theoretical revisability. Few social theorists (particularly in the German-speaking world) embrace revisability because they are still accustomed to thinking through Kantian or neo-Kantian analytical models. For them, then, successful social theories tend to facilitate closure rather than openness and revisability; they are supposed to explain rather than throw up new questions. We can explain a lot of ANT authors’ scepticism about theory in light of their opposition to these Kantian theoretical models; but perhaps they are making things a little too easy for themselves, as Noortje Marres observes: “I am strongly [...] convinced that some core assumptions of ANT—not least the notion that it is possible for researchers to ‘follow traces,’ and that this does not involve or require buying into any given ‘theory,’ at least not initially—have lost some of their efficacy, and even, are ceasing to be tenable.”180 As Law correctly underlines, ANT also contributes to the production of theories about the social, and it does so precisely by facilitating revisability. This is, in fact, the challenge posed by an experimentalist social theory—it is supposed to operationalise the formulation of new questions in the same way as an experiment does. Thus, ANT uses the theoretical resources revealed by the sociology of translational relationships in order to break with conventional patterns of social-theoretical generalisation. This entails four challenges. Because it is always empirical problems that gives rise to the first instance of reflection—in other words, a trialling situation for both the observed and the ANT researcher—the first challenge is to comply with the precept of symmetry. This compliance goes hand in hand with the second challenge, which involves the meaningful arrangement of the participating actants in order to construct translational chains that are viable regarding both the formation of observational categories and the sociological constitution of objects. The third challenge is to determine the location and timing of the analytical closure of the experiment, which makes it possible to secure revisability as a task for subsequent research, rather than allowing it to result in an infinite regress.181 Finally, the fourth challenge consists of theory formation itself, which is placed on an equal footing with the tackling of a specific empirical problem. Just as Callon derived a social theory of translational relationships from the observations within an empirical testing situation, Law develops an organisational theory of modernity that is based on actors’ specific abilities to process uncertainties productively. Like a Trojan horse, these empirical findings simultaneously convey the social theory inherent in

Marres, Noortje: “As ANT is getting undone, can Pragmatism help us re-do it?”, in: Blok, Anders, Ignacio Farias and Celia Roberts (eds): The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, London and New York: Routledge 2020, p. 115. 181 See for example Luc Boltanski’s critique of ANT; Boltanski, Luc and Mauro Basaure: “Die pragmatische Soziologie der Kritik heute. Luc Boltanski im Gespräch mit Mauro Basaure”, in: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 10 (2008), p. 8. 180

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

195

them, which is embedded in their methodological implementation182: the integration of non-human actors, the radical symmetrization of both participants and existing theories about the case under examination, the shifting of residual categories to the socio-analytical backburner, and the linkage of observational category and the constitution of objects. It is the confirmation of these heuristic strategies that makes revisability possible. In accordance with ANT’s assumption of contingency, the study of the scallops of Saint-Brieuc Bay could have taken a quite different form using the same information available to it. As in the film Run Lola Run,183 one might retell this case from the outset from the perspective of the scallop larvae rather than that of the scientists. Alternatively, the builders of the collectors might have related these objects’ backstory and described the materials, technologies, everyday practices and political decisions associated with them. We must, however, be aware of the risks of a formulaic application of Callon’s model to every type of experimental situation. The extent to which the translational stages do, in fact, turn out to be relatively stable and applicable to various contexts always depends on the empirical case study at hand.184 The safeguarding of the empirical clues based on which the associated analytical paths are stabilized is decisive to maintaining revisability. It is not just “things” that stabilize the social. ANT contends that sociologists participate in this stabilization by developing a specific social-theoretical approach. This is the source of ANT’s unique realism, which is often confused with a loss of “objectivity”. Let us recall Donna Haraway’s critique: it is less rather than more universality that enables us to evade the temptations of the “gods’ trick”. Partiality and emphatic localism, meanwhile, can allow us to perceive rational claims to knowledge—including social-theoretical knowledge. If we systematically integrate this insight into our research methodology, revisability enables us to observe such instances of theorisation. This possibility of an external description of theory building, as we have already seen in the work of Luhmann, is a basic prerequisite for a theory of the science of sociology. It is this possibility that explains the deeply democratic character of the social theory espoused by ANT, a trait whose affinity with Dewey’s experimentalism is now plainly apparent.

182

This, as it happens, is in accordance with Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron’s premise that every sociological method implies an inherent philosophy of science of the social and, thus, a social theory as well; see Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron, The Craft of Sociology, p. 3f. 183 The film Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer (Germany, 1998), narrates the story of a young gangster couple in three different ways in succession. The point of departure is a sequence that always begins in the same way. Each time Lola runs, different consequences and dramatic developments then ensue. The resulting subtext of the film articulates the impossibility of determining flows of action causally or teleologically and underlines the randomness of social events and their outcomes. From a sociological perspective, this is an exciting experiment in narration that could also be applied to sociological narratives. 184 See, for example, Sismondo, An Introduction into Science and Technology Studies, p. 73f.: “ANT, while it recognizes the provisional and challengeable nature of laboratory work, glides over these issues. It presents science and technology as powerful because of the relative rigidity of their translations, or the objectivity—in the sense that they capture objects—of their procedures. Yet rigidity may be a fiction, hiding many layers of expert judgement.”

196

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Summary Having drawn on the work of Luhmann to show how the process of preparing socialtheoretical revisability might be facilitated by an evolutionary heuristic, this section focused on the categorical significance of the trial or test, which is of socialtheoretical relevance chiefly in STS. I made a direct link between the testing situation and the significance of the laboratory experiment to theory building in ANT. I elucidated this, firstly, in light of the critique of Shapin and Schaffer’s study on the experiment’s founding scene within the history of science, secondly regarding the sociology of translational relationships developed based on that critique, and thirdly and finally, with reference to the principle of “pragmatogony”. The specific character of the testing situation as the starting point for theory building also shed light on why the natural scientific laboratory was the paradigmatic locus of a methodological pragmatism, one that we can now integrate into a sociological experimentalism. The latter’s principle of revisability also serves as an empirically backed heuristic for a philosophy of science of sociology, which is established within ANT through the fusion of the observational category and the constitution of objects. In contrast to the work of Luhmann, we are not dealing here with a theoretical architecture that facilitates revisability and observability simultaneously but with an empirically based methodology. The trialling situation, then, always feeds directly back into the sociological research experience. Why does this amount to social theory? The STS scholars’ reservations about theorisation are well-known. They never tire of underlining that STS can only be explained in light of case studies: “It is impossible to understand STS theory without looking at cases. These are where we do our theory. Some find this difficult: they think of theory as abstract. But in STS there is little or no theory/empirical divide. Instead it rolls theory and method and empirical practice together with social institutions (and sometimes objects) and insists that they are all part of the same weave and cannot be teased apart.”185 What, then, is the virtue of embedding methodological pragmatism in a social theory of experimentalism? Firstly, there is no comparable sociological approach that combines the criterion of social-theoretical revisability so proactively with an empirical analytical model as ANT. Furthermore, the repertoire of ANT includes all the elements of the heuristic prefigured by Dewey, while expanding on it by linking the laboratory, society, natural sciences and sociology. Rather than merely assailing the a priori and residual categories as basic social-theoretical postulates, ANT takes a holistic, empirical and relational approach (demonstrating once again its proximity to Dewey) by putting the entire sociological research process and, in particular, its production of empirical knowledge up for discussion. William James once intervened vigorously in the old dispute between rationalism and empiricism, describing pragmatism as a “new name for some old ways of thinking”. Nowadays, it is from the perspective of ANT that we can grasp why experimentalism may be seen as an old name for some new ways of thinking. ANT furnishes us with a heuristic that not only integrates artefacts,

185

Law, “STS and Method”, p. 2.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

197

non-human actors and technology but that, with no hint of nostalgia, has turned its back on the theoretical observation tower where the spectator theories of knowledge stationed themselves for decades. Because ANT provides us with the methodological foundations for a philosophy of the science of sociology, we can make the leap from a science of crisis to a science of experience that is truly worthy of the name. It is on this premise that we will now take the third step in this test run. Having seen how STS and ANT deployed the test as both an observational category and a framework for the sociological constitution of objects, I now present the socialtheoretical modelling of the test. In the late 1980s, inspired by STS and the writings of Latour and Callon, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot put forward an analytical model for a pragmatist sociology of testing, one whose contribution to sociological experimentalism I discuss in what follows.

4.3.3

“Modelling”. The Ratification of Relevant Epistemic Issues and the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique

The pragmatic sociology of testing, also called the sociology of critique, emerged in France in the mid-1980s.186 It was the result of an intensive engagement both with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose research group gave rise to it, and the études des sciences et des techniques, which were opposed to Bourdieu’s ideas and to established sociology in general. At the École des Mines, under the leadership of Bruno Latour, Madeleine Akrich and Michel Callon, French STS had begun to make waves with the “sociology of translation”, in other words ANT.187 The founders of the sociology of critique, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, took from Bourdieu an epistemological constructivism that challenged the inductive classificatory principles underpinning sociological categories and supplanted them with a correlative and practice-theoretical perspective. The sociology of critique shared with the ANT developed by Latour, Law, Akrich and Callon the objective of reconceptualising social dynamics, a new perspective focused on the observation of controversies and attempts to deal with them. This combination, then, was anything but a “third way” between practice theory and ANT, let alone an attempt at reconciliation between the two approaches. What we are dealing with here is, in fact, an independent contribution to social theory, which is significant in the context of sociological experimentalism, above all, due to its modelling. Luhmann laid the philosophy-of-science foundations for a social theory of experimentalism through the modus operandi of “preparing”, while ANT in light of its investigation of laboratory situations practised a modus operandi of

The following remarks draw on passages in my article: “Was heißt Pragmatismus? Boltanski meets Dewey”, in: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 3/4 (2013), pp, 311–328. 187 See Akrich, Madeleine, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour: Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs, Paris: Presses des Mines de Paris 2006. 186

198

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

“trialling” in the shape of “doing theory”. The sociology of critique, meanwhile, put the modus operandi of “modelling” such a theory into practice in exemplary fashion. The actors and collectives observed, as well as the sociologists observing them, actively carry out this modelling. It fulfils the criterion of revisability because neither an antecedent structural analysis nor a predetermined commitment to residual categories can anticipate the outcome of testing situations. Instead, what is being propounded here is an epistemology of uncertainty that focuses simultaneously on actors’ abilities to situationally process transitional situations, as underlined by Boltanski and Thévenot in an article: “[T]hose situations are necessarily transitory because they break the ordinary course of action. Nobody can live constantly in a state of crisis. One of the ways to get out of a crisis is to return to an agreement. The frame of analysis must therefore also tackle agreement and disagreement with the same tools.”188 This symmetrical analytical perspective is congruent with the methodology of ANT. Boltanski and Thévenot also emphasise the relevance of non-human actors in the context of controversies: “Finally, these disputes are not merely a matter of language. Disputes involve not only human persons, but, also, a large number of objects: in the course of a professional dispute, for example, a computer whose data have been erased; in the course of a dispute between heirs, a house or a land; or, in the course of a domestic scene, plates which have to be washed up, and so on. The frame must be designed to deal with disputes in the real world, that is, it must be able to describe the way disputes link together persons and things.”189 A symmetrical analysis of actors’ critical abilities to deal with problems—this appears to be indicative of a pragmatist sociology. However, this proximity to pragmatism is not per se identical with an experimentalist approach. Regarding the pragmatic sociology of critique, neither a pragmatist nor an experimentalist approach was as evident as the Paris-based research group’s selfdesignation suggested. My next step, then, is to discuss the pragmatist content of the sociology of critique before going on to elucidate its contribution to a Deweyan sociological experimentalism. The sociology of critique became known internationally, and especially in Germany, due to the success of the book The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello. It was published in German in 2003, at a time when the pragmatic sociology of critique had already been established for more than a decade in France. Meanwhile, within the German-language and Anglo-American reception, there appears to be no doubt that the sociology of critique has given new impetus to pragmatist explanatory contexts, enlarging upon them, particularly through the work of Boltanski and Chiapello, by adding a critique of capitalism.190 But does this mean Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot: “The Sociology of Critical Capacity”, in: European Journal of Social Theory 2/3 (1999), p. 360. 189 Ibid., p. 360f. 190 See Diaz-Bone, Rainer (ed.): Soziologie der Konventionen. Grundlagen einer pragmatischen Anthropologie, Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus 2011; Susen, Simon and Bryan S. Turner (eds.): The Spirit of Luc Boltanski. Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’, London, New York & Delhi: Anthem Press 2014. 188

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

199

that the French sociology of critique can truly be considered ‘pragmatist’ in the same sense as the US-American classics? Within France, there is a dispute over whether the “sociologie pragmatique de la critique” is itself pragmatist.191 However, criticisms are limited to the fact, conceded in the recent past by members of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale (GSPM) themselves, that while they certainly adopted the label of pragmatism in the founding stages of their approach, they paid very little attention to the pragmatist classics themselves.192 As is well-known, the team around Boltanski and Thévenot in the 1980s got together in large part due to a desire to distance themselves from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Here, “pragmatism” served as an umbrella term under which a radical methodological critique, particularly of Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, took off.193 This methodological critique was inspired by ethnomethodology, interactionism and STS194—a “pragmatics” more in the sense of the linguistic interpretation of the relationship between thinking, speaking and acting, rather than a “pragmatism” based on the classics of the US-American tradition.195 However, at least in Paris, after the death of Bourdieu the question of whether, and if so how, the relevant scholars related their work to pragmatism also appeared to redefine their relationship to the man who had been “France’s premier sociologist”.196 Luc Boltanski’s references to the “constructivist structuralism”197 of his one-time teacher and colleague seem to be characterised by a marked proximity, above all, regarding hopes of a critical social science’s emancipatory potential. But

191 See Stavo-Debauge, Joan: “La sociologie dite ‘pragmatique’ et la philosophie pragmatiste, une rencontre tardive”, unpublished discussion paper for the conference Why Pragmatism? The Importance of Pragmatism for the Social and Human Sciences (I), Villa Vigoni, Italy, 2012; English version available at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/36833723/The_so_called_prag matic_French_sociology_and_American_pragmatism_a_few_notes_on_a_late_meeting, accessed 29 August 2021. There exists in France a long-standing and rich tradition of a firmly elaborated and well-established pragmatic sociology preceding and transgressing the works of Boltanski, Thévenot and their colleagues from the (former) GSPM. This applies particularly to the members and fellows of the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux (CEMS) at the EHESS, founded in 1967. For more information see http://cems.ehess.fr/, the Dewey Center France (head: Roberto Frega) http://dewey.ehess.fr/ and, furthermore, the works from Daniel Cefaï, Roberto Frega, Nathalie Heinich, Sandra Laugier, Albert Ogien, Barbara Stiegler, Joëlle Zask et Bénédicte Zimmermann. See also the journal “Pragmata”, founded notably by members of the CEMS: https://pragmataaep.wordpress.com/revue-pragmata/ 192 See Thévenot, “Powers and Oppressions Viewed from the Sociology of Engagement”; Dodier, Nicolas: “L’espace et le mouvement du sens critique”, in: Annales. Histoire et Sciences Sociales 1 (2005), p. 731. 193 See Boltanski, Luc: “Usages faibles, usages forts de l’habitus”, in: Encrevé, Pierre and RoseMarie Lagrave (eds.): Travailler avec Bourdieu, Paris: Flammarion 2003. 194 See Bogusz, Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski, p. 39f. 195 See Dodier, Nicolas: “Agir dans plusieurs mondes”, in: Critique 529–530 “Sciences Humaines—sens social” (1991), p. 441. 196 Lepenies, Wolf: “Ernst und Elend des sozialen Lebens. Theorie aus Verantwortung. Zum Tode von Pierre Bourdieu“, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25 January 2002. 197 See Bourdieu, “Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge”, p. 700.

200

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

he provides us with no more than incidental remarks on US-American pragmatism. It is only in the last few years that this group,198 and Boltanski himself, have articulated their relationship to the classics more explicitly.199 In much the same way as in STS, their references to the leading pragmatists have been few and far between and rather unsystematic.200 This lacuna challenges us to subject the French sociology of critique itself to a pragmatist “trial”. In what follows, I will be presenting and discussing the sociology of critique in light of three key premises. These point to epistemological interests analogous to those of sociological experimentalism—and, thus, to an “intra-pragmatist” debate of social-theoretical scope. This involves a pluralist epistemology201 as the starting point for the investigation of processes of socio-political transformation. Revisability as the subsumption of a normative under a descriptive-experimentalist research approach is inherent in this epistemology. Finally, we can discern an instrumental conception of “critique”, particularly in the work of Luc Boltanski, which I also view as an anthropological constant for analysing actors’ competencies and a functional 198

The GSPM was dissolved in 2012. Parts of the group, of which Boltanski and Thévenot are not members, have founded a new group named “LIER”—Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d’études sur les réflexivités. Similar to the GSPM, this is based at the EHESS in Paris and brings together philosophers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists. For further information see https://lierfyt.ehess.fr/ 199 With reference to the history of the GSPM, Laurent Thévenot published an essay (see Thévenot, ‘Powers and Oppressions Viewed from the Sociology of Engagements’) on the occasion of a workshop organised by the present author and Craig Calhoun on the topic of “Pragmatism, Practice Theory, and Social Change” in September 2008 at the Institute for Public Knowledge of New York University. This is an analysis of Bourdieu and Dewey regarding the “pragmatic sociology of engagement”, which Thévenot developed out of the “pragmatic sociology of critique” which he and Boltanski established. On the analogous epistemic interests inherent in the practice-theoretical perspectives of Dewey and Bourdieu, see Bogusz, Tanja: “Experiencing practical knowledge. Emerging convergences between pragmatism and sociological practice theory”. In: European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2011, 2, 2. Symposia: “Pragmatism and the social sciences: a century of influences and interactions”, pp. 32–54. Subsequent to these discussions, members of the LIER published an essay in 2013 (see Barthe et al.: “Sociologie pragmatique”). Like the GSPM, this text uses the adjective “pragmatic”, which essentially connotes linguistic, ethnomethodological and interactionist dimensions, in contrast to “pragmatist”, which would suggest an explicit reference to the philosophy of pragmatism. 200 Elsewhere, I have carved out Boltanski’s connections with pragmatism by bringing out his charged relationship with the French tradition of structuralism. See Bogusz, Tanja: “Why (Not) Pragmatism?” in: Susen, Simon and Bryan S. Turner: The Spirit of Luc Boltanski. Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’, London, New York & Delhi: Anthem Press 2014, p. 129–152. Logically enough, Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre currently define the programme they have sought to continue as “pragmatic structuralism”. See Boltanski, Luc and Arnaud Esquerre: Enrichment. A Critique of Commodities, Cambridge: Polity 2020, p. 6. 201 I borrow the concept of “pluralist epistemology” from Nicolas Dodier’s discussion of the pragmatic sociology of critique. See Dodier, Nicolas: “L’espace et le mouvement du sens critique”, in: Annales. Histoire et Sciences Sociales 1 (2005), p. 11f. But it can also be derived from William James’s concept of a “pluralist universe”, in which, to the best of my knowledge, the pluralist approach was articulated for the first time with reference to pragmatist philosophy. See James, William: A Pluralistic Universe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1977.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

201

translator of aspects of the constitution of civil society. Finally, I will elucidate the extent to which Dewey’s concept of “intelligent action” describes a species of critical science that might take concrete form as a methodological experimentalism, for which the sociology of critique has put forward a social-theoretical analytical model. Investigating Transformations: A Pluralist Epistemology The STS had investigated sociotechnical controversies in order to find out how those involved are capable of processing uncertainty through the formation of stable infrastructures and networks, while also integrating them experimentally in the spirit of “pragmatogony”. Boltanski and Thévenot were also interested in controversies. Their attention, however, was focused on those controversies in which participants invoke general ordering principles, which these authors call “action regimes” in the first instance, in order to make their critique heard and stabilize it in such a way as to eliminate situational uncertainties. They, thus, transferred the theme of the scientific controversy to that of general, everyday social controversies by linking this theme with the idea of the transformational efficacy of social critique. In the late 1980s, Boltanski and Thévenot began to study workplace conflicts in an attempt to determine which general ordering principles are invoked by the various parties in a conflict.202 Rather than putting these conflicts down to class differences and social inequalities and declaring these parameters to be the starting point for sociological investigation, as typical of the critical sociology of work and industry, Boltanski and Thévenot distinguished between two other dimensions of conflict: “justice” and “justesse” (appropriateness). What they were interested in is how participants in a conflict invoke either those lines of argument or objects that reflect the “action regime of justice” or the “action regime of appropriateness”.203 In the relationship of tension between justice and appropriateness, the authors tell us, it is critique that links together the two regimes of action. The following chart illustrates this (Fig. 4.4). A typical example of this would be a dispute between an industrial worker and their superior regarding whether the worker has produced metal slugs with the lathe or milling machine precisely in accordance with the technical schematics at hand, in other words, whether they have complied with the prescribed criteria or not.204 A dispute flares up because the superior ascertains that the measurements deviate from the prescribed norm. The superior remonstrate with the worker. The latter responds by arguing that they are overworked, they have already had to do too much overtime due to the new shift regulations and it is not fair to reproach them about the

202

See Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot (eds.): Justesse et justice dans le travail, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France & Centre d’études de l’emploi 1989. 203 In the English translation of De la Justification (On Justice), the Catherine Porter has translated “justesse” by “justness”. Following Laurent Thévenot (personal correspondence), the term “fitness” has been applied in several translations. For the sake of semantic clarity, I prefer the term “appropriateness”. 204 See Dodier, “Agir dans plusieurs mondes”, p. 236f.

202

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

Fig. 4.4 The two action regimes of work according to Boltanski and Thévenot (1989)

related through

justice

appropriateness

critique

measurements. The first priority, the worker insists, must be to sort out the working hours. While the superior bases their argument on the action regime of “appropriateness”, in other words, the correctness, accuracy and aptness of the work, which the worker has pledged to uphold by signing their employment contract, the worker invokes the action regime of “justice”. The worker appeals to the general context of labour law governing the conditions of production, which are preventing them from complying with the former action regime. The employer has also framed this context contractually and pledged to uphold the rules on working conditions. Through critique, then, “appropriateness” and “justice” are positioned towards one another in a controversial way. The unsettling of both the action regimes to which the parties in conflict originally committed themselves becomes evident through a micro-social conflict situation. The two parties do not content themselves with references to metal slugs or overtime. They invoke “political forms of worth”205 that generalise their local problems and, thus, lend them weight. Hence, action regimes are activated that point to plural orientations. Actors may switch between these action regimes; they may add others to them and gear them meaningfully to a given conflict situation. Because of its symmetrical approach to action regimes, which puts them on an equal footing, this “pluralist epistemology” cross-cuts typical forms of sociological differentiation, such as the pairings of structure and practice or individual and society. Dewey had already articulated his unambiguous opposition to the latter and, by means of his democratic experimentalism, extended William James’s pluralist epistemology to the public sphere.206 Depending on the nature of the testing situation engendered by critique, actors may draw on a complex repertoire of things and fields of reference that stabilize their position within the controversy. Boltanski and Thévenot initially called this repertoire action regimes (régimes d’action) and later justificatory orders or even “cités”. The two French sociologists observed that the invoking of such general action regimes is a typical procedure within the resolution of conflicts. It was not long 205 Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot: On Justification. Economies of Worth, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, p. 83f. 206 See Dewey, The Public and It’s Problems, p. 143f.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling Fig. 4.5 The four action regimes as envisaged by Boltanski (see Boltanski, Luc: Love and Justice as Competences, London: Wiley & Polity Press, 2012)

203

violence

justice

appropriateness

agapé / love

before critics were attacking this model: if controversies only play themselves out between the action regimes of “justice” and “appropriateness”, how do things stand with, for example, violence? And can a sociology of critique disregard relationships of power and dominance entirely? Boltanski and Thévenot certainly emphasised that they wished to develop a concept of critique that chiefly investigates it as a competency and a transformative power. But they came to realise that it is unrealistic to leave out more radical forms of testing situation. Boltanski, thus, enlarged upon the model in 1990 by adding another contrasting pair: the absence of critique in the form of agapè, that is, unconditional love, on the one hand, and the most extreme form of critique, namely violence, on the other (Fig. 4.5). While the action regimes of “violence” and “agape” were discussed only here and there in their subsequent studies, Boltanski and Thévenot continued to develop their sociology of work. In light of the oppositional tension between “justice” and “appropriateness” and the classic example from the field of work, they focused on the action regime of justice on which, they contended, a lot if social criticism draws. This choice had both a heuristic and social-theoretical function: recourse to “justice” made it possible to move from a purely ethnomethodological or interactionist analytical level to a social-theoretical and theory-of-society level, which also implies a philosophy of the science of sociology. Rather than leaving the investigation and ratification of social justice to the sphere of social-theoretical reasoning, the actors under investigation are endowed with the ability to articulate issues of justice themselves by constructing ‘political forms of worth’. In this way, the sociology of critique links the level of the observational category with that of the sociological construction of objects and is, thus, compatible with a sociological experimentalism. Actors develop a “critical matrix”,207 which may extend from everyday controversies to philosophical concepts of justice. We may detect and generalise these concepts in actors’ statements, in the things they use and invoke to substantiate their concerns, in classical philosophies, but also in management manuals or

207

Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, p. 237.

204

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

workers’ representative bodies. Here, then, the “doing theory” established in STS is transferred to the level of tests of justice. Based on the action regime of “justice”, Boltanski and Thévenot initially identify six and later more so-called justificatory orders that are invoked within the action regime of “justice” in situations of testing and conflict. These orders’ characteristic features, they assert, are their relative generality and independence from history.208 The action regimes of “justice” and “appropriateness” are now located at the level of arrangement that enables actors to put forward a critique and bring about testing situations in the first place. Conversely, the justificatory orders, now derived within the sociology of critique exclusively from the action regime of “justice”, make an impact at the level of the pluralist acquisition and experimental negotiation of ordering principles. Thus, while in the first model, critique had the task of putting two action regimes (“justice” and “appropriateness”) to the test and relating them to one another, now it is the justificatory orders that, derived from the action regime of “justice”, are combined with and against one another through critique (Fig. 4.6). Without elucidating the significance of the various justificatory orders here in great detail,209 their main social-theoretical function is to provide an opportunity to take testing and crisis situations into account in a way that allows actors a broad scope to adopt plural critical positions. The anticipation of a wide variety of openended action orientations, thus, implies a basic epistemological prerequisite for the emergence and comprehension of processes of societal constitution and transformation. Bound up with this is the assumption, already anchored in ethnomethodology and ANT, that societies and their actors do not primarily administer stability but rather the uncertainty of its presence: society is not ‘order’, but a perpetual ‘ordering’, as expounded by John Law, which may succeed or fail. Exponents of the sociology of critique, in agreement with Dewey, criticise a dogged focus on a priori concepts of order, calling it an epistemological power fantasy. According to Boltanski in On Critique, this led to problems, particularly for exponents of critical sociology: they hopelessly underestimate actors’ critical capacities. In this way, Boltanski argues, one ends up in a bizarre dialectic—in terms of disciplinary psychology—between an inflated sense of analytical efficacy and a peculiar lack of trust in not only actors’ critical competencies but also the relevance of one’s own interpretive concepts and their potential to shape opinion across a broad front.210

208 The criterion of historical timelessness was dropped when the New Spirit of Capitalism introduced the project-based justificatory order. 209 See Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification and Bogusz, Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski, p. 45–58. 210 See Boltanski, On Critique, p. 19f. In his work Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity 2014, Boltanski gets to grips with the paranoid characteristics of sociology, which emerged in the early twentieth century as a science that sought to uncover the true nature of the social. According to this analysis, when it comes to coping with contingency, this new science may be regarded as the accomplice of the modern crime novel.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

205

LEVEL OF DISPOSITIONS: ACTION REGIMES

violence

justice

EXPERIMENTAL LEVEL: ORDERS OF JUSTICE

-

domestic

-

inspired

-

civic

-

industrial

-

opinion

-

market

appropriateness

agapé / love

related through critique

Fig. 4.6 A pluralist epistemology. Action regimes and justificatory orders in the pragmatic sociology of critique

While Dewey’s epistemological pluralism made forays into the fields of natural scientific research, pedagogy and democratic development, Boltanski and Thévenot expanded this pluralism to include a sociology of justification that is intimately bound up with the concept of testing as developed in STS and ANT. The positive flipside of the open-endedness of testing situations for Boltanski and Thévenot lay in the ongoing, often surprising and impressive manifestation of actor-specific capacities to reach agreement, in situations of uncertainty, on how the latter might be eliminated or at least held in check. In On Justification, Boltanski and Thévenot developed an analytical model according to which the negotiation of uncertainty through testing situations is formatted, oriented and stabilized in such a way as to produce normative value judgements. In Dewey’s work, experimental action is the event within research that produces a difference in action orientation by disrupting the experiential continuum. In the thinking of Boltanski and Thévenot, meanwhile, ‘testing’ plays a similar framing role, articulating and reflecting on existing justificatory orders, managing their difference from other justificatory orders and, thus, contributing to the collective ratification of a situationally produced action orientation. “Trials”, as Boltanski and Thévenot contend in their shared magnum opus, are action options that are focused on reducing uncertainty, while simultaneously laying

206

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

down the parameters for a process of collective reassurance regarding “both an evaluation according to a moral standard and an assessment according to the standard of truth”.211 The concept of testing in the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, thus, attained the status of a core category, one that inherently ascribed a fundamental role in processes of social interaction and democratic transformation to actors’ critical competencies and asserted that the latter had not been adequately appreciated: “Our aim is to describe the actor’s sense of justice—or, more precisely, their sense of injustice— and to build models of competence with which actors have to be endowed in order to face ordinary situations.”212 Rather than focusing, as is typical in social sciences, on structural power differences that are rendered explicit in conflict situations, the authors ask: How can a social science hope to succeed if it deliberately neglects a fundamental property of its object and ignores the fact that persons face an obligation to answer for their behaviour, evidence in hand, to other persons with whom they interact? It suffices to be attentive [. . .] to the justifications that people develop, in speech and in action, to see that the social sciences must begin to take this phenomenon into account, must reckon with the fact that the ordinary course of life demands nearly constant efforts to maintain or salvage situations that are falling into disarray by restoring them to order. In everyday life, people never completely suppress their anxieties, and, like scientists, ordinary people never stop suspecting, wondering, and submitting the world to tests.213

These French sociologists investigated the co-production of criteria of agreement aimed at reducing uncertainties at the level of classificatory practices (for example, the formation of equivalences in statistics) and at the political-moral level (compromise formation).214 This co-production presupposes the ability to assemble heterogeneous elements, ideas and objects in such a way that participants perceive them as arrangements that are stable enough to validate actions satisfactorily. What Boltanski and Thévenot conceptualised as a process of equivalence formation in conflicting action regimes is congruent with the concept of “intelligent action” in the work of Dewey. John R. Shook sums this up fittingly as follows: “To act intelligently is to be in possession of such a variety of habits appropriate for successfully conducting oneself in many different situations.”215 The success of the use of such “habits” is assessed in situations of uncertainty that, in the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, culminate in testing situations with an open outcome. The authors emphasise in On Justification that the concept of testing is not limited to the issue of co-ordinating

211

Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, p. 360. This is clearly reminiscent of William James’s theory of truth. 212 Boltanski and Thévenot: “The Sociology of Critical Capacity”, p. 364. 213 Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification, p. 37. 214 On the concept of compromise formation, see Knoll, Lisa: “Die Bewältigung wirtschaftlicher Unsicherheit. Zum Pragmatismus der Soziologie der Konventionen“, in: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 13/3–4 (2013), pp. 367–387. 215 Shook, John R.: Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press 2000, p. 179.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

207

action. Epistemologically, they place this concept in opposition to the cognitivism of the so-called “linguistic turns” and, instead, embrace a practice-theoretical realism.216 This “realism of actors” tallies with Dewey’s scepticism about purely discursive forms of testing, which he criticised for being one-sidedly rationalist. Thus, with a basic epistemological insight, namely, the productivity spawned by overcoming uncertain situations, as its micro-level point of departure, the pluralist epistemology in the work of both Dewey and Boltanski and Thévenot extends all the way into the field of democracy theory. The conviction shared by the three authors is thus: democratic societies draw their legitimacy from the fact that they are not closed systems, which is, in turn, a result of democracies’ processual character. They are always “in the making”. However, Boltanski especially is far more concrete than Dewey when it comes to the relationship between this procedural development of society and macrosocial transformations: should an existential test occur in the sense of a ‘trial of strength’, the uncertainty may take on a more radical form and agreement may be rendered impossible, as in the case of the use of violence.217 Yet, as with the establishment of a new societal structure (network), the test may also have macrostructural ramifications—as Boltanski and Ève Chiapello showed in light of the establishment of the “projective city” in the working world of the 1990s.218 Revisability: An Experimental Methodology But how can social research help render productive, or perhaps even do away with, the methodological schism between the description of the social and its critique, between positive and normative science? Reflection or intervention—which of these to privilege has always been a contentious matter within the history of sociology. Within the German-speaking world, this problem was intensified during certain periods as a result of the positivism dispute219 and then managed rather than dealt with through a division of labour between critical and descriptive sociologies. This approach has been perpetuated by the division—increasingly subject to criticism at present—between an empirically untested form of theory building, on the one hand, and an empirical social research that abstains from theorising, on the other. As reflected in the sociological experimentalism developed here, the sociology of critique makes it possible to challenge the polarisation inherent in these interpretive strategies and reassemble their various constitutive elements. To this end, I seek in what follows to fuse the heuristic of justificatory orders set out above with the sociological experimentalism developed in the present book. Exponents of the sociology of critique often associate the factual findings of the “sociological experimentation” facilitated by this model220 with the image of the laboratory.221 This is See Boltanski, Luc and Laurent Thévenot, “The Reality of Moral Expectations. A Sociology of Situated Judgment”, in: Philosophical Explorations 3 (2000), p. 212f. 217 See Boltanski, Love and Justice as Compentences. 218 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 103f. 219 See Ritsert, “Der Positivismus-Streit”. 220 Dodier, “Agir dans plusieurs monde”’, p. 448. 221 See ibid., p. 445f. and Dodier, “L’espace et le mouvement du sens critique”, p. 13f. 216

208

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

not only testimony to this approach’s early proximity to STS and ANT, but also holds out the prospect of direct compatibility with an experimentalist social theory that takes its inspiration from Dewey. From the perspective of the sociology of critique, controversies are a constitutive component of everyday disputes that operate to ensure the collective ratification of a given state of affairs. For Boltanski and Thévenot, drawing on studies of scientific controversies produced by STS, “endless disputes”222 facilitated a descriptivemethodological critique of Bourdieu’s critical sociology. The plurality of shared “beings” or even “goods” furnished them with a potential means of describing the ways in which actors orient their problem-solving action, endow this action with general relevance (‘worth’) and, thus, articulate forms of societal differentiation. Against this background, they were interested in the extent to which experimental action, which responds to and shapes the contingencies of complex environments, also necessitates an experimental methodology in the sense of socio-analysis. The shift between action regimes or justificatory orders that I identified above requires a more flexible mode of sociological reflection that is capable of responding appropriately to the experimental character of these transitions. While there is no direct reference to James here, we may interpret this as a sociological response to the pragmatists’ objective of supplanting a normative theory of truth backed up by an externalised observer’s perspective with a pluralist, descriptive and operational—in short, an experimental—model. Through the process of its empirical verification, this model can function as an instrument for finding truth rather than playing the role of the social-theoretical substrate of truth. The socio-theoretical model developed by Boltanski and Thévenot in On Justification rests on a simple idea, namely, the elaboration of the normative principles and the capacity for the co-ordination of contingent forms of practice on which critical action builds and to which it refers.223 Similar to Callon’s ANT heuristic and Dewey’s stages of inquiry, we can subdivide this approach into four stages. These four stages are, in turn, mutually compatible with the stage models presented by Dewey and Callon, though their emphases are different. Like the latter two models, rather than a linear development, they tend to describe a circular and processual one, which may vary depending on the empirical case at hand. Similar to them, these four stages are based on a symmetrical, pluralist and revisable investigative procedure and integrate the sociological constitution of objects into their empirical object. Finally, they do away with the micro-macro distinction by linking specific local controversies with general principles of justice as established within the conceptions of morality prevailing within Western societies.224 Boltanski and Thévenot model See Boltanski, Luc: “Endless Disputes. From Intimate Injuries to Public Denunciation”, Working Papers in Networks and Interpretation, Cornell University, Department of Sociology 96–2 (1996). 223 See Boltanski and Thévenot, “The Sociology of Critical Capacity”, p. 364. 224 Of course, we might wonder here about the principles involved in deviating from such conventions, that is, about the “anomic” justificatory orders. Boltanski and Thévenot mention in an article what they regard as a counterfactual case, in which, during an argument, one person retorts: “I don’t agree with you because I don’t like your face.” (Boltanski and Thévenot, ‘The Sociology of Critical 222

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

209

Table 4.3 The four experimental testing stages as envisaged by Dewey, Callon, and Boltanski and Thévenot Stage I II III IV

Dewey Determination of a problem Determining of a problem-solution Reasoning Operational character of facts-meanings

Callon/ANT Problematisation Enrolment Collectivization Mobilisation

Boltanski & Thévenot Moment of critique Equivalence formation Legitimisation Testing

the social-theoretical dimension of experimentalism by declaring that the principles of construction privileged by actors and collectives are the starting point of their model. In the sociology of critique, this model builds on the following four idealtypical steps: critique, equivalence formation, legitimisation and testing. The following overview reveals their analogies with the heuristics presented by Dewey and Callon (Table 4.3). As in the stage of problematisation described by Callon, the “moment of critique” (moments critiques) synthesizes the stages of “suggestion” and “determination of a problem” as defined in the work of Dewey. Here, in classic pragmatist fashion, this moment entails a disruption of the flow of experience (James) by an event that triggers reflection. In the sociology of critique, the event is the cause of critical reflection that is also manifested by critique itself. In contrast to the laboratory situation as envisaged by Dewey, the critical moment is, for the most part, a surprising event that is imposed on those involved from outside and triggers a controversy. What Bourdieu once called “practical sense” (sens pratique), becomes aware of itself here. Practical sense is unsettled and strives to clarify the situation. However, in contrast to Bourdieuvian practical sense, here it becomes a reality by means of reflection. This sense is articulated in the form of a critique of the situation. We are dealing with a broad concept of critique here; political critique is just one possible form of it. In Luhmann’s sense, participants suddenly become observers of the situation by evaluating it. Critique, then, simultaneously expresses an attempt to help change the situation. The next step, according to Boltanski and Thévenot, consists of the production of equivalence. It is clear that pure observation or discontent is not enough to change the critiqued situation in such a way as to open up new action options that might lead to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Typically, violence ends conflicts to the advantage of one party only, so it is excluded from the analytical frame. The controversy must be managed in such a way that those involved can come to an agreement with the least possible effort. To this end, they must invoke justificatory

Capacity’, p. 360). The authors exclude instances of violence from their analytical model because it departs from the principle of equivalence, so, such a response is considered counterfactual within the model of justificatory orders. But everyone knows that this very response, precisely because it exits the field of reference of justice, often heralds a switchover from the regime of justice to the regime of violence. It would be a worthwhile empirical endeavour to investigate the shift from the action regime of justice to the action regime of violence.

210

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

orders that can abstract from the local problem while, at the same time, lending it a certain ‘worth’, in other words, relevance, which gives the other participants an opportunity to invoke rival justificatory orders in turn. Actors can appeal to the action regime of justice, for example, via the justificatory orders of domesticity, the public sphere or the market, which imply loyalty, esteem and adventurism, respectively—the crucial thing is that these orders facilitate a shared verification of the situation, a process of verification that rests upon social conventions. In line with Dewey’s thinking, things and ideas are invoked in order to solve problems, things and ideas that, according to Callon, determine who and what can be ‘enrolled’, that is, integrated, into the formulation of a solution. According to Boltanski and Thévenot, the third stage, legitimisation, goes hand in hand with the collective modelling of perceptions of justice. It is at this stage that participating actors’ problem-solving competencies are accessed, as these actors order and stabilize the conflicting justificatory orders in accordance with their varying principles of justice. Callon refers here to assemblage or collectivization. Allies are recruited and this contributes, in a Deweyan sense, to the development of hypotheses, a process that makes the apt execution of the actual experiment—the test—possible in the first place. In the writings of Boltanski and Thévenot, these allies are composed of supporting elements of the justificatory orders, which also lead to the legitimisation of critical positions and the moment of critique as a whole. Finally, in the fourth stage, that of testing according to Boltanski and Thévenot, specific testing formats are put into practice, and these are intended to bring the controversy to an end. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, they initially call such testing formats “trials of strength” (épreuves de force).225 Boltanski distinguishes three testing formats in On Critique: so-called “truth tests”, “reality tests” and “existential tests”.226 Plural justificatory orders are evaluated in light of one another until a compromise is reached. Boltanski and Thévenot define the compromise as follows: “In a compromise, people maintain an intentional proclivity towards the common good by cooperating to keep present beings relevant in different worlds without trying to clarify the principle upon which their agreement is grounded.”227 The compromise, thus, represents a functional rather than a moral principle. It serves to provide closure, which facilitates a return to the habitual and familiar flow of action. Thus, as in Dewey’s work, the testing situation—the trial—already anticipates its future integration into actors’ accumulated stock of experience, based on which new ‘suggestions’, irritations and experiments are possible. The model of justificatory orders was motivated by the search for an interpretive option that combines the pluralist philosophy of Michael Walzer, which seeks to get to grips with the issues of justice and the common good, with sociological epistemic procedures. “In this way”, states Peter Wagner, “De la justification reconnects the

225 See Latour, Bruno: Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard: Harvard University Press 1987, p. 77f. 226 Boltanski, On Critique, p. 103f. 227 Boltanski and Thévenot, “The Sociology of Critical Capacity”, p. 374.

4.3 The Modi Operandi of Testing: Preparing, Trialling and Modelling

211

threads of political philosophy and theory of society, which became increasingly separate endeavours after they were pulled apart in the early nineteenth century.”228 Summary Drawing on the methodological premises of STS and ANT, as well as Bourdieu’s practice-theoretical critique of the construction of socio-cultural categories and taxonomies, the pragmatic sociology of critique has proposed a means of modelling the principle of symmetry. This sociology reaches beyond the microsociological case studies typical of ANT, in the sense that it concretizes the social-theoretical dimension of the de-hierarchization of researchers and researched through the model of justificatory orders. The question raised within Dewey’s theory of democracy regarding the preconditions and potential for the public ratification of societal problem-solving strategies is translated, in light of actors’ critical competencies, into the question of how the relevant epistemic factors are produced. In this model, revisability is ensured by the transitions between four testing stages that characterise the heuristic principle of this social theory: the moment of critique (1), equivalence formation (2), legitimisation (3) and testing (4). As in the work of Dewey and in ANT, this analytical model is not linear but processual, circular and pluralist, with the modus operandi of “modelling”, as pursued by the actors observed and collectives, taking centre stage within the investigation. Revisability is based on the uncertainty about the outcome of the controversy triggered by critique, but it is not synonymous with arbitrariness. The ability of actors and collectives to access, performatively activate and combine normative ideas of justice in order to stabilize critique rests upon finite conventional ordering principles. Because “critique” simultaneously serves to challenge traditional sociological ways of constituting objects (in other words, the supposed external vantage point of “critical sociologies”) and functions as an observational category to ascertain the specific competencies of actors, it becomes the lynchpin of ‘doing social theory’, an approach that rejects the idea of a privileged sociological observer’s standpoint. We can discern the aspiration to both analyse critical social forces and pool them practically for the purposes of social critique in Boltanski’s later call for a cartography of actors’ critical competencies: “Sociology achieves its objective when it provides a satisfactory picture of the social competences of actors.”229 This approach, then, like Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and ANT, facilitates the external description of sociological research, albeit in a very different way. It is a perspective that touches on a sore point within the German debate by enacting a radical break with the foundations of critical sociologies, which is probably why it has been received by German scholars so far with no more than moderate enthusiasm.

Wagner, Peter: “Soziologie der kritischen Urteilskraft und der Rechtfertigung. Die Politik- und Moralsoziologie um Luc Boltanski und Laurent Thévenot“, in: Moebius, Stephan and Lothar Peter (eds.): Französische Soziologie der Gegenwart, Konstanz: UVK 2004, p. 441. 229 Boltanski, Luc, On Critique, p. 103f. 228

212

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

At the same time, it is evident that Boltanski in particular has sought tirelessly to roll back this radical break. He began by historicising the justificatory orders through the introduction of the “project-based cité” together with Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. More than 20 years after the publication of On Justification, we can discern historical and political lacunae in the justificatory orders that it elaborates. Global entanglements and integration, for example, play no role and gender differences are relegated to the narrative of the “domestic” justificatory order. It is doubtful whether an expanded version of the justificatory orders could reproduce the rigour of the original model. Conversely, it was The New Spirit of Capitalism that laid bare the potential of this model to interpret the modern world, a model that in other ways drew directly and systematically on the sociology of critique.230 Certainly, the notion of the structural and non-violent transformative power of critique has been contested. But, at the same time, this idea highlights a genuine epistemic interest, particularly of the sociological experimentalism developed in the present book, an interest inherent in the social-theoretical modelling of actors’ critical competencies. This endeavour—in the sense of the experiment—remains ongoing and, from the perspective of social-theoretical experimentalism, provides a wide range of foundations on which to build: be it the study of evaluative formats (sociology of evaluation), the development of a heuristic for collaborative interdisciplinary research that explores societal crisis situations, or the study of controversies and conflicts at the local level and their interweaving at the global level. We, thus, have a socialtheoretical foundation for such research programmes. In addition, we can discern ways of exploring in this model, from a theory-of-society perspective, the field of social co-operation in particular, exploratory approaches that I address point by point in “test run III”.

4.4

Interim Conclusion: The Social Theory of Experimentalism

The social theory of experimentalism is derived from a combination of the Luhmann-inspired theory-of-science of sociology, ANT’s practice of “doing theory”, developed out of empirical research fields, and a sociology of testing and

230

In a retrospective, Boltanski underlines that The New Spirit of Capitalism was, in part, a response to the critique of the ahistoricity of the original model. See Boltanski, Luc: “Autour de De la justification. Un parcours dans le domaine de la sociologie morale”, in: Breviglieri, Marc, Claudette Lafaye and Dany Trom (eds.): Compétences critiques et sens de la justice, Paris: Economica 2009, p. 24. At present, the updated model would be of use in the analysis of right-wing social and cultural criticism, whose political success in the OECD countries indicates the normative limits of a one-sided concept of critique. See Boltanski, Luc: “Macht des ‚Volkes’. Die Krise des Liberalismus entfaltet nationale Affekte”, in: Die Zeit, 11 October 2012 http://www.zeit.de/2012/42/Essay-VolkKrise-Liberalismus, accessed 29 August 2021.

4.4 Interim Conclusion: The Social Theory of Experimentalism

213

critique, with the latter determining the theoretical prerequisites for ascertaining social actors’ problem-solving skills. The category of “testing”, which I have discussed in “Test Run II”, holds out the prospect of a social-theoretical architecture that ascribes testing to not only the observing sociologist but also the actors observed and phenomena. To this end, I identified three modi operandi, which reflect the culturalisation of the scientific experiment within three sociological programmes. Like every theoretical project, this classificatory schema came at the cost of certain analytical constraints since—in accordance with the processual and sequential character of experimentalism—each of the approaches discussed also integrates the other modi operandi. That these restrictions were necessary was shown by my interpretation of the principle of social-theoretical revisability, which could only be derived directly from the various modi operandi. At the end of this interim conclusion, it should become clear that it is revisability that underpins the specific characteristics of an experimentalist social theory. The three modi operandi in this test run were “preparing”, “trialling” and “modelling”. Each was linked with specific sociological research programmes, some of which have already been established as social theories (such as Niklas Luhmann’s theory of differentiation) and some of which have so far had a rather hazy social-theoretical status (such as STS and ANT, as well as the pragmatic sociology of critique). Before seeking to determine this status more precisely at the end of this interim conclusion, I recapitulate the most important features of the three modi operandi below (Fig. 4.7). I discussed the modus operandi of social-theoretical ‘preparing’—in the sense of orienting social theory in advance for the purpose of its external description—in light of the congruence between Luhmann’s evolutionary theory and Dewey’s experimentalism. I explained the social-theoretical significance of this process from the perspective of sociological experimentalism on the premise that the two aspects of this experimentalism, as social trope and investigative strategy, must both be borne in mind at the theoretical level. What does it mean if the sociological observer, as Luhmann emphasised, no longer makes theoretical observations from an external and ultimately privileged position and, thus, gives up sociological claims to authority? I implemented the “self-reference test” that Luhmann called for instead, with the help of the circular sequence of “variation”, “selection” and “restabilization” in analogy to Dewey’s experimentalism, in which “experience”, “testing” and “co-operation” function as self-referential categories that concurrently mark transitions between observation and object constitution. Luhmann’s contribution emphasises the possibility of and the necessity for a theory-of-science of Fig. 4.7 The modi operandi of testing

Testing

preparing

trialling

modelling

214

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

sociology that is always ready to apply the process of ‘testing’ to itself. Since Luhmann has furnished us with such a theory-of-science of sociology, we can switch from the modus operandi of “preparing” an experimentalist social theory to the modus operandi of ‘testing’ social theories, which I discussed here in terms of the pragmatist methodology in STS and ANT. With reference to STS and its methodology, I presented the modus operandi of “testing” social theories as “doing theory”. The empirical testing of existing social theories is not at issue here, but empirical test situations which are generated by experimental arrangements and act as a stimulus to sociological theorising. As Callon, Latour and Law made clear, the decisive factor here is not theoretical categories but a specific heuristic that allows us to understand social theories as effects of the reassembling of human and non-human participants in experimental situations (in the laboratory) or in light of controversies (inside and outside the laboratory). The precept of symmetry implicitly follows on from Luhmann’s rejection of traditional social theories’ claims to authority and puts this rejection into practice through a specifically empirical realism of social contingency. The concept of the event, as coined by James, marks not so much a specific notability (as implied in the concept of scientific “discovery”) as a sequential, temporal moment in both natural scientific and sociological research in the “trialling” found in both historical and contemporary science and technology research, and in the work of Dewey and Luhmann. The symmetrical heuristic developed by ANT, thus, realised Dewey’s goal of understanding testing situations as a call for the re-evaluation of existing “habits” and linking these testing situations to an independent logic of empirical research. Drawing on the French pragmatic sociology of critique and deploying the analytical model of a diverse range of actor competencies, I both concretized and generalised social testing situations in light of the modus operandi of “modelling”. In the context of experimentalist social theory, then, ‘modelling’ refers to the ability to reconfigure trialling or testing situations in specific ways and the potential to do so. The action regime of “justice” versus “appropriateness”, initially examined by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, provided the starting point for a sociology of actors’ critical capacities, which could not evidently be captured either from a privileged external sociological point of view or with the associated categorical distinctions. Actors model test situations with impressive skill by continuing to account for matters of justice in light of their ability to invoke, evaluate and compare plural justificatory orders. At the same time, the model of justificatory orders itself proved to be expandable and modifiable when it came to providing rationales for a new justificatory social order, one induced by structural changes in the world of work, in light once again of actors’ critical capacities. Testing situations operationalise experiential differences. From a social theoretical point of view, then, it is vital to ensure that potential new definitions—both regarding the object examined and the researcher’s experience of reflection—can be anticipated and preparations made for future changes. The resulting principle of the revisability of experimentalist social theories, thus, designates a normative and prescriptive criterion. However, tests are always interventions as well. Despite

4.4 Interim Conclusion: The Social Theory of Experimentalism

215

their differences, the three sociologies discussed earlier all adhere to the principle of revisability. This principle builds on the combination of analytical and methodological decisions that flow into reflective and research experiences. In line with this, social theory itself is always on trial as well, in the sense that it prepares itself—from a theory-of-science perspective—for its external description, which it integrates heuristically. Following Dewey, revisability is also based on the premise that processual (perhaps even cumulative) theory development must not exclude theoretical closure. The possibility of external description must be associated with a determinate purpose, just as the assembling and symmetrization of experimental research arrangements is finite because it is linked to a specific question. The number of possible justificatory orders used to model a solution to a problem should also be limited in order to ensure analytical correlativity. At the same time, the experiment may be broken off or interrupted at any point and time, or it may be started again from the beginning. Tests mediate between reflective and structuring practices. Accordingly, they substantiate revisable social theories, which form the starting point for a new round of “doing theory”. When it came to describing the permanentisation of irritants within structures, Luhmann referred not to revisability but to recursivity. He was far more stringent in his argument than Dewey, and sought to unite within a single level of analysis the insight into indeterminacy and contingency, as found in evolutionary theory, with its operational processing and temporal closure. Hence, explicit recourse to previous events, as typical of the natural sciences, lays the ground for a new (theoretical) operation. Variation, selection and restabilization only work because of the presence of recursivity. Precisely the same may be said of the category of testing in experimentalism. It is based on the principle of revisability, in that it ensures its own testability and, thus, facilitates continuity between the social trope observed and the constitution of sociological objects. Uncertainty, insecurity and disorder are not understood as a rejection of each and every scientific statement, but are the normative starting point, and (always provisional) endpoint, of theory development. The ANT has further developed the criterion of revisability by sketching out an experimental research heuristic. Inherent in the very concept of the “sociology of translation” is the theoretical postulate of interaction between the constitution of research and that of objects, which are integrated symmetrically both regarding the actor-specific relationship with a given problem and sociological theorising. Uncertainty is also the state of being that is paradigmatic of ANT itself. The ANT’s particular challenge lies in the question of whether, and if so to what extent, the performative processing of uncertainty is bound to prevent closure, particularly at the level of social theory. On the other hand, ANT can hardly, and ought not to, refuse to engage in the project of experimentalist theory development, because this is particularly apt, through the criterion of revisability, to make rational claims to knowledge perceptible, as Donna Haraway put it. The pragmatic sociology of critique and particularly the concept of “testing” represent a social-theoretical concretization of the revisable analytical strategy developed by Dewey. In the latter’s work too, radical uncertainty is made the starting point for theory building. Hence, it is not the grammar of justificatory orders that is

216

4 Test Run II: What Is Testing? Social-Theoretical Effects of Experimentalism

decisive but the way in which these are experimentally produced, stabilized, tested and criticised: “We can therefore more or less link to the spirit of pragmatism the way in which the sociology of critique undertook to describe the social world as the scene of a trial, in the course of which actors in a situation of uncertainty proceed to investigations, record their interpretations of what happens in reports, establish qualifications and submit to tests.”231 The sociology of critique can, thus, be understood as a social-theoretical laboratory in which Dewey’s experimentalism is used to sociological ends and, at the same time, subjected to constant testing by critical actors. In light of the three programmes, I brought out the distinguishing features of an experimentalist social theory. The paradigm of cultural experimentalism, which became established in the context of science and technology research, expanded the concept of the experiment, taking it from the laboratory to the level of general exploration and analysis of the environment and problem-solving. The latter are also the empirical prerequisites for an exploratory form of theory development in the social theory of experimentalism. Despite his abstinence from empirical studies, Luhmann would have accepted this from a social-theoretical point of view, since, like Dewey, his arguments were informed by evolutionary theory. In this respect, when it comes to the preparation of social theory for the purpose of its external description, whether this preparation is empirical-exploratory or has been built into the theoretical architecture is a secondary matter. The key question that arises from an experimentalist perspective is: How can such a theory-of-science of sociology ensure social-theoretical revisability in such a way that surprises (within the framework of the experiment) are still possible at all? And where else should such surprises come from if not from an environment that usually registers its claims to relevance at the level of empirical reality? However, this criticism highlighting the need for a theory-of-science of sociology will remain secondary as long as the “doing theory” characteristic of the sociologies of translation, testing and critique not only allows for but proactively facilitates their theorisability. For the time being, it seems fair to say that we have gained a clear sense of the social-theoretical interpretive potential of the category of “testing”. The category of “testing” at the heuristic level stimulates the productive processing of experiential differences, which I discuss in “Test Run III” below in light of the category of “co-operation”. This brings us to the theory-of-society dimension of sociological experimentalism.

231

Boltanski, On Critique, p. 25, original emphasis.

Chapter 5

Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a Contribution to a Critical Social Ecology

Co-operation [. . .] needs to be developed and deepened. This is particularly true when we are dealing with people unlike ourselves; with them, co-operation becomes a demanding effort.—Richard Sennett, 20121

5.1

Epistemic Downpours and Fair-Weather Theories

John Dewey described co-operation as a way for society to deal with experiential differences generated by specific crisis or testing situations. On this basis, I have defined co-operation as a theory-of-society category of sociological experimentalism, a category that embodies the principle of a capacity for structuration. In our so-called late modern present, we are confronted by a wide range of crises that induce experiential differences and, thus, require co-operative action. This is the basis for Richard Sennett’s thesis that we need to understand co-operation as a complex and demanding undertaking that, contrary to traditional notions of co-operation, demands the establishment of connections between people who are not of like mind.2 In view of the production of new epistemic objects, particularly in the fields of environment, technology and the public sphere, as well as global political conflicts, such new types of societal co-operation seem particularly imperative. Hence, following on from the epistemological and social-theoretical dimensions, I now elaborate the theory-of-society dimension of sociological experimentalism. The generation of new research objects can be traced back to veritable ‘epistemic downpours’ triggered by the interplay of the geopolitical, ecological, scientific and technological transformations over the past 40 years: the end of state socialism and 1

Sennett, Richard: Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation, London: Penguin 2012, p. ix. 2 See Sennett, Together, p. 7f. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2_5

217

218

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

the Cold War, heralded by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the rapid spread of digital communication since the early 1990s, the establishment of molecular biology and genetic engineering, the consequences of modern industrialisation and the domestication of nature, as manifested in technological disasters and the global ecological crisis; the worldwide “war on terror” launched after the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the undeniable persistence of decades-long wars in many parts of the world, and, finally, the recent migration and financial crises. All of these events and their interrelationships have left their mark on the development of contemporary social theories and theories of society. The so-called “interpretative turn” of the 1990s made a social and societal analysis more focused on actors’ competencies acceptable in the German-speaking academy as elsewhere. Finally, post-colonial theories of society have found their way into the German debate, triggering critical reflection on the Eurocentric foundations of social scientific epistemologies. Technological developments and their integration into the body and everyday social life have given science and technology research an enormous boost. In Germany, as elsewhere, STS has blossomed from a marginal subfield into an innovative and promising social scientific undertaking that is increasingly co-operating with the natural and life sciences and engineering. Analyses of society that seek to illuminate the present era are now flanked by studies entailing explicit reference to practice and empirical reality, as evident in the so-called “cultural”, “practice” and “pragmatic” turns. In line with the interpretive shift, ethnographic experiential knowledge is increasingly being integrated into major research programmes. It has become more self-evident for qualitative research methods to be taught and utilised on a near-equal footing with statistics. All these observations are compatible with the social scientific experimentalism developed here, in the sense that they confirm its central principles of reflexivity, revisability and capacity for structuration. Globalisation, in particular, forces us to confront the limits of traditional forms of knowledge, including within theories of society, whose Occidental constraints are becoming plainly apparent. This applies not only to the barely concealed claims to universality of many Western theories of society, which have been successfully challenged by social and cultural anthropology and post-colonial theories. It also applies to what Gesa Lindemann has called the “fair-weather theories” of European-North American provenance. According to Lindemann, these theories are “ill-suited to capturing the social reality of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which is characterized by excesses of violence”.3 Yet, Durkheim himself described anomie—including crimes and physical violence—as a constitutive characteristic of social development.4 Norbert Elias supported Durkheim’s ideas against Robert Merton’s assumption that deviant behaviour was essentially a form of ‘social chaos’: “If its use in Durkheim’s study of suicide means anything, it means that ‘anomie’ is a specific type of social structure,

3 Lindemann, Gesa: Weltzugänge. Die mehrdimensionale Ordnung des Sozialen, Weilerswist: Velbrück 2014, p. 16. 4 See Durkheim, Émile: Suicide. A Study in Sociology, London: The Free Press 1951, p. 350f.

5.1 Epistemic Downpours and Fair-Weather Theories

219

not its opposite pole in a continuum of social phenomena.”5 From Lindemann’s perspective, sociology’s silence about violence would also apply to the pragmatic French sociology of critique presented in “Test Run II”. However, Luc Boltanski has dealt with the action regime of violence in no less than two studies,6 while other former members of the GSPM such as Elisabeth Claverie and Francis Chateauraynaud, have investigated violence with reference to the Yugoslav Wars and their treatment at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague,7 as well as through the sociology of risk and conflict.8 Finally, Hans Joas’s attempt to elucidate whether “human rights are Western” must be mentioned as a line of research beholden to the tradition of pragmatism that addresses the controversial and violent character of Western political history explicitly.9 But regardless of whether pragmatist social theories and theories of society always deserve this “fair-weather” label, historically or individually, Lindemann’s critique provides a useful jumping-off point from the perspective of an experimentalist theory-of-society of co-operation. Her analysis recalls a reservation often expressed about pragmatism, namely, that it has failed to face up to the problematic aspects of modernity and put forward an overly optimistic, if not naive, theory of the social. “Critical theories” in particular always raise this objection when pragmatist sociologies’ rejection of universalist and a priori postulates becomes particularly obvious. It, thus, seems advisable to clarify in advance, in a chapter on social co-operation, whether the present theoretical proposal is yet another “fair-weather theory” that fails to adequately acknowledge the aporias inherent in the societal transformations outlined above. In fact, pragmatism—and this is even more true of Dewey’s democratic experimentalism—sought to illuminate what enables actors to respond competently, while preserving their dignity as persons, to societal problems in the narrow and broad sense and to solve them where possible. For Dewey, however, the need for problemsolving never implied any kind of whitewashing. It is, after all, astonishing and impressive that actors enable themselves and others to structure their lives, ensure their survival, organise an everyday existence and articulate criticism even in the

5

Elias, Norbert and John L. Scotson: The Established and the Outsiders. A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems, London: Sage 1994, p. 177, and Bogusz, Tanja (2007): Institution und Utopie, p. 47f. 6 See Boltanski, Love and Justice as Competences, and Boltanski, Luc: Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999. 7 See Claverie, Elisabeth: “La Violence, le procès, et la Justification”, in: Breviglieri, Marc, Claudette Lafaye and Dany Trom (eds.): Compétences critiques et sens de la justice, Actes du Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, Economica 2009, p. 107–123. 8 See Chateauraynaud, Francis: La faute professionnelle. Une sociologie des conflits de responsabilité, Paris: Métailié 1991. 9 See Joas, Hans: Sind die Menschenrechte westlich? Munich: Kösel 2016.

220

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

most complicated and dramatic situations.10 Based on her studies of wartime and post-war society in Angola, Teresa Koloma-Beck observed alternating regimes of action that the war fed into people’s everyday lives: “[T]he alterations can be best understood in terms of adaptation, as conceived by Dewey; they are modifications attempting to change the environment in a way so as to preserve existing behavioural, cognitive and perceptual patterns. [. . .] Put differently, they were intended to preserve agency under the conditions of civil war.”11 Here, it becomes clear how the experimentalist approach can be used to examine not violence as such, but how it is dealt with as a function of actor competencies. In this way, the social theoretical and theory-of-society gaze is directed away from sometimes simplistic perpetrator–victim dichotomies towards actors’ endeavours to preserve “agency”, in other words, the capacity for action—an issue that was pursued by Dewey as well as the pragmatic sociology of critique and Sennett’s analyses of co-operation. Given the normalising character of routinized, long-lasting civil wars, according to Koloma-Beck, violence cannot, in fact, be considered an exceptional state: “[T]he most salient feature of civil wars is their systematic expansion in the sphere of everyday life.”12 Like the co-operation on which this chapter will focus, violence is characterised not only by destruction but also by the capacity for social structuration: “Looking beyond deconstruction, war appears also as a productive process, not only as consumptive, but also as creative. Rather than simply destroying the structures in place, war modifies them, transforms them in an often stealthy process.”13 Conversely, from this perspective, co-operation would be one way of responding to experiential differences or disjunctures. Violence would be another possibility, as envisaged by Durkheim, Elias and Koloma-Beck. It would represent another structural type of action, though not one located outside the social, as the following diagram illustrates (Fig. 5.1). Grappling with co-operation from a theory-of-society perspective, then, does not mean excluding violence. There is, in fact, a symmetry between co-operation and violence since both play potentially the same role within theories of society. Just as violence has a structuring effect on everyday social organisation in societies undergoing civil war, co-operation also entails a capacity for societal structuration.

10

See also Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb: The Hidden Injuries of Class, New York: Knopf 1972. 11 Koloma-Beck, Teresa: The Normality of Civil War. Armed Groups and Everyday Life in Angola, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus 2012, p. 124. 12 Ibid., p. 57. 13 Ibid., p. 57. Through the concept of “violence competition” and with reference to IS, KolomaBeck has developed this idea further in collaboration with Tobias Verron. See Koloma Beck, Teresa and Tobias Werron 2018: “Violent Conflictition. Armed Conflicts and Global Competition for Attention and Legitimacy” in: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 31/3 (2018): 275–296.

5.2 Co-operation as a Response to Experiential Differences: Entangled. . . Fig. 5.1 Structural symmetry between cooperation and violence

221

a) Crisis

b) Experiential differences

c1) Co-operation

c2) Violence

Both violence and co-operation, thus, imply a specifically socioecological perspective on society, one characterised by contextuality and co-textuality.14 I have already discussed the concept of social ecology in “Test Run I” in connection with the Chicago School of Sociology. Dewey’s socio-ecological concept of co-operation was shaped by the theory of evolution and assumed that co-operation is a pervasive phenomenon in nature and society. The Chicago School applied his experimentalist conception of society, which privileged the creative adaptability of individuals and collectives, to the field of urban research. Here, the concept of social ecology was understood as the spatial-material structuring of the relationships of continuity between acting and thinking. It is this socio-ecological structuring capacity characteristic of co-operation that I examine in what follows in light of Philippe Descola’s anthropology of nature, recent studies on political participation in STS and collaborative biodiversity research among marine biologists. I bring out the potential contributions of all three to an experimentalist theory of society. Having hopefully made it clear that neither experimentalism nor pragmatism suppresses the dark sides of modernity, bearing in mind the violence it so often produces, I now briefly explain how the programmes discussed in this test run can enrich the analysis of the present era.

5.2

Co-operation as a Response to Experiential Differences: Entangled Modernity, the Environment and the Public Sphere

In 1986, the environmental and technological disasters of the late twentieth century prompted Ulrich Beck to describe late modern society—which he also called the second modern age—as a “risk society”. Wolfgang Krohn and Johannes Weyer took

14

See Beck, Stefan: Umgang mit Technik, p. 341f.

222

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

up Beck’s ideas by referring to “society as a laboratory”, their key goal here being to shed light on the “genesis of risks through scientific research”.15 This fusion of science, technology and society in German-speaking sociology was facilitated in a significant part by a public sphere declaring these risks scandalous and that triggered the emergence of a massive and influential environmental movement in West Germany. Within the late modern public sphere, the convergence of the technological and ecological crises led to a fundamentally different experience of modernity, as Beck explains: “There is no need to add anything to the horrific panorama of a selfendangering civilization that has already been sufficiently developed in all sectors of the opinion market. The same applies to the manifestations of a “new perplexity” which has lost the organizing dichotomies of an industrial world that was “intact” even in its antagonisms.”16 As Beck sees it, this difference in experience led inevitably to a new concept of modernity: “We are therefore concerned no longer exclusively with making nature useful, or with releasing mankind from traditional constraints, but also and essentially with problems resulting from techno-economic development itself. Modernisation is becoming reflexive; it is becoming its own theme.”17 Influenced by the Chernobyl disaster, he states: “The downside of socialized nature is the socialization of the destruction of nature, the transformation of this destruction into threats to social, economic and political systems in a highly industrialized global society.”18 From the perspective of sociological experimentalism, we can understand this socialisation of the ecological and technological crises, which Beck derived from the inevitably universal side effects of industrial modernity, as the starting point for a historically situated experiential difference, to which critical social movements and other actors have responded with co-operation (and violence). This has prompted theories of society that uphold the socioecological continuity between acting and thinking, as expounded by Dewey, to posit the transformation of modern social ecologies. In addition to Ulrich Beck, we might mention Richard Sennett, Philippe Descola, post-colonial studies, and recent work in STS as key sources of inspiration for the associated attempt to scrutinize global interdependencies, which are particularly significant in the context of the ecological crisis. The resulting concept of co-operation—as a response to this crisis—implies a criticism of the modern social ecology, which, as Sennett notes, is “‘de-skilling’ people in practising cooperation”, such that we “are losing the skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work”—co-operation, it should be noted, as a coalition of socially, economically and culturally heterogeneous actors.19 This includes a critique of the misguided academic division of labour between sociology and social or cultural anthropology, something post-colonial theory has frequently

Krohn and Weyer, “Gesellschaft als Labor”, p. 350. Beck, Rikogesellschaft [German foreword: “Aus gegebenem Anlass”], p. 10. 17 Beck, Ulrich: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage Publications 1992, p. 19. 18 Ibid., p. 10. 19 See Sennett, Together, p. 7. 15 16

5.2 Co-operation as a Response to Experiential Differences: Entangled. . .

223

highlighted. According to Shalini Randeria, this division of labour is still based on a modern concept of society that ignores the fact that “modernity as a social experience [...] has long since been global, even if, as idea and category, its roots lie in Western history”.20 In the narrower sense, this division of labour has led to the “disciplining of colonial relations”, with sociology being responsible for Western societies and cultural or social anthropology for “the rest”.21 With Randeria, I advocate “the pursuit of a mutual opening of the boundaries between sociology and sociocultural anthropology that goes beyond a partial and functionally determined interdisciplinarity, which tends to reinforce these boundaries”.22 Randeria, thus, extends Beck’s theorem of the risk society to post-colonial societies. In the context of colonial history, the “risk society” is, in fact, equated to a history of terror.23 This political-historical extension of the concept of modernity is also evident in STS when we consider the theory-of-society benefits of linking sociology and anthropology in light of the concept of co-operation. Here, once again, the complementarity of social trope and investigative strategy inherent in experimentalism, which I elucidated earlier regarding the categories of “experience” and “testing”, comes into play. Dewey designed his democratic experimentalism, from which the concept of co-operation presented here is derived, to be holistic—the point of departure being his call, articulated in 1925 in Experience and Nature, for the integration of anthropology into philosophy. Here, according to Dewey, anthropology has “the task of analytic dismemberment and synthetic reconstruction of experience”.24 In her study of the global networks generated by the Japanese matsutake mushroom, social anthropologist Anna Tsing asks to what extent a holistic approach to the co-operative relationships arising from these networks can integrate non-Western structuring principles. She refers to “colonial taxonomies”, with which she contrasts non-Western forms of “worlding”, which she believes have been suppressed in STS and ANT. In the post-colonial situation, the ahistorical concept of translation is inevitably endowed with history and context. But the concept of co-operation also needs to be sharpened here. We cannot shed light on who co-operates with whom and to what end without considering politically determined asymmetries. Hence, many researchers within anthropologically informed STS refer not to co-operation but to collaboration. The concept of collaboration elaborates Sennett’s notion of co-operation based on difference by specifying how people co-operate. While Sennett’s concept of co-operation leaves open the question of whether the problem

Randeria, “Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie”, p. 374. On the project of socialist modernity, see Bogusz, Institution und Utopie, p. 71f. 21 See Hall, Stuart: “The West and the Rest. Discourse and Power”, in: Hall, Stuart and Bram Gieben (eds.): Formations of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press 1992, p. 275–320. 22 Randeria, “Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie” p. 376. 23 Ibid., p. 379. 24 Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 40. 20

224

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

that has brought the participants together has been defined in advance by a certain group, the modus operandi of collaboration emphasises a collective problem-finding process. This becomes particularly important if there is a high degree of socioeconomic diversity among participants, as is especially the case in post-colonial contexts marked by geopolitical power imbalances. I also understand heterogeneous co-operation as a key to inter- and transdisciplinarity, which have become indispensable in the wake of the transformations outlined above. This insight rose to prominence as a result of the debate launched by Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons on “mode-2 sociology”. These authors see an increased need for co-operation not only across disciplinary boundaries but especially in light of the co-operative goals of a non-disciplinary nature.25 For relevant parts of STS, this generates the need to bring its “interactional expertise” (Collins and Evans) into the development of science and technology. For Brian Wynne, “unruly technologies” and the alarming recurrence of technological disasters should not lead to a view of practices that deviate from the rules as exceptions, “human error” or singular phenomena, but should, instead, prompt engineers and social scientists to co-operate to make these practices an integral part of the development and control of science and technology. Sheila Jasanoff has long been calling for STS to intervene in public issues, implicitly echoing Dewey’s democratic experimentalism. Such implicit updatings of Dewey’s theory of inquiry can often be observed in STS. Georgina Born and Andrew Barry, for example, emphasise in their book Interdisciplinarity, with reference to environmental research: “In this account, environmental research does not confront an external nature or a given set of problems, but itself contributes to the problematisation of the environment. [. . .] [T]he practice of environmental research is understood as animated by and as entering into the ongoing formation and re-formation both of environmental problems and their publics.”26 This discussion indicates two kinds of symptomatic challenges that are only ostensibly methodological in nature. When it comes to interdisciplinary co-operation, the first question that arises is how we might forge productive links between disciplines in terms of epistemology, disciplinary history and methodology. Differentiation within academic disciplines means that specific epistemic styles may even be more compatible across disciplines than within them. Sociological statisticians, for example, often work better with computer scientists than with social theorists. Ethnographers probably find it easier to access the world of marine biologists because, as field researchers, they are more used to travelling and immersing themselves in unfamiliar societies than their more armchair-based colleagues with their social philosophies. By the same token, marine biologists who “go into the field” feel greater affinity with ethnographers than with those of their colleagues focused on theoretical biology, and so on. Such interdisciplinary elective affinities

25

See Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons: Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, London: Polity 2001. 26 Barry and Born, “Interdisciplinarity”, p. 26.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

225

hold out good prospects of solving transdisciplinary problems, but they are still a long way from being systematically translated into research practice. Secondly, the integration of the public sphere and evaluations of what contribution it might make to problem-solving remain a controversial topic. This applies particularly to the role of expertise and evaluation, which was the subject of a contentious debate between Dewey and Lippman, and to the question of which participants ought to be granted a political say. Noortje Marres calls for a consistent implementation of STS’s principle of symmetry when it comes to the study of the public sphere and for integration of the material requirements for and objects of participation.27 And, as we will see when we consider Descola’s cosmopolitan anthropology of nature, in the global context, it is only by radically questioning the Western understanding of politics that we can resolve the issue of who gets to make their voice heard epistemically. These challenges have theory-of-society implications because they open up ways of structuring experiential differences that we can capture through an appropriately informed concept of co-operation. In this test run, entangled modernities, the environment and the public sphere constitute the empirical fields that allow us to investigate how we might bring “cooperation” up to date in theory-of-society terms by drawing on Dewey’s experimentalism. In what follows, I discuss the modi operandi of co-operation and the criterion of a capacity for structuration in light of two research programmes and an ethnographic study. I elucidate the modus operandi of “criticising” through Philippe Descola’s anthropology of nature, which I refer to as “critical social ecology”. I shed light on the modus operandi of “participating” in the solving of public problems by examining more recent programmes in STS. Finally, I illuminate the modus operandi of “collaboration” with reference to my ethnography of a marine biology expedition that took place on the northern Pacific coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 2012.

5.3

The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and Collaborating

So far, based on Dewey’s ideas about democratic experimentalism, we have determined that co-operation, in the sense examined here, denotes a possible consequence of experiential differences that arise from crisis and testing situations. However, this tells us little about the theory-of-society content of co-operation. Its theory-ofsociety rationale, as I argued in Chap. 2, is based on the assumption that co-operation contributes to the structuring and stabilization of publicly relevant collectives, types of action and organisational formats. This can be derived from Dewey’s concept of the public. As he emphasised, publics always arise where other organisations, such as the state, are absent or overwhelmed. This entails the practical 27

See Marres, Material Participation.

226

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

manifestation of problem constellations that are articulated through the creation of new infrastructures and, in light of which, possible solutions are anticipated. Depending on their interpretations and normative motives, authors advocate an essentially homogeneous or heterogeneous concept of co-operation. While, for some (such as Hartmut Esser), shared norms, values and goals are the basic prerequisite for co-operation, others (such as Richard Sennett) champion a contingent and socio-culturally determined, heterogeneous concept of co-operation. What both concepts have in common is that they determine in advance who or what enables co-operation. Another—and, I believe, more pragmatist—possibility is to sound out the theory-of-society scope of co-operation not by identifying those involved in it but by determining its effects. I did this earlier in my discussion of Dewey with reference to the criterion of a capacity for structuration. Hence, co-operation attains the status of a theory-of-society category if it can be shown that its analytical use contributes to the structuring of observed facts, which can also be rendered empirically plausible or proven. The advantage of shifting our criterion from the question “Who is involved in co-operation?” towards the effects of co-operation is plainly apparent: it facilitates a broad concept of co-operation capable of integrating both homogeneous and heterogeneous coalitions as well as non-human contributors. In this section, then, I place greater emphasis on heterogeneous forms of co-operation. This, of course, makes the question of what a capacity for structuration means at the theory-of-society level even more important. I presented in “Test Run II” the principle of a “capacity for structuration” regarding co-operation, derived from the work of Dewey, as analogous to Luhmann’s concept of “(re)structuring” in order to clarify the evolutionary notion, shared by both authors, of the processual character of social development. Dewey elucidates his concept of structure in Experience and Nature: “The fact is that all structure is structure of something; anything defined as structure is a character of events, not something intrinsic and per se. [. . .] Structure is constancy of means, of things used for consequences, not of things taken by themselves or absolutely. Structure is what makes construction possible and cannot be discovered or defined except in some realised construction, construction being, of course, an evident order of changes.”28 Dewey sought to identify an evolutionary rationale for his democratic experimentalism, close here to Durkheim’s dynamic concept of structure, and formulated a concept of the public as a decisive factor in social development. In contrast to Walter Lippmann, Dewey distrusted any normative framing of the structuring process, for example, by experts. Instead, he put his faith in a public characterised by its capacity for critique and willingness to participate in order to solve public problems. Criticising Current social crises, which, as Sennett emphasises, are characterised by a lack of capacity for co-operation, point to the need to focus our theory-of-society reflections

28

Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 72.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

227

on co-operation between those who are not of like mind or on a range of different participants—including non-human entities. This is bound up with a shift in the concept of critique. It will be clear from what I have said so far that the concept of critique in experimentalism is quite different in nature from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School as it rejects the latter’s normative and a priori postulates. Instead, critique is given an empirical cast as in French neopragmatism and STS, and is declared a phenomenon that is also socially observable (for example, by a sociology of critical publics), while also being inherent in every scientific and, thus, sociological investigative procedure. This does not mean that the effects of social scientific investigations cannot be translated into normative critical positions, nor that the revision of established knowledge can be no more than the base, bread-and-butter routine of social scientific activity. Dewey always emphasised that the critique of knowledge is chiefly intended as a “critique of prejudices”.29 He saw this critique as an insight-generating unsettling of habits: the “intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us”.30 According to Dewey in The Public and Its Problems, the critical examination of existing facts can provide an opportunity for political decisions that form the basis for experimental working hypotheses.31 Such a broad concept of critique requires a correspondingly broad concept of co-operation, which I have already discussed. Sennett’s proposed expansion of the concept of critique is important here. He positions his concept of co-operation explicitly in contrast to the concept of solidarity, as used not only in the labour movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by the political left for many decades but also as a leading notion in classical sociology. According to Sennett, the problem with the concept of solidarity is its limitation to members of an economically, culturally and socially equal group. This may have served a purpose historically (and is still relevant regarding certain social conflicts). But Sennett sees the challenge and task of the present as lying in co-operation between heterogeneous actors. He regards this as the only meaningful antidote to social segregation and exclusion, which are among the most pressing problems of globalised societies. Those who continue to refer to the concept of solidarity cannot resolve the problem of poor social cohesion by pointing to the strengthening of comparatively homogeneous social contexts. On the contrary, these intensify boundaries, exclusion and polarisation. In addition, invigorated conservative and far-right forces in Europe and the US have also built on the principle of solidarity, as derived from national identities. This strategy makes it clear that neither “critique” nor “solidarity” denotes politically unambiguous practices. Their analytical one-sidedness can be overcome through new assemblages of heterogeneous participants who are defined through the structural effects of their co-operation, that is, whose definition is based neither on

29

Ibid., S. 37. Ibid. 31 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 203. 30

228

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

intrinsic attributes, such as affiliation to a class or social stratum, nor on the hubris of an affect-laden national identity. This is one of the great challenges of the twentyfirst century: how might we enable social co-operation that crosscuts the traditional political ideas about collectives that have shaped our thinking so far?32 And how might we cut across these ideas about collectivity in such a way that, rather than giving rise to more islands of “critical” Western-style thinking, they generate new forms of heterogeneous social co-operation in global societies that open themselves to the unsettling of familiar ways of thinking?33 It is in this spirit that I discuss the experimentalist modus operandi of “criticising” in “Test Run III” with reference to Philippe Descola’s cosmopolitan social ecology. Descola’s anthropological theory of globally distributed nature–culture relationships is distinguished by the fact that he does not put forward a critique of Occidental naturalism per se—as critical theories would do. Instead, his symmetrical anthropology works to critically contextualize and localise the supposed universalism that has always been inherent in the Western separation of nature and culture in the modern era. Descola’s work unsettles customary methods of classification powerfully. By virtue of his analysis, which builds on structuralism while simultaneously criticising it, he lays the foundation for enhancing co-operation with non-Western and non-human collectives in order to combat the ecological crisis. This project is being carried forward and transferred to the political and public realms through the “critical reconstitution of certain conceptualizations of non-modern societies” that he has been pursuing in his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris.34 Without using the term co-operation, Descola, like Sennett, implicitly emphasises the friction-prone and conflictual nature of co-operation when it comes to the global reorganisation of human–nature relationships. As a social and cultural anthropologist, he provides a corresponding analytical framework that assumes that these relationships themselves have a structuring effect on the development of societies. He goes so far as to assert that these relationships’ capacity for ontological structuration is more relevant than their capacity to structure society. Thus, engaging with Descola’s work also allows us to overcome the division of labour between sociology and anthropology, as criticised by Randeria. Participating In Dewey’s reading, a short definition of co-operation is integration of the environment. This became particularly clear in the contemporary “settlement” movement in the US, as exemplified by the Hampton and Tuskegee institutes founded by Booker

32

See Latour, Bruno: Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime, London: Polity 2018. On the post-colonial critique of Western feminist universalism, see, for example, Spivak, Gayatri: “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in: Williams, Patrick and Laura Grisman (eds.): Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1994, p. 66–111. 34 See Descola’s lectures “Les usages de la terre. Cosmopolitiques de la territorialité”, https://www. college-de-france.fr/site/philippe-descola/course-2016-03-02-14h00.htm, accessed 30 August 2021. 33

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

229

T. Washington, and Hull House, initiated by Jane Addams in Chicago.35 Dewey supported this movement with a clear positioning of his pragmatic philosophy: “Better it is for philosophy to err in active participation in the living struggles and issues of its own ages and times than to maintain an immune monastic impeccability, without relevancy and bearing in the generating ideas of its contemporary present.”36 Sennett draws on this US-American tradition to underpin his concept of co-operation and emphasises the interrelationship between engagement and participation. Beyond romanticising ideas of community, he is concerned with “how one might develop a sense of inner purpose by communal co-operation”.37 The urban sociologist Sennett is also always concerned with the configuration and structuring of public space and the question of how its order helps promote or impede co-operative behaviour. It is this relationship between the public sphere, engagement and participation that is being examined in a particularly original way in present-day STS. This international field is exploring the possibilities of investigating co-operative community formations through its trademark symmetrical methodology and is, thus, simultaneously making a determined move into the field of politics. Within STS, Sergio Sismondo has summarised this trend under the banner of the “engaged programme”. This programme is characterised by the systematic examination of the contribution of science, technology and non-human entities to the creation of publics. Furthermore, STS is beginning to elaborate theory-of-society concepts whose relevance to the development of an experimentalist theory of society can hardly be overestimated. This entails chiefly the redefinition of freedom from methodological value judgments almost a hundred years after Weber. While STS—like German-language science and technology research—initially investigated the politically relevant consequences of scientific and technological practices, it has now begun to probe the management, governance and infrastructural aspects of public issues. Furthermore, it is becoming clear in the field of politics that, on this level, we can link STS with the sociological experimentalism developed here, as STS’s theory-of-society potential becomes increasingly apparent. I aim to flesh this out in the relevant section. This also prepares the way for the transition to the empirical part of this test run, which will focus on the modus operandi of collaborating or ‘co-laborating’, currently a hot topic in STS. Collaborating From heterogeneous co-operation to collaboration—I connect this step with an expansion of Dewey’s experimentalism, which STS has for some time linked with the question of how public problems are identified and constructed and which normative premises they embody. I scrutinize here the structuring consequences of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research programmes. After discussing the On Addams, see Rosiek, Jerry Lee and Scott Pratt: “Jane Addams as a Resource for Developing a Reflexively Realist Social Science Practice”, in: Qualitative Inquiry 19/8 (2013), p. 578–588. 36 Dewey, John: “Does Reality Posess Practical Character?”, in: Goodman, Russel B. (ed.): Pragmatism. A Contemporary Reader, New York and London: Routledge 1995, S. 90. 37 Sennett, Together, p. 263. 35

230

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

two modi operandi of criticising and participating, I then present an experimental heuristic of heterogeneous co-operation in this last part of the test run. Based on the observation of a marine biology expedition off the coast of PNG, I discuss the modus operandi of collaborating as a distinct means of heterogeneous co-operation that enables us to respond to the disciplining that typifies colonial relationships, as criticised by Randeria and Descola. While the unsettling effect of participant observation has epistemological advantages, it may well be controversial if there is a coming together of dissimilar people who disagree about the structuring effects of co-operation intended. Strong social, cultural or economic differences put the heterogeneous concept of co-operation to a hard test, not only regarding social analysis but also in concrete research practice. They compel us to confront the limits of co-operation, which arise in a heterogeneous research context and complex everyday situations. During the expedition I observed, it was the limits of a concept of co-operation based on Western principles of negotiation that came unambiguously to light. If post-colonial STS in particular privileges the concept of collaboration instead, then this is a call for the contextualization and historicisation of STS. In light of this, I outline in the third section a theory-of-society analytical model for collaborative research on sustainability within the framework of sociological experimentalism. With reference to Philippe Descola’s cosmopolitan anthropology of nature, I now present the socioecological critique that underpins this model.

5.3.1

“Criticising”. The Productivity of the Nature–Culture Difference and Descola’s Cosmopolitan Anthropology of Nature

5.3.1.1

Experience and Nature: Dewey and Anthropology

The thesis of continuity articulated in “Test Run I”, which pervaded Dewey’s epistemology, generated its assumptions of plausibility largely from Darwin’s theory of evolution and William James’s “radical empiricism”. For Dewey, Darwin’s law of the development of life, whose main message—and most provocative aspect—was the unpredictability of life’s origin and outcome, was tantamount to a statement about the environment-dependent development of the human mind. For this reason alone, it made sense for Dewey to engage with the anthropologists of his day, whose critical insights permeated his thinking on democracy.38 Dewey presented an See Dewey, John: “Foreword”, in: Radin, Paul: Primitive Man as Philosopher, New York: Dover 1955, p. xvii–xx. Radin was a student of Franz Boas and James H. Robinson. Dewey makes an interesting remark on Radin’s research findings with respect to contemporary sociology: “The conception that primitive man attributes an independence to the existence of the group comparable to that of the “external world” seems not only to do justice to the facts which the upholders of the incorporation theory rely upon, without falling into their excesses, but to be also a valuable

38

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

231

anthropology of nature in his book Experience and Nature (first published in 1925) that ostensibly makes only a few scattered references to anthropological or ethnological studies. But the 1920s also marked Dewey’s heyday at New York’s Columbia University, where he got to know and appreciate Franz Boas, whom he met in 1904. Around 10 years later, in the winter semester of 1914–1915, they organised a joint seminar on methods for investigating the human mind.39 The collaboration must have been a profound experience for both of them. US-American cultural anthropology systematically integrated the social, cultural and life sciences through the four-field approach developed by Boas, Ruth Benedict and others. Hence, cultural anthropologists in the US have been educated in the basics of linguistics, archaeology, and physical and biological anthropology.40 Interdisciplinary co-operation with natural and life scientists, therefore, flowed into anthropology’s disciplinary self-image as a matter of course—although with a lot of friction. Herbert Lewis thinks it likely that this closeness to the natural sciences was partly due to Boas’s close contact with John Dewey.41 Conversely, it is probably due in part to the success of the cultural anthropology established in the US in the early 1950s that Dewey went so far as to express a desire to abandon his concept of experience in favour of that of culture in a 1951 text originally intended to serve as a new introduction to Experience and Nature.42 In line with the debate at the time, Dewey suspected that the concept of culture would convey the dual functionality, anchored in the concept of experience, of empirical social trope and the constitution of sociological objects far more directly.43 In the cultural anthropology of the time, the fact that culture represents something that exists, to which reference is made (environment), and something that is always in the process of becoming (process), was associated with a critique of essentialism, not least of a political nature—an

contribution to any sociological theory” (ibid., p. xix). He underlines: “[Dr. Radin] makes it clear that objects and nature were conceived dynamically; that change, transition, were primary, and transformation into stability something to be accounted for” (ibid., p. xx). 39 See Zask, Joelle: Introduction à John Dewey, Paris: La Découverte 2015, p. 63. 40 See Ingold, Tim: “General Introduction”, in Ingold, Tim (ed.): Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, London and New York: Routledge 1994, p. xiii–xxii. For a critical discussion on the four-field approach within younger scholars of anthropology, see https://anthrosource-1 onlinelibrary-1wiley-1com-1y3tgvod308cf.han.ub.uni-kassel.de/doi/epdf/10.1111/AN.804, accessed 30 August 2021. 41 See Lewis, Herbert S.: “Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology”, in: Current Anthropology 42/3 (2001), p. 384f. 42 Dewey, John: “The unfinished Introduction 1949–1951, edited by Joseph Ratner”, in John Dewey: Experience and Nature, The later Works (Vol 1/1925), edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1988, p. 361f. Here, however, Dewey refers not to Boas, but to Malinowski. 43 Here Dewey underlines again: “If ‘experience’ is to designate the inclusive subject-matter it must designate both what is experienced and the ways of experiencing it.” Ibid, p. 362. Dewey explained his shift away from the concept of experience by emphasising that it was not being received in this way in the contemporary debate. Instead, he contends, the term was being used to provide explanations which ran counter to its original intention. Ibid.

232

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

issue of the utmost priority for both Boas and Malinowski as well as for Dewey. “Culture” was simultaneously a means of combatting a concept of ‘civilisation’ that, in sharp contrast to Darwin, was based on the colonial hierarchization of human development within a teleological framework. The so-called “uncivilised”, that is, the peoples of the global South and the underprivileged at the heart of the industrial metropole, were, thus, declared second- and third-class people. Colonialization, segregation and racism flourished in this intellectual soil. Cultural anthropology opposed this zeitgeist with a holistic and de-hierarchized concept of culture, whose foundations tallied with Dewey’s epistemological and theory-of-society programme. Dewey’s conception of social co-operation as a way of dealing collectively with experiential differences, thus, chimed with a socioecological critique that—at least in the contemporary US-American debate—seemed better conveyed by the concept of culture than the concept of experience. However, today, many consider the concept of culture to be worn out, not least cultural sociologists and cultural anthropologists themselves. Regarding funding policies, meanwhile, there have been calls for a more ‘experience-based’ knowledge. In view of the lack of a normative sociological concept of experience, these two factors, especially the latter, indicate that it is more important than ever to uphold Dewey’s original concept and apply it sociologically. Dewey set out the key premise in this regard in Experience and Nature, of all things: “The chief obstacle to a more effective criticism of current values lies in the traditional separation of nature and experience, which it is the purpose of this volume to replace by the idea of continuity.”44 This seems all the more imperative at a time when anthropology is expanding Dewey’s epistemological thesis of continuity within its theories of society by making the analytical discontinuity between “nature” and “culture” the basis of a post-colonial social critique with global reach. Alongside Bruno Latour, it is currently French anthropologist Philippe Descola who is substantiating the productive character of this discontinuity regarding a theory of society and, thus, opening up the prospect of a critical reformulation of the experimentalist category of “co-operation”. The socioecological critique developed in what follows, as facilitated by Descola, allows us to flesh out Richard Sennett’s heterogeneous concept of co-operation by integrating globally differentiated relationships with nature.

5.3.1.2

Descola’s Critical Redefinition of the Analytical Discontinuity Between Nature and Culture45

So, down to brass tacks. After two decades of ‘turns’, whether they bore the epithet “cultural”, ‘practical’ or ‘pragmatic’, after three decades of corresponding ‘studies’

44

Dewey, John: Experience and Nature, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. 1929, p. ix. The following remarks are based on my essay “Dekolonisierung des Denkens. Was wir von Descola lernen”, in: Mittelweg 36. Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung 22 (2013): 46–62. My thanks to Martin Bauer for including the revised version in Mittelweg 36.

45

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

233

movements, qualified as “cultural”, “gender” or “science and technology”, and after the waves of postconstructivism and poststructuralism, not to mention postmodernism itself, the fragmentation and provincialisation of the social sciences and humanities seems to have passed its peak. Ironically, it was the most radical critics of the classic figures of sociology and their essentialist residual categories, namely, the champions of ANT and one of its most prominent thinkers, Bruno Latour, who proclaimed until recently a new turning point that might just overshadow all the others—the “ontological turn”.46 It seemed like a good time to get back to basics. The social sciences understood by the 1990s, a period of reckoning with the grand political and sociological narratives, that their tendency for analytical generalisation had come at the price of methodological-normative, Eurocentric, anthropocentric and gender-specific curtailments. Initially, then, intradisciplinary diversification—influenced by “post history”—seemed appropriate. But in view of the present-day processes of sociopolitical transformation, which have become evident as a result of globalisation, the digital and genetic revolutions and the unmistakable decline of ecosystems, the drive to specialise within the human sciences came to seem out of place. Post-colonial anthropology recognised the problem early on. As early as 1996, Arjun Appadurai highlighted the close intertwining of global and local action orientations, deploying his concept of “global ethnoscapes”47 to challenge the notion of regionally and nationally determined cultural spheres. Since then, the question of global forms of social differentiation has been raised in an increasingly self-evident way. Furthermore, when it comes to the attempts that have been made to engage with the performative potential and normative limits of every social analysis, this issue of global social differentiation inevitably implies that the necessary leap in complexity ought to lead to a symmetrical, in other words, both anti-fundamentalist and antihegemonic, analytical stance. This, however, by no means clarifies how the reconfigured tension between relativism and universalism can be made methodologically productive. French philosopher, ethnologist and anthropologist Philippe Descola declared the dualism of nature and culture, which is deeply rooted in the Occidental understanding of the world, the starting point for this tension. Drawing on one of the basic concepts in Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modern,48 Descola ascribes to the Western cultural sphere a specific relationship to nature, according to which “being modern” means understanding nature as an invariant and independent ‘thing’ vis-à-vis cultural contexts, one that can be reduced down to the smallest of units and exists outside of its perception and processing. But, in fact, Latour asserted, we have “never been modern”, because nature and culture de facto permeate each other

Woolgar, Steve and Javier Lezaun: “The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontology in Science and Technology Studies?” in: Social Studies of Science 43/4 (2013), p. 321–340. 47 Appadurai, Arjun: Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 1996. 48 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. 46

234

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

constantly in our everyday actions. It is this thesis that Descola turned into an ecological anthropology of global scope in his magnum opus Beyond Nature and Culture,49 first published in 2005. This new anthropology substantiates Descola’s long-held suspicion that the assumption that nature and culture are fundamentally different, while constitutive of Occidental modernisation, represents just one dispositive among several through which modes of social existence—and their associated ontologies—are organised. This discovery, this “relative universalism”, is the core idea and the basic epistemological prerequisite for Descola’s social anthropology. We do not necessarily have to start with the discipline of STS to understand the complexion of Descola’s conceptual edifice and his argumentational strategy for unsettling a centuries-old certainty. Indeed, Descola, similar to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour, started out as a philosopher who subjected his own philosophical questions to a radical experience in the form of an ethnographic test. Bourdieu, borrowing from British jurist and philosopher of language John L. Austin, described his Algerian experiential test as “fieldwork in philosophy” in an interview conducted by Axel Honneth in the 1980s.50 But why, Honneth inquired, did Bourdieu, in contrast to Habermas, never investigate universally valid norms? “I have a tendency to scrutinize the problem of reason or norms in a resolutely historicist way”, Bourdieu responded. “Instead of wondering about the existence of ‘universal interests’, I ask: who has an interest in the universal? Or rather: what are the social conditions that have to be fulfilled for certain agents to have an interest in the universal?”51 As Descola sees it, there are three key aspects to the universality of the normative. Firstly, “fieldwork in philosophy” describes anthropology’s genuine empirical epistemic focus as a discipline that, inasmuch as it aspires to be a general science of humanity, has always been interested in the universal. Secondly, the current global ecological and biodiversity crises show with alarming urgency that the normative universals through which the relationships between humans and the environment have hitherto been legitimised and organised require fundamental epistemological revision. Finally, the “relative universalism” championed by Descola differs significantly from normative universals. Especially in light of colonial history, these have proven to be a one-way street from the Occident to the rest of the world. This even applies to their ‘critical’ variants, not to mention the unwavering forms of Eurocentric normativity. Descola would, therefore, agree with Bourdieu, insofar as he too critiques Occidental universalism by subjecting it to systematic comparison. Descola’s anthropology sees itself as part of an anti-hegemonic research endeavour that his Brazilian colleague Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has summed up succinctly

49

Descola, Philippe: Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre: In Other Words: Essays toward a Reflective Sociology, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990, p. 3f. 51 Ibid., p. 31. Translation modified. 50

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

235

as follows: “Anthropology is the theory and practice of permanent decolonisation”.52 In his study on modernity, with a view to the experiences of the former colonies, Arjun Appadurai described decolonisation as “a dialogue with the colonial past, and not a simple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life”.53 But what happens if such a practice of decolonisation, which—to put it crudely—takes the form of a selfreflective attempt to purge normative Western interpretive claims, culminates in the radical relativisation of the ontological dualism that underpins our nature–culture relationships? In what follows, I explore this question with reference to three thematic areas. Firstly, I elucidate Descola’s concept of “relative universalism” before attempting to determine the extent to which this universalism offers a productive answer to the challenges to social co-operation outlined above. I then shed light on the significance of Descola’s critical anthropology of nature to sociology, discuss how his social ecology might provide a stimulus for a theory of society in keeping with the times and, finally, derive a “cosmopolitics of co-operation” from his recent studies.

5.3.1.3

A “Relative Universalism”

In 1986, Philippe Descola, who began his university education as a philosopher, published his doctoral thesis on the relationship between practice and symbolism in the ecology of the Achuar, a tribe scattered across the Amazon region, which he and his wife and colleague, anthropologist Anne-Christine Taylor, had studied through participant observation from 1976 to 1978 (Fig. 5.2). Photo of Descola Latour addresses Descola’s work in We Have Never Been Modern: “The Pythagorean theorem and Planck’s constant spread into schools and rockets, machines and instruments, but they do not exit from their worlds any more than the Achuar leave their villages. The former constitute lengthened networks, the latter territories or loops: the difference is important and must be respected, but let us not use it to justify transforming the former into universals and the latter into localities.”54 Latour, on the other hand, proposes a “work of relative universalization”55 intended to curb the excesses of modern universalism and especially its scientific cosmologies. In response, Descola continued his previous studies on the problem of continuity and discontinuity within the human–nature relationship by exploring the possible consequences of Latour’s ideas for the analysis of structure. To this end, he takes two Latour, Bruno: “Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’? Guest Editorial”, in: Anthropology today 25/2 (2009): 1–2. 53 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 89. 54 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 119–120. 55 Ibid., p. 118. 52

236

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Fig. 5.2 Philippe Descola in 1976, during his field research in Kapawi, Ecuador, © Philippe Descola

key steps in Beyond Nature and Culture. Firstly, he rejects Latour’s thesis that we separate nature and culture formally but not in practice, in favour of a pragmatic analysis of the consequences of this separation.56 In a second step, Descola puts forward a strong argument not primarily against the separation of nature and culture, but against the normative assumption of its universal ontological validity—a subtle but important distinction. Unlike Latour, his goal is not to probe, in the context of an analysis of modernities, the extent to which the separation of nature and culture is, in fact, maintained, in order to then demonstrate the practical-material hybridity of modern thought and action. Descola is not, therefore, conducting the type of analysis characterised by Appadurai—in his definition of decolonisation—as the detection of colonial elements in post-colonial societies. Instead, he relegates modernities to the grandstands of a global ethnological arena that is home to diverse ways of conceptualising continuities and discontinuities between nature and culture, to all of which a strict distinction between nature and culture is alien. Descola, thus, opens a polyphonic dialogue with a colonial past, a dialogue that problematises one of the most persistent propositions inherent in this past and is still with us today, namely, that of the inevitable superiority of Western culture and its highly specific relationship with nature. Descola systematises these observations in a universal taxonomy of global differences, one that is based on the proposition that these differences obey internal laws that can be traced back to four general ontologies (modes of existence): “naturalism”, “animism”, “analogism” and “totemism”. Each of these ontologies is

Descola, Philippe: “The two natures of Lévi-Strauss’” in: Wiseman, Boris (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009, p. 115f.

56

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . . Table 5.1 The three basic modes of the nature/culture relationship

Identification (a) Animism (b) Totemism (c) Naturalism (d) Analogism

Relationship Predation Protection Reciprocity

237 Classification Metaphorical Metonymic

characterised by different modes of identification and relating and different forms of classification, all of which affect the relationship between humans and nature. In this context, then, “relative universalism” denotes a procedure that relativises the mode of existence of “modernities” by first comparing it to and then correlating it with three other ontologies. In effect, then, Descola’s project leads to nothing less than “alienation from one’s own culture”.57 It continues the structuralist tradition of seeking to identify general grammars of social organisation, as exemplified by LéviStrauss and Bourdieu. At the same time, Descola expands the attempt to ascertain such organisational grammars of society into a deterritorialised human science in keeping with the times. Its indicators, however, no longer stem from a spatially and historically limited practice of differentiation, as in Bourdieu’s concept of the field. Neither are they based, as in culturalism, on symbolic aggregates, which are often systematised through an inadequate empirical-heuristic system of co-ordinates. Instead, Descola has developed a genuinely new ontology of the social by filtering the legacy of structuralism through the experimental inventory of ‘tonnes of ethnographies’ with the assistance of its harshest critics—ex ante, such as Gabriel Tarde, or ex post, such as Latour—and boiling it down to its essence in light of three key premises. (1) Relationships with the world can be reconstructed out of three invariant forms (“identification”, “relationship” and “classification”), whose respective use and combination, (2) determines the probability of one of the four modes of existence (naturalism, animism, analogism or totemism), which are, in turn, (3) characterised by the different degrees to which they establish continuities—or “invariances”58 in the nature–culture relationship. Descola links these degrees of continuity with the presence or absence of the assumption of an interiority shared with nature (intellectual or spiritual life) or physicality (biological or material existence). The matrix resulting from these premises can be summarised as follows (Table 5.1). Of course, Descola’s taxonomy of the four ontologies is not an attempt to place a number of other cosmological constructs alongside our own cosmology in order to point up cultural relativism and subject the naturalism of modernities to possible criticism. To quote Rainer E. Wiedemann’s cogent summary in his review of the 57

See Amann, Klaus and Stefan Hirschauer (eds.): Die Befremdung der eigenen Kultur. Zur ethnographischen Herausforderung soziologischer Empirie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1997. 58 On the significance of these invariances for the structuralist analytical strategy and its compatibility with the positivist natural sciences, see Héritier, Françoise: L’identique et le différent. En dialogue avec Caroline Broué. Avant-propos inédit, La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube 2018, p. 50f.

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

238

Interiority

+

Physicality

-

Interiority – Physicality +

Animism

Totemism

+ Interiority

Naturalism

Analogism

–Interiority

+ Physicality –Physicality

Fig. 5.3 Nature-culture-continuities in modes of identification as basic ontologies

German translation of Par delà nature et culture, the goal is to achieve “nothing less” than “a structural ‘cartography’ of modes of experience and relationship, through which ways of life capture their associated entities ontologically, overlay them with practices and organize them into typical collectives”.59 The first step was already inherent in the cognitivist structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, while Bourdieu turned the cartography of possible experiences into a theory of practice and applied it to local industrial societies. The socio-politically explosive element in Descola’s updating of structuralism, meanwhile, arises from his systematic correlation of the four fundamental modes of identification. While Latour has now sought to correct the monistic-Eurocentric slant of his metaphysics of modernity by analysing the proliferation of modes of existence, Descola emphasises the limiting of modes of identification within the framework of his “relative universalism” in the sense of “relational universalism”, although “the word ‘relative’”, as he underlines, “should be understood as in the term ‘relative pronoun’, that is, with regard to relationship”.60 This makes the decisive factor in Descola’s analytical approach the schemas of practice from which we can derive different nature–culture relationships (Fig. 5.3). The special features of the four modes of identification come clearly to light in this comparative diagram. For Descola, modes of identification are primarily schemas that co-ordinate actions in and perceptions of the world. As such, he understands them, logically enough, as an ordering framework for social topographies and specific cosmologies that predefine the boundaries between self and others when dealing with humans and non-humans.61 Totemism (mainly observed so far among the indigenous inhabitants of Australia), for example, differs from animism (as found, for example, in South America) in that, in contrast to animism, totemism uses animals and plants to organise social life (the totem as a social institution),62 Wiedemann, Rainer E.: “Rezension zu ‚Descola, Philippe: Jenseits von Natur und Kultur’”, in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 65/2 (2013), p. 359. 60 Descola, Philippe: “Wem gehört die Natur? Warum der Schutz der Artenvielfalt kein universelles Prinzip sein kann”, in: Lettre International 83/Winter 2008, p. 73. 61 Descola, Philippe: “Constructing Natures. Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice”, in: Descola, Philippe and Gisli Pálsson (eds.): Nature and Society. Anthropological Perspectives, London: Routledge 1996, p. 87. 62 See Karsenti, Bruno: “Durkheims Theorie des Totemismus revisited”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz (eds.): Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main and New York 2013, p. 529–558. 59

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

239

while animism emphasises the features common to the spiritual life of humans, animals and plants. Naturalism and animism share a relationship to nature that is focused on humans (anthropocentrism), while analogism, found in Asian medicine and pre-Renaissance astrology, subscribes to a cosmocentrism that negates all continuities and assumes a circular chain of existences in which neither “nature” nor “culture” dominate. By contrast, naturalism turns animism into its opposite, assuming a genetic-material and, thus, linear continuity between the physicalities of all living beings but, at the same time, postulating a fundamental ontological difference between body and mind. Culture is, thus, everything that is not nature and vice versa.63 Descola’s pragmatic analysis of the Occidental nature–culture division in light of the three other ontologies generates two advantages in terms of theoretical strategy. It can outline a genuinely social anthropological object of investigation without falling into the trap of cultural relativism, while also ensuring connectivity with the rest of the social sciences by clearing up a misunderstanding that science studies, at least according to Latour, has neglected to clarify regarding the field it investigates. This is the assertion that every form of knowledge production, including the Western-scientific variety, is always “fabricated”. This notion of a “phenomena factory”, of constructedness in the sense of the controlled production of facts, is in no way meant to indicate a lower degree of realism.64 On the contrary, it is precisely the evidential character of scientific facts that has kept the nature–culture division stable over such a long period of time. Descola, with Robert Lenoble, dates the emergence of a rigid dualism of nature and culture to the seventeenth century, particularly to Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which “produced the objects of the new science. This process then acquired autonomy at the cost of forgetting the conditions of the objectivization of the phenomena.”65 Descola develops an anthropological natural history out of this genealogy of nature as an autonomous object that permits analytical-scientific and technical-practical access. This illuminates how the naturalistic preparation of nature paves the way concurrently for the splitting off of a sphere of being conceptualised as ‘culture’. Culture appeared as the antipode of nature, which was increasingly domesticated in terms of both epistemology and research practice. The eighteenth century then began to historicise this other of nature, that is, to write cultural history. “Nature as an autonomous ontological domain, a field of inquiry and scientific experimentation, an object to be exploited

Pierre Charbonnier sums up the epistemic effect of Descola’s social ecology as follows: “Ce qui est saissiant dans votre travail, c’est que nous apparaissons du point de vue de l’animisme comme un peuple étrange, qui a opéré un partage du monde qui n’a plus rien d’intuitif” (in: Charbonnier, Philippe: Descola, Philippe – La composition des mondes. Entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier, Paris: Flammarion 2014, p. 279). 64 See Latour, Bruno: “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, in: Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), p. 225–248. 65 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 62. 63

240

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

and improved” became the counterpart of culture and something that “very few thought to question”.66 Anthropology emerged at the historical moment when this dualism was turned into a universal mission as travel to the non-European world increased and its inhabitants were brutally subjugated. This new science of humanity inherited this dualism, deriving the legitimacy of its research practice from “the belief that all societies constitute compromises between Nature and Culture and that its task is to examine the many singular expressions of this compromise and, if possible, to try to discover the rules of their formation and destruction”.67 For Descola, the persistence of natural scientific monism and of social scientific cultural relativism confirms that this assumption persists to this day.68 According to him, however, both conceal the basic problem, namely, an unwillingness to reflect upon the normative charge of nature–culture dualism and expose it to the gaze of those who might respond to this opposition with the kind of helpless shake of the head typical of Westerners when confronted with a view of nature in which kinship with animals is par for the course. We can, therefore, understand Descola’s social ecology as an anthropological response to Sennett’s call for heterogeneous co-operation. If, for example, Western scientists intervene in ecological processes in the global South, where a non-naturalistic ontology dominates, a problem of co-operation arises. Following Descola, in such cases, it is imperative to clarify the ontological status of local societies’ relationship to nature and adapt the naturalistic principle to local problems. This raises the question of the basic ontologies’ social status and how they might interface with sociological theories of society.

5.3.1.4

Ontologies Rather than “Sociocentrism”?

The recurring recourse to Durkheim’s “sociocentrism” in Beyond Nature and Culture69—which also appears to mean sociology as such, given the lack of references to other and contemporary intellectual currents—seems surprising at first glance from an author who generally emphasises the common ground between sociology and anthropology. It is even more astonishing when you consider that Descola was one of the initiators of a Durkheim symposium featuring leading scholars from around the world held in Paris in the summer of 2012 to mark the centenary of the publication of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Descola reacted coolly and sceptically to Bruno Latour’s incendiary speech here attacking the French

66

Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., p. 78. 68 See Bogusz, Tanja and Estrid Sørensen: “Einleitung”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Estrid Sørensen (eds.): ‘Naturalismus | Konstruktivismus – Zur Produktivität einer Dichotomie’, Berliner Blätter, Ethnographische und Ethnologische Beiträge, special issue 55 (2011): 6–21. 69 See Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 248. 67

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

241

disciplinary founder and influential contributor to French anthropology.70 He warned Latour and the audience against declaring the entirety of Durkheim’s work invalid. On the other hand, it is precisely this “sociocentrism” for which Durkheim is criticised and the “intellectualism” of which Lévi-Strauss stands accused that prompt both Latour and Descola to reach the conclusion—which is, at the very least, not immediately obvious—that sociological realities should be subordinated to ontological ones. The latter represent a kind of “syntax for the composition of the world” for Descola, from “which the various institutional regimes of human existence all stem”.71 Consequently, he felt compelled to “reject the sociocentric assumption and opt for the idea that sociological realities (stabilized relational systems) are analytically subordinate to ontological realities (the systems of properties attributed to existing beings)”.72 This choice raises at least two questions from a sociological point of view. The first is: what kind of concept of the social, or of what sociologists believe the social to be, is, in fact, being circulated here—almost a hundred years after Durkheim and in view of the anti-fundamentalist and anti-universalist movements within the social sciences, as outlined earlier, which have been in existence for 30 years now? The wide-ranging international debates on “multiple modernities”,73 on the “provincializing of Europe” so necessary in the context of recent global history,74 the critique of “methodological nationalism”75 and studies on heterogeneous worlds of action and modes of action76 have ultimately left little sign within the more advanced social sciences of what Descola and Latour assail as sociocentrism. A second question is directly related to these concerns. What justifies this reversal of the interpretive hierarchy, given that “relative universalism” must prompt us to question hierarchy itself as a normatively valid universal just as fundamentally as the naturalism associated with it? Should we not place the social and ontologies on the same epistemic level? And what empirical evidence is there that we ought to understand the social as a mere effect of the interplay of deeper substrates, whose existence is claimed to be even more self-evident than the nature–culture dichotomy?

See Latour, Bruno: “Formes élémentaires de la sociologie, formes avancées de la théologie”, in: Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 167/3 (2014): 255–275. 71 Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 125. 72 Ibid, p. 124. 73 Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.): Multiple Modernities, Piscataway and New Jersey: Transaction Publishers 2002. 74 See Chakrabarty, Dipesh: Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007. 75 See Beck, Ulrich and Edgar Grande: “Varieties of Second Modernity. The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research”, in: Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande (eds): Varieties of Second Modernity: Extra-European and European Experiences and Perspectives. Special Issue: British Journal of Sociology 61(3) 2010: 409–443 and once again Randeria, “Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie”. 76 See Boltanski and Thévenot, On Justification. 70

242

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

The first question can be answered easily enough. Descola’s line of argument is oriented primarily towards the legacy of structuralism, which is hardly conceivable without Durkheim—especially as a conceptual foil. In this vein, it is logical to combine the criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s intellectualism with that of Durkheim’s sociocentrism, because this dual critique leads directly to the problem of possible continuities between nature and culture and, thus, allows us to discern degrees of continuity that apply not only to ontologies unfamiliar to us but also to our own. At the same time, Descola’s thematization of nature–culture continuity and discontinuity makes the question of the social compatible with self-reflective processes within the social sciences in the first place—because around 1900, according to Descola’s thesis, the social was defined against the background of a naturalistic ontology. According to the latter, the social had to be understood as part of nature, though the former had to be wrested from the latter, in a positivistic manner, as the subject of empirical science. In this way, the social was modelled into an object of intellectual inquiry, an object taken up unquestioningly by an emerging sociology from the contemporary natural sciences in the form of nature–culture dualism. And Descola is surely right to state that the social sciences and anthropology, in particular, are unwilling to thoroughly rethink the conditions of the genesis of their own scientific cosmologies regarding this particular problem. Yet, this is precisely what Descola is proposing: that we facilitate the decolonisation of thought through an analytical model that reflects on the complexities and curtailments of forms of social organisation in light of another fundamental relationship that is, presumably, common to all societies. According to Descola, this is the nature–culture relationship. Its potential for generalisation is great enough, its specificity sufficiently symptomatic. In short, it offers the simplest, lowest common denominator for a comparative anthropology capable of putting forward social scientific arguments.77 The ontological distribution of the forms of social organisation characteristic of the nature–culture relationship leads to a symmetrical redistribution of practice schemas across the globe and opens up the possibility of a dialogue about these forms of distribution that is not determined by geopolitical power relationships. This impressive project makes many a well-intentioned postcolonial critique and the attempt—in terms of the politics of theory—to generate ever more elaborate distinctions seem like little more than petty tinkering. It remains to be seen, however, how Descola’s proposal—which would have to take into account the more current post-sociocentrisms being debated at present—can truly enrich the long-standing critique of sociocentrism within the social sciences. Descola’s relativised universalism provides a productive response to the challenges to social co-operation outlined earlier by elucidating the local and historical limitations of the political project associated with naturalism. This raises certain questions. How can the three “other” ontologies be related to ours in the first place?

77

Tim Ingold underlines the difference between anthropology’s interest in theoretical generalisation and the descriptive specificity of ethnography. See Ingold, Tim: “Anthropology is Not Ethnography”, in: Proceedings of the British Academy 154 (2008): 69–92.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

243

Is there perhaps an implicit hierarchy within the four ontologies after all? No, says Descola, who believes global ethnographies do not provide empirical evidence of such a hierarchy. The relationing of the four ontologies, on the other hand, is supposed to be guaranteed by a pair of binary opposites, namely, the basic distinction between “interiority” and “physicality”. Descola maintains that this distinction, unlike the four ontologies, must be considered invariant and universal, and here he invokes “the fact” that “consciousness of a distinction between the interiority and the physicality of the self seems to be an innate aptitude that is borne out by all lexicons, whereas terminological equivalents of the pair constituted by nature and culture are hard to find outside European languages and do not appear to have experimentally demonstrable cognitive bases”.78 Hence, the local character of the naturalistic division, which Descola conceptualises as the “autonomy of dualism”,79 only becomes apparent on condition of its relationing, its correlating with other forms of social organisation. Comparing the nature/culture dualism with ontologies that do not contain this dualism throws its local specificity and, thus, its “relative universalism” into sharp relief. Its literal relativity is the prerequisite for heterogeneous and symmetrical co-operation between participants, whose relationship with nature may arise from different natural ontologies, but who are pursuing a common socioecological interest.

5.3.1.5

Descola’s Theory-of-Society Contribution to Sociological Experimentalism

The integration of Descola’s project into the German-language debate has been impeded so far by anthropology’s problematic position within the social sciences,80 which features epistemological distortions and interdisciplinary power asymmetries.81 Anthropology enjoys a status equal to that of sociology in France and the Anglo-American world. In Germany, by contrast, the discipline ekes out a marginal existence within the realm of social-theoretical discourses.82 Exchanges 78

Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 121. Ibid., p. 78f. 80 See Bröckling, Ulrich: “Der Mensch ist das Maß aller Schneider. Anthropologie als Effekt”, in: Mittelweg 36, 22/1 (2013): 68–88. 81 See Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz: “Renaissance eines penseur maudit? Émile Durkheim zwischen Soziologie, Ethnologe und Philosophie”, in: Bogusz, Tanja and Heike Delitz: Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus 2013, p. 11–43. 82 Then there is the subdivision, highly confusing to outsiders, into ‘ethnology’ (Ethnologie, the study of non-Western societies), “European ethnology” (Europäische Ethnologie, the study of European societies and those deeply moulded by Europe), “folklore” (Volkskunde, a crossdisciplinary term for a social and cultural anthropology limited to the German-speaking world, a designation that is highly contested among its practitioners, not least due to certain continuities with National Socialism) and “social and cultural anthropology” (Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie), though in practice all of them interpenetrate constantly. The less ambiguous division in France into 79

244

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

between sociologists and anthropologists are at times bedevilled by overt arrogance on the part of the former. It is difficult to imagine an empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated renewal of the social sciences in Germany spearheaded by adventurous philosophers who head out into the ethnographic field in an attempt to clarify basic epistemological and ontological questions. Conversely, the ones who do go out into the world, the ethnologists, rarely address epistemological and theoryof-science problems, which are simultaneously of profound ontological import. No sign here, then, of “fieldwork in philosophy”? It is, in fact, the once rare but growing category of ethnographically and theoretically productive social scientists who are taking on such a role, though they rarely travel far and are usually concerned with ‘moderns’, that is, people like them. Not only does the prestige of ethnography appear to be on the up, but we are also seeing a reawakening of interest in basic anthropological questions, which is related to socioempirical reflections in the context of phenomenological, discourse-analytical, practice-theoretical and pragmatist approaches.83 If the booming reception of Latour’s work and the still scattered recognition of STS and ANT also manage to make an empirical and methodological impact at some point, another key step would have been taken. What, though, is Descola’s specific contribution to sociological experimentalism? The ideas set out above imply three crucial points of departure. Firstly, Descola’s work presents an emphatically practice-theoretical epistemology that not only builds on critical discussions of naturalistic concepts (body, power, and so on) but advances them in an original way. This epistemology compels us to put the constitution of specific modes of social existence and their practical manifestations into relational perspective. His sceptical distancing from the relationship with nature established by naturalism—because this distancing reveals culturalism to be the twin of the Occidental dichotomising of nature and culture—can alert us to blind spots in social theories that are heavy on discourse and subjectivity and fail to acknowledge the experimentalist fusion of theory and empirical knowledge. The valorization of culture, in its negation of nature (whether by generally de-thematizing it or by adopting an anti-science stance) remains beholden to that which it supposedly rejects. The anti-Cartesian movement, by contrast, is finally being fortified with a powerful, long overdue counter-thesis of its own—one centred on the practices of differentiation that organise the relationships of continuity between nature and socialities. It is here—by means of an impressive corpus of world-spanning ethnographies—that Descola’s practice-theoretical linkage of these continuities provides insights that subvert dualistic certainties. Descola’s decolonisation of thought dispenses with moralising pathos and accusatory jargon. In a matter-of-fact way, he presents a system of analytical co-ordinates that works to decentre established modalities of observation through the concrete comparison of different practices of

ethnology and anthropology makes it much easier for sociologists to relate the anthropological interest in generalisation to its sociological counterpart and vice versa. 83 See Hirschauer, Kalthoff and Lindemann (eds.), Theoretische Empirie.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

245

identification and classification. This defamiliarization is a condign response to a globalised world struggling with tremendous social and ecological problems. Secondly, from the perspective of sociological experimentalism, Descola’s “relative universalism” has consequences for the redefinition, informed by theories of society, of basic normative questions. In contrast to both Habermas and Bourdieu, Descola’s critical social ecology does not link the issue of social normativities’ logic of validity directly with a critical theory of the social. Such a critique would have to historicise the epistemological schemas that Descola’s typology generalises in order to relate them to concrete power relationships. But Descola’s anthropology is deliberately ahistorical. It gains its critical potential solely from the effect of correlating specific experiential structures and the schemas of practice that make recourse to them. Methodologically comparable to the intellectual punch of constructivist structuralism, as exemplified by Bourdieu’s Distinction, Descola goes beyond the specificity of Bourdieu’s field perspective. He is pursuing a more fundamental, genuinely anthropological goal: to elucidate the totality of relationships to the world that underlie modes of existence. This project moves away from an anthropocentric epistemology, since the wide range of relationships to nature identified by “relative universalism” are not subsumed into the fact of sociability. Accordingly, the ‘social’ requires explanation insofar as Descola does not accept it as the fundamental relationship with the world—among the wealth of relationships to nature and culture, it merely represents a specific form of practiced experience of the world.84 “Understood in this way”, notes Descola, “a collective corresponds in part, but only in part, to what we call a social system”.85 We ought to “regard the different modes of social and cosmic organization as a matter of distributing existing entities into different collectives: what or who gets to be ranked alongside what or who, and in what way, and for what purpose?”.86 In light of this question, it becomes clear that, for Descola, neglecting the implications of naturalism produces a questionable— because incomplete—concept of the social, one incapable of accounting for its own historical situatedness.87 By confronting anthropology with the task of determining the continuities and discontinuities through which people conceptualise their relationships to one another and to the natural environment, Descola makes an important contribution to contentious contemporary debates that—especially in the social sciences—have been sparked off by consideration of the status of the normative foundations of social action.88 Thirdly, Beyond Nature and Culture develops a new social ecology that provides an impetus both for the reconceptualisation of the ‘social’ and a modified version of science and technology research. There are solid grounds for Descola’s choice of the

84

Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, p. 248. Ibid., p. 247. 86 Ibid., p. 248. 87 See Descola, Philippe: Diversité des natures, diversités des cultures, Montrouge: Bayard 2010. 88 As already emphasised by Descola’s teacher Michel Foucault. See Descola, Philippe: “Par delà la nature et la culture”, in: Le Débat 114 (2001): 92. 85

246

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

oxymoronic “Anthropology of Nature” as the name of his chair at the Collège de France: “Like every paradox, this one seemed particularly suggestive because it expresses an aporia of modern thought that indicates a possible means of overcoming it [. . .].” This aporia is to be overcome through an “ecology of relations”89 that seeks to grasp all relationships through which people relate not only to other people but also to their non-human environment. The preconditions for such an endeavour appear to be more favourable than ever. In an era in which nature “shifted from being a resource to become a topic”90 and the blurring boundaries between humans, nature and technologies have become an everyday subject of political negotiation, methodological innovations are required that help overcome nature–culture dualism. The conclusions Descola draws from Latour’s thesis of modernity regarding whether and, if so, how ‘modern’ we really are, which at first glance seem quite different from Latour’s views, reveal the explosive significance of Descola’s project to the politics of research. This is particularly evident in light of current debates on species protection, in which Descola’s trenchant critique identifies a problematic fact: as different conceptions of nature clash, a new Occidental ecological universalism is making headway that fails to acknowledge that “every morality of nature is anthropogenic in the sense that it inevitably expresses values defended by human beings”.91 Descola’s relational social ecology points to the potentialities of an ecological anthropology beyond the methodological nationalism criticised by Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, one that addresses the pressing questions raised by the troubling legacy of naturalism across the globe.92 It, thus, seems likely that Descola’s intervention could be a source of productive irritation even in natural scientific research contexts that deal with the interactions between humans and nature. The success of a social ecology of human relationships will, however, depend to a significant extent on the support of the social sciences. As Descola indicates, this support is subject to certain conditions. Social scientific thought requires decolonisation, in the sense that its relativity vis-à-vis other relationships to the world can only be understood through reflection on its historical and material situatedness. Through such self-relativisation, the social sciences could open up paths leading potentially—as Descola promises—to “a true ecological understanding of the constitution of individual and collective entities”.93 In line with this, Descola is currently seeking to expand his social ecology into the field of political anthropology. This generates new perspectives on heterogeneous forms of

89 Descola, Philippe: L’écologie des autres, Paris: Quae 2011, p. 100. In the English translation of the book [Descola, Philippe: The Ecology of Others, Chicago: Prickly 2013], the corresponding chapter of the quote [“Discussion”] has not been included. 90 Latour, “Perspectivism“, p. 1. 91 Descola, “Wem gehört die Natur?”, p. 71. 92 See Bogusz, Tanja: “Ende des methodologischen Nationalismus? Soziologie und Anthropologie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung”, in: Soziologie 47/2 (2018): 143–156. 93 Descola, “Constructing Natures”, p. 98.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

247

co-operation in global society, which, drawing on Descola’s lectures at the Collège de France (in spring 2016), I refer to as the “cosmopolitics of co-operation”.

5.3.1.6

A Cosmopolitics of Co-operation

Descola’s symmetrical anthropology of nature–culture relationships is the result of his decades of research into how we might get to grips with the ecological crisis and the social disparities exacerbated by it. This anthropology aims to develop a theoryof-society analytical model that can be used on a global scale while also capturing local specificities. Though he was mostly restrained about the socio-political consequences of his analysis in Beyond Nature and Culture, these are the explicit subject of his current research.94 He, thus, addresses sociology and the social sciences before going on—in light of the “sociocentrism” that both he and Latour criticise—to call for a different concept of the social, namely that of the “collective”. Based on his concept of the collective, which differs from Latour’s, and the “cosmopolitics of territoriality” he puts forward as a response to the ecological crisis, we can derive a “cosmopolitics of co-operation”, which I outline below. The concept of co-operation I develop here combines Dewey’s approach to the integration of the environment with Sennett’s definition of “demanding” co-operation, which details how the integration of the environment works by focusing on heterogeneous participants. This pertains to socio-political forms of co-operation and the question of what enables participants from different disciplines to work together to solve problems. At the same time, I expand on Sennett’s definition by focusing less on the composition of co-operation and more on its effects, in order to include the principle of a capacity for structuration. In order to grasp Descola’s socioecological contribution to this perspective, I begin by presenting his concept of the collective. Descola emphasises that his concept of the collective is more clearly congruent with Luc Boltanski’s and Laurent Thévenot’s concept of orders of justification (‘cités’) than with the concept of the collective developed by Latour on the basis of STS and ANT.95 While Latour was concerned mainly with exploring the concept of the collective not only as an alternative to the ‘social’, which traditionally excludes non-human actors, but also as a means of overcoming the division between nature and society, for Descola these problems arise only for the anthropology of modernity, not for non-modern societies. Descola perceives another difference regarding methodological orientation. While Latour’s concept of the collective concentrates on the process of assembling human and non-human entities, this is

94

My remarks in what follows refer to Descola’s lectures at the Collège de France from February to March 2016, which are available online at https://www.college-de-france.fr/site/philippe-descola/ course-2016-03-02-14h00.htm (accessed 31 August 2021). In the case of direct quotes or paraphrasing, I always indicate the date of the relevant lecture. 95 The following refers to Descola’s lecture of 9 March 2016.

248

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

so taken for granted in non-Occidental societies that it can generate little in the way of substantial insights. By contrast, the term “cite” offers a more specific conception that, in my reading of Descola, may, in turn, be combined with Sennett’s heterogeneous concept of co-operation. According to Descola, “cite” implies shared conventions that allow individuals to generate both separate and shared worlds simultaneously. Orders of justification are, thus, contrasting forms of existence and social relationships, which themselves determine the criteria for their differentiation. Descola sees here a direct analogy to his concept of the collective. According to his definition, a collective is a stabilized conjunction of beings that may be homogeneous or heterogeneous both ontologically and in terms of their compositional principles. However, these principles must be reflexively comprehensible and specifiable by the human participants, especially when it comes to delimiting them from other principles. Here, then, we see the formulation of criteria that may be applied to the heterogeneous co-operation proposed by Sennett, criteria that allegedly pertain not only to modern societies but to a global society as well. On this premise, heterogeneity not only means the inclusion of socio-economically and culturally different participants (Sennett) or non-human entities (Latour), but entails the notion that they are the prerequisite for a principle of structuration. Understood in this way, the reflexive integration and differentiation of a complex environment would be a prerequisite for determining the effects of heterogeneous co-operation by the collective. This is no longer a matter of overcoming the dichotomies posited by modernity, but of integrating them into a more comprehensive analytical model. This is in line with Descola’s basic assumption that it must be possible to grasp existing disparities through an ontological approach—beyond sociological principles of exclusion and beyond the naturalistic model of modernity that plagues Latour. This ontological concept of the collective forms the basis for Descola’s cosmopolitan programme, which continues the decolonisation of thought by posing the following theory-of-society questions. How might a symmetrical anthropology help redefine the relationships between collectives and their relationships with the environment in light of this globalised concept of the collective? What redefinition of the political would be required if territories are no longer understood through the Eurocentric perspective of submission and appropriation but as physical places that contain not only people and things but also spirits and ancestors—in short, a cosmology that includes nature and society? Descola wants to arrive at a general understanding of modes of interaction that conceptualises globally distributed cosmologies not as their origin but as their effect. According to Descola, the “colonial machine” reveals its devastating effects in political anthropology in particular. A cosmopolitan anthropology, meanwhile, can reduce these aporias by problematising the naturalistic universalisms of Western political theory and practice.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

5.3.1.7

249

Summary

Dewey’s examination of the critical potential arising from the interdependence of experience and nature can be reformulated in theory-of-society terms by drawing on Descola’s anthropology of nature. In light of Descola’s work, Hartmut Rosa remarks: “Our resonant relationship to nature is the result not of cognitive learning processes or rational insights, but of active or practical and emotionally meaningful processes.”96 In this way, the concept of experience is updated anthropologically and, with the help of Dewey and Descola, can now be related to the question of human-environment relationships. Descola provides key pointers on how experiences might be systematised on a global comparative scale and linked in such a way as to facilitate a co-operative approach to tackling the ecological crisis. His practicetheoretical epistemology puts the constitution of specific modes of social existence and their respective practical manifestations into relational perspective. It illuminates the anti-scientism so deeply anchored in many sociological theories of society, which can be read in this context as a reaction to a naturalism that must be overcome in light of the current ecological crisis and its transdisciplinary effects. This includes a redefinition—geared towards a theory of society—of basic normative questions beyond the external positions of traditional critical theories. We can turn Descola’s ahistorical anthropology into a critical social ecology by supplementing it with an attempt to characterise heterogeneous relationships with nature and relate them to one another. As a cosmopolitan anthropology of nature, this intellectual framework enables us to reflect, from a theory-of-society perspective, on the new ecological universalism, which now seeks to replace the aporias of modernity with the imperative of ecological sustainability. Just as modernity globalised the normative principles associated with a domesticated nature, it is now vital to move towards the globalisation of heterogeneous social ecologies within a theory-of-society framework. Such an anthropologically informed theory of society requires, on the one hand, the methodological grounding of its research principles if it is to enter into a productive fusion with natural scientific and social scientific research on ecological sustainability. On the other hand, Descola’s cosmopolitan anthropology calls on sociology to expand its concept of the social into a transdisciplinary concept of co-operation. This incorporates critical actor competences by granting human and non-human participants an equal status, a move that breaks with colonial epistemologies within the crisis-focused discipline of sociology.

96

Rosa, Hartmut: Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, London: Polity 2019, p. 273.

250

5.3.2

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

“Participating”: STS and ANT as Experimentalist Sociologies of Critical Publics

As yet, STS has dealt almost exclusively with the “modern” side of the critical social ecology developed by Descola. Within the modus operandi of “participating”, heterogeneous co-operation is often understood as a prerequisite for political and scholarly participation in the public arena. Richard Sennett has highlighted historical and currently effective forms of social participation that might be expanded regarding critical publics. But it is here that Dewey’s thesis of continuity proves particularly problematic. Are sociologists able and do they wish to contribute to the creation of critical publics by involving themselves in the latter? In contrast to STS, Michael Burawoy’s public sociology, for example, puts forward no specific methodological concepts for inter- or transdisciplinary co-operation, but adheres to the external standpoint of traditional critical sociologies. The “public sphere” is present chiefly in terms of the communicative visibility of sociological positions, for example, in the media, as captured by the formula: representation rather than heterogeneous co-operation.97 This outdated twentiethcentury model implies a political common sense whose existence has not only become questionable in recent times in the US but that also requires fundamental rethinking in light of the ontological differences discussed above. Burawoy invokes a heroic disciplinary community, making his ideas only partially compatible with the experimentalism developed here. Again, STS and ANT offer useful points of interface in this context. The modus operandi of participating is discussed in this section as a form of heterogeneous co-operation within the framework of “experimental research on democracy”. What we find is that STS considered the topic of social scientific participation in public problem-solving at an early stage and did so in diverse and sometimes controversial ways. Brian Wynne’s study Unruly Technology (1988), Harry Collins and Robert Evans’s proposal for an STS based on Expertise and Experience (2002), Sheila Jasanoff’s move away from social constructivist deconstruction (1999), Noortje Marres’s “material participation” (2012b), and John Law and Karel Williams’s concept of “government as experiment” (2014) all agree that the investigation of contemporary societies must be carried out on the basis of public participation and representation, which underlines the social sciences’ potential for co-operation and their capacity to take an active, interventionist approach. This potential relates to social change as viewed from both an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspective, as we will see below.

In a critical response to Burawoy, Craig Calhoun remarks: “[O]ne of the most basic conditions of a publicly valuable sociology is taking public significance into account in problem choice. That is, we need to worry not just about how well or poorly our scientific findings are communicated, but about what we should study. It is shocking that there is not more sociology centrally focused on global inequality, on HIV/AIDS, on humanitarian emergencies, on the growing integration and other transformations in Asia, etc.” Calhoun, Craig: ‘The Promise of Public Sociology’, in: The British Journal of Sociology 56/3 (2005), p. 358.

97

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

5.3.2.1

251

On the Relationship Between Scholarship and Critical Publics in the Work of Dewey

What are “critical publics”?98 It can be fairly stated that today criticism is everywhere. It is limited neither to a particular political outlook nor to a specific academic discipline. The critique of capitalism, once the dearest child of sociology, is being embraced by groups and individuals whose other views are anathema to the discipline. This critique migrated from the left to the right-wing populist camp and can, therefore, hardly be dealt with using the traditional conceptual tools, which were forged at a time when critique still seemed to represent an ethically and morally unambiguous point of view., Bruno Latour asked as early as 2003 why critique now makes little impact and called for a rethinking of theories of society, for a shift away from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern”99—the imperative being to tackle the latter not by maintaining an academic distance but through active collaboration between scholars and non-scholars. Latour sees the global ecological crisis as the core field of critical social research, a field in which such instances of collaboration are urgently required. Latour is, in fact, neither the only nor the first figure to advocate a democratic experimentalism in the tradition of US pragmatism. An intense debate is being carried on within international STS regarding the criteria best suited to cementing such an “engaged programme”, as British-Canadian STS researcher Sergio Sismondo calls it. In this debate, participatory forms of the public processing of problems—another term for “critique”—are combined with the collection of heterogeneous data. In Germany, too, this approach has become known in research on science and technology, in environmental sociology and through Jörn Lamla’s theory of experimental consumer democracy. Here, what I call a “sociology of critical publics” is established in clear proximity to the “sociology of critique” formulated by Boltanski and Thévenot. In the context of debates in Germany on the relationship between critical theories of society and a sociology of critique, this sociology provides fresh answers to the question of whether the theory of society qua critique can function as an endeavour external to empirical events. Despite some internal discord, the answer from STS and ANT researchers is a resounding “no”. They, thus, agree with Dewey that it is impossible to locate scholarly knowledge outside the possibility of making a performative impact on given matters of fact. In the experiment, as Dewey showed, the operationalisation of an uncertainty generates insights when it produces experiential differences—that is, the disruption of “habits”—that induce a reorientation of action. Dewey regarded “criticism” as a medium for the solving of collective and public problems and, thus, as a special type of knowledge triggered by the unsettling of established action regimes. Hence, true

The following remarks are based in part on my chapter “Kritik, Engagement oder Experimentalismus? STS als pragmatistische Soziologie kritischer Öffentlichkeiten“, in: Dietz, Hella, Fritjof Nungesser and Andreas Pettenkofer (eds.): Pragmatismus und soziale Praktiken. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, p. 283–300. 99 Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 98

252

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

insight requires an experiential difference, which, on the one hand, changes the object examined and, on the other, can be used as a starting point for further research. This crucial phase of the appeal to reflection explains why Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” was associated with a specific conception of social development, which he defined as a never-ending experiment in his 1927 book The Public and its Problems. For Dewey, the public was part of a concept of development based on problematisation, learning and new discoveries. Society and state, thus, become the locus of solutions through the operationalisation of specific attempts to solve problems within a limited field. From the constitutive character of experiential differences, a notion Dewey borrowed from the heuristics found in the physics of his day, he derived the necessity for theory-of-society underdetermination, which, he contended, provides stimulus for new insights rather than merely confirming what is supposedly known. In contrast to classical critical sociology, this approach takes account of the fact that criticism is not just “everywhere”, but that every social criticism must acknowledge critical actor capacities that are inspired by a broad range of motives, while scrutinizing the political integration of these critical abilities. This is in line with a key concern of STS and ANT.

5.3.2.2

STS and ANT Today: The “Engaged Programme”

As has already been explained in “Test Run II”, the discipline of STS emerged in the 1970s out of theory-of-science constructivism, which STS put to the test empirically. The starting point here was initially scientific and technological controversies, which were sparked by the development of new technologies or the handling of technological accidents and disasters. This constructivism is corroborated by Dewey’s experimentalism and the sociology of critique. In recent debates, the work of Sheila Jasanoff, Noortje Marres, Harry Collins, Bryan Wynne, John Law and Bruno Latour in particular has made a clear turn towards the field of “political issue-making”, which is linked with a lively methodological debate. After STS long refused to pursue theory building, the theory-of society potential of its methodological innovations is now being thoroughly sounded out. Despite all the internal differences within the field, the tendency is towards an engaged, collaborative and participatory sociology of critique. This takes cognizance of the ineluctable significance of science and technology to processes of political co-determination and initiates new debates that seek to take critical stock of contemporary interdisciplinary research.100 A field is taking shape here in which the formatting character of critical competencies vis-à-vis processes of social transformation, as affirmed by Dewey, Boltanski and Thévenot, takes on concrete forms. Sergio Sismondo summarises these activities under the heading an “engaged programme”, thus, highlighting implicitly how it differs from public sociology as envisaged by the likes of Burawoy: “The engaged 100

See, for example, Barry and Born, Interdisciplinarity.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

253

program studies science and technology when they are or should be engaged, and as a result, interactions among science, technology, politics, and public interests have become topics for STS and not just contexts of study. Politics has become a site of study rather than a mode of analysis.”101 Political action as a site of investigation rather than an a priori analytical stance, meanwhile, is possible only on the basis of a radical revision of methodology, which Boltanski and Thévenot envisaged as the de-hierarchization of epistemic privileges. In line with this, STS makes a systematic contribution to the theory-of-society observation of heterogeneous contributions to collective, critical and problemsolving action. The field’s ethnographic know-how when it comes to structuring public controversies and political decision-making processes has now turned its practitioners into internationally sought-after interlocutors, especially regarding the ecological crisis. This is reflected institutionally in Sheila Jasanoff’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society,102 which focuses on climate change, at Harvard Kennedy School, and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change initiated by John Law at Manchester University.103 Bruno Latour’s international project on ecological crises, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME),104 the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) initiated by Kim Fortun,105 the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University of Berlin,106 and the Citizen Sense project funded by the European Research Council and led by Jennifer Gabrys107 are further examples. Sismondo differentiates between several forms of social scientific engagement in STS in his “engaged programme”. Harry Collins and Robert Evans, for example, advocate a normative theory of social scientific expertise, while Sheila Jasanoff examines civil society epistemologies with a focus on geopolitical decision-making processes. Bruno Latour, meanwhile, seeks to achieve the transdisciplinary democratisation of academic disciplines. His sociotechnical diplomacy of nature, influenced by Descola’s anthropology of nature, is concerned, above all, with illuminating the potential for collective problem-solving strategies. The integration of non-scholarly knowledge is also scaled differently in the various projects, ranging from ‘citizen science’ to the laboratory-like experimental arrangements characteristic of certain interdisciplinary projects; the latter are alert to asymmetrical power

Sismondo, Sergio: “Science and Technology Studies and an Engaged Program”, in: Hackett, Ed, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch and Judy Wajcman (eds.) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2007, p. 21. 102 See http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/, accessed 3 September 2021. 103 See http://www.cresc.ac.uk/, accessed 3 September 2021. 104 See http://www.modesofexistence.org/, accessed 3 September 2021. 105 See https://worldpece.org/, accessed 3 September 2021. 106 See https://www.iri-thesys.org/, accessed 3 September 2021. 107 See http://www.citizensense.net/, accessed 3 September 2021. 101

254

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

relationships within scholarly disciplines and to the need to try out and test unconventional research formats.108 With reference to a number of selected studies, I seek to show in what follows how STS implicitly builds on Dewey’s democratic experimentalism, thus, providing vital impetus for an experimentalist theory of society. Under the heading “Participating I”, I consider the investigation of technological disasters, the role of (sociological) experts and the contribution of materialities to the generation of competent critical publics. “Participating II” explores how the interrelationship between public and theory-of-society performance and between practices of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity fosters the structuring processes acknowledged by Dewey. In a summary, I flesh out the concept of co-operation in light of the potential contribution of STS and ANT to an experimentalist theory of society.

5.3.2.3

Participating I: Disasters, Experts and Materialities

Disasters Along with Beck, Krohn and Weyer, in the late 1980s one could still refer to “risk societies”, in which “societies as a laboratory” were held scientifically liable for the use of new technologies, but in subsequent decades increasing emphasis was placed on the potential of these “real-world experiments” to help configure society. This was the title of a book by Matthias Groß, Holger Hoffmann-Riehm and Wolfgang Krohn, in which they remark that “real-world experiments [are] embedded in processes of social, ecological and technological construction that are generally the work of many actors”.109 According to these authors, real-world scientific and technological experiments are closely linked with processes of social change. Experimental practices, then, are no longer limited to the scientific laboratory. In the knowledge society, they extend to the entire public sphere.110 British science and technology researcher Brian Wynne gave impetus to this idea in his 1988 study “Unruly Technology. Practical Rules, Impractical Discourse and Public Understanding”.111 In it, Wynne developed the thesis that risk prevention and risk regulation must abandon the idea that the development of technologies and their practical operation are separate spheres. The “human factor” that has been invoked so often cannot be located outside of energy cycles and materialities but must be understood as an integral part of them. If this insight were to become widely

See Niewöhner, Jörg: “Ökologien der Stadt”; Fitzgerald, Des and Felicity Callard: “Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements”, in: Theory, Culture and Society 30 (2014): 1–30. 109 Groß, Hoffmann-Riehm and Krohn, Realexperimente, p. 11. 110 Ibid., p. 13f. 111 Wynne, Brian: “Unruly Technology. Practical Rules, Impractical Discourses and Public Understanding”, in: Social Studies of Science 18 (1988): 147–167. 108

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

255

accepted, it would be a matter of course to systematically establish co-operation between engineers and sociologists at the point where environmental and technological disasters are investigated, though it would be even better to do so when developing and implementing new technologies. Wynne was concerned with three key questions. What forms of uncertainty can scientific knowledge control in the first place?112 What assumptions about rule-consistent behaviour are inscribed in various technologies? How does expert knowledge help constitute the public perception of technologies and the conditions for their controllability? In order to answer these questions, Wynne considered a series of technological disasters that shook the global public sphere in the 1970s and 1980s: the radiation accident at Windscale (Sellafield) in 1973, the gas explosion at a waterworks in Lancashire, UK, in 1984, the chemical and environmental disaster in Bhopal, India in 1985, the aeroplane fire at Manchester Airport in 1985 and the explosive destruction of the space shuttle Challenger in the US in 1986. Numerous people died or were critically injured in these accidents and some of them are still suffering the consequences today. In the case of the Bhopal disaster, the environment was also subject to unprecedented contamination and long-term spoliation. Wynne examines the interrelationship between science, politics and the public sphere in light of analytical oppositions, highlighting how a range of actors subject “unruly technologies” to the charged relationship between “rationality” and “contingency”, “normal technology” and “accident technology”, “general principles” and “specific circumstances”, “public” and “informal”, “official” and “unofficial”, “universalism” and “local practice”, and “fragmentation” and “generalisation”. These pairings also reflect the public perception of technological disasters and, according to Wynne, perpetuate traditional natural scientific dualisms that are present within sociology as well. In line with the critique put forward by STS, technologies appear here as “black boxes” that are opened only when a crisis occurs and then present a far more complex picture than implied in the notion of successful technologies. If we examine how the various accidents above unfolded, we always find that the dualisms associated with them have little connection with reality. The misconceptions about their rule-governed use inherent in the various technologies were in fact hypotheses that were often scarcely verified. The regular checks carried out, as almost all examples show, were designed in such a way that deviations were either not perceived or were classified as implausible or harmless (as in the case of the space shuttle Challenger)113; alternatively, the implicit rationality of deviating

See also the research on the “sociology of ignorance”: Böschen, Stefan and Peter Wehling: Wissenschaft zwischen Folgenverantwortung und Nichtwissen. Aktuelle Perspektiven der Wissenschaftsforschung, Wiesbaden: VS 2004; Wehling, Peter: Im Schatten des Wissens? Perspektiven der Soziologie des Nichtwissens, Konstanz: UVK Verlag 2005; Groß, Matthias: Experimentelles Nichtwissen. Umweltinnovationen und die Grenzen sozialökologischer Resilienz, Bielefeld: Transcript 2014; and finally Groß, Matthias and Linsey McGoey (eds.): Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London: Routledge 2015. 113 See Vaughan, Diane: The Challenger Launch Decision. Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Chicago: Chicago University Press 1996. 112

256

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

practices was subordinated to other rationalities. Technologies are often not sufficiently adapted to the social change going on around them, as apparent in the case of the waterworks in Lancashire. The water pump was built on the assumption of an economically prosperous region with a high demand for water. In the early 1970s, however, the region was hit by economic recession and high unemployment, which not only increased the number of anglers fishing in the vicinity of the plant, but also had a significant impact on the utilisation and maintenance of the facility. These factors played a crucial role in the genesis of the explosion. Wynne concludes from these observations that technological security requires a “new dialectic” in the relationship between experts and critical publics that takes the latter’s concerns seriously. “Black boxing” must be supplanted by “white boxing”. Rather than being viewed as an often irksome footnote to the implementation of technology, the public must be granted a rationalised and integrated status in the context of risk management. “[A]d-hoc compromises, inventions, adaptions and contradictions of practical day-to-day-existence”114 should be systematically included in the way we deal with technology. Wynne believes—a Deweyan thought—this would facilitate a constructive, participatory learning process. Similar to Krohn and Weyer, he views technology as an upscaled social experiment. According to Wynne, the integration of everyday knowledge is, therefore, not just a scientific and technological but also a socio-cultural necessity. What do Wynne’s insights mean for the capacity for structuration within the modus operandi of ‘participating’ and, thus, for social co-operation? Compared to more recent debates, it is striking that the aim in 1988 was still to “sociologies” the field of technological development and persuade its protagonists of the social embeddedness of technologies. Critical actor capacities and heterogeneous forms of co-operation as the systematic basis for experimentalism as a theory of society were, at most, only hinted at here. The public appeared primarily as the recipient of failed technologies, but its potential for structuring interventions was already perceptible. Wynne also sought to de-hierarchize and redefine the status of experts. At the time, only scholars and engineers were considered experts,115 confronting them with a dilemma. On the one hand, they were often held responsible for things they could not control. On the other hand, they responded with ‘human error’ arguments relating to part of the system for which they were clearly not responsible. This reproduced the dualisms identified above. Wynne criticised this practice as the depoliticisation of opportunities for public participation, though he had little to say beyond this.116 But what exactly should the role of experts be in creating and accompanying critical publics? The reader will recall that, Dewey contended in his debate with Lippmann that the deployment of experts to tackle matters of public

Wynne, “Unruly Technology”, p. 161. Almost all of them men, it should be noted. 116 For a practice-focused proposal on the regulation of risks, see Otway, Harry and Brian Wynne: “Risk Communication: Paradigm and Paradox”, in: Risk Analysis 9/2: 141–145. 114 115

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

257

concern runs the risk of placing the truly relevant public problems on the back burner, due to the establishment of an elite of experts that grows increasingly apart from the public. Some 70 years after the Dewey-Lippmann debate, what role would experts play from the perspective of STS? Harry Collins and Robert Evans sought to answer this question in their much-discussed essay “The Third Wave of Science Studies. Studies of Expertise and Experience” (2002).117

Experts Collins and Evans recap the state of research in science studies some 20 years after its inception in terms of the extent to which the knowledge generated by STS has managed to make a difference when it comes to the use of technology. Their findings are ambivalent. While STS has made an important contribution to raising the awareness of non-scientific experiences of science and technology, as called for by Wynne, it remains unclear who actually generates which knowledge, who participates in the creation of critical publics and how they do so, and precisely how they can impact on the construction of new technologies and their management. The question of the validity of the nature–culture difference or its supposed universality plays no role here. Conversely, Collins and Evans are far more specific than Descola when it comes to the practical integration of heterogeneous participants into research. They advocate a both normative and differentiated concept of expertise. In this view, expertise may be based on both experience and knowledge. It is the prerequisite for meaningful co-operation between sociology, scholarship and the public sphere. Participation is, thus, understood as problem-oriented co-operation between scholars and non-scholars. However, the authors consider the unregulated expansion of participation to be of little use and potentially even dangerous. With this differentiated concept of expertise, they are positioned, so to speak, between Dewey and Lippmann: expertise does not exclude experience, but experience alone is not a sufficient criterion for “intelligent action”. Collins and Evans build their argument around the narrative of three “waves” within science studies, which they define as follows. The “first wave” (“the age of authority”) still adhered to the positivist assumption that scholarship stands outside of other social affairs. Scholarship and the public sphere were divided by a clear line, one that separated the “truth class” from the “laity”. In the “second wave” (“the age of democracy”) the establishment of STS, among other things, helped to ensure the growing legitimacy of attempts to abolish the boundary between scholarship and the public sphere. The idea here was that scholarly expertise and political participation ought to merge and that there should be no distinction between them in legal, epistemic or regulatory terms.

Collins, Harry and Robert Evans: “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Experience and Expertise”, in: Social Studies of Science 32 (2002): 235–296.

117

258

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

This is where Collins’s and Evans’s proposed “third wave” (“the age of expertise”) comes in, something they seek to launch through their “sociology of experience and expertise”. Neither the sealing off of scholarship and the public sphere from one another nor their voluntaristic amalgamation can solve the problems identified by Wynne. The goal must instead be to conceptualise the concept of expertise itself in a constructivist, problem-focused and case-oriented manner. Consequently, the authors differentiate between “certified” and “uncertified” specialists. Their respective forms of expertise differ in that the former are mostly scholars, while the latter draw their expertise from experience with technologies. But how can these experiences be integrated? And what sociological knowledge can meaningfully help solve specific problems? Sociologists, as “uncertified specialists”, have three options: (1) “no expertise”, (2) “interactional expertise” and (3) “contributory expertise”. In the course of field research, one might move from the first to the third option: from the absence of any expertise upon entering the field, through the ability to communicate in interesting ways with participants and carry out a sociological analysis, to the analytical penetration of the field, its problems and possible solutions. The “second wave” having raised the issue of the legitimation of expertise, Collins and Evans seek to shed light on this problem not only at the level of political integration but also through a focus on research strategies. Now that the antagonisms by no means exist solely between a professionally recognised expert class and “the rest” but between different specialists and “the rest”, there is a need to recognise both the limits of scholarly participation and the potential of non-scholarly experiential knowledge. These limits become apparent when public outrage comes to the fore under the banner of participation and derives its legitimacy merely from the will to have a say: “The romantic and reckless extension of expertise has many well-known dangers—the public can be wrong.”118 In the case of the sheep farmers studied by Wynne, whose knowledge was not recognised by scientists after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, meanwhile, Collins and Evans contend that ultimately two groups of experts were interacting with one another, one of them without science degrees. This prompts them to conclude: “Each different case of public-domain science will need its own combination of expertise.”119 They call on STS to develop the knowledge it produces systematically in the spirit of ‘contributory expertise’ and to act as a translator between scholarship and the public sphere by exploring ways of shaping social reality that can be meaningfully structured through empirical observation. Sheila Jasanoff has sharply criticised this approach. She considers Collins and Evans’s proposal a relapse into a positivist phase, which overlooks the fact that governments have long understood that their citizens are responsible subjects who are quite capable of contributing to weighty public problems and making decisions. It is problematic, she states, that some still seek to identify the limits to participation rather than ensuring that these continue to expand. She argues in her essay “STS and 118 119

Ibid., p. 271. Ibid.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

259

Public Policy: Getting beyond Deconstruction” (1999): “[D]emocratic societies have an obligation to fashion meaningful ways of talking about the interactions between science, technology, and politics. In turn, the long-term-viability of STS as an academic discipline depends on our rediscovering how we, as scholars and teachers in the field, can best serve that need.”120 Precisely because STS’s strength lies in pointing up the complex entanglements of scholarship and society, it needs to establish itself more firmly and professionalise in the space between these two realms: “If these efforts succeed, then STS will indeed have much to offer to policy-makers and democratic publics in the twenty-first century.”121 Even if the status and limits of expertise and experience are contested, they suggest a path towards establishing, in the spirit of democratic experimentalism, heterogeneous forms of co-operation to tackle public problems. This co-operation claims a capacity for structuration not only in sociological terms but also in a sociopolitical sense. But how can this be combined with Descola’s critique of the restriction of sociology to naturalism and “social facts”? One premise that is central to STS and even more important in ANT is the materiality of publics and political participation. This is apparent in a particularly radical way in those ANT studies in which these publics are not thought of in terms of human actors, but of technologies and things. Noortje Marres’s programme of “material participation” is one of the most significant contributions in this regard.

Materialities Noortje Marres examines the contribution of artifacts, objects and material devices to the production of publics. As elaborated in “Test Run II”, she includes consideration of how pragmatist approaches might enrich the investigation of the way in which publics are integrated into controversial situations.122 According to her, the special quality of STS-inspired studies lies in the insight that the formatting of a public problem is not, as critical theory has particularly claimed for a long time, a primarily discursive process. Instead, we are dealing here with socio-material co-productions that reduce the traditional distinction between epistemic, material and political forms of knowledge to absurdity. However, Marres tells us, it is precisely these productive capacities that STS must tap in order to examine the construction of public problems more precisely in light of how publics are integrated. Only then, according to Marres, can we define STS’s contribution to political theory more clearly and, thus, to theories of society as well. She discerns a significant potential source of stabilization for STS in John Dewey’s experimental logic of inquiry because Dewey did not see ‘democracy’ as an ideal but as a site of the

Jasanoff, Sheila: “STS and Public Policy: Getting beyond Deconstruction”, in: Science, Technology & Society 4/1 (1999), p. 61. 121 Ibid., p. 70. 122 See Marres, “The Issue Deserves More Credit”. 120

260

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Fig. 5.4 Noortje Marres in 2014 at the FORCAST Summer School for Controversy in Paris © Noortje Marres

practically necessary collective processing of problems. Moreover, Dewey already recognised the performative influence of technology and industry on the public. In light of the “participative turn”, Marres refers to “material participation”, underlining STS’s transdisciplinary research approach. Marres’s empirical research fields, meanwhile, include ecological sustainability and digital social research (Fig. 5.4).123 Photo Marres What do things do for and with publics? Marres explores in her book Material Participation. Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics (2012)124 how non-human entities—such as trees or nuclear power stations—can mobilise publics. She does not examine material participation in light of what she views as the obsolete question of whether it has “agency”. Instead, she works on the assumption that things play an important if not crucial role in the production and structuration of public participation. Hence, her main goal is to bring out the “normative differences” between these forms of participation.125 Marres takes artifacts as her starting point in order to examine participation as a specific form of social co-operation. This is nothing less than an investigation of objects’ political capacities. Marres, thus, 123 For examples of her work in these two fields, see: Asdal, Kristin and Noortje Marres: “Performing Environmental Change: The Politics of Social Science Methods”, in: Environment and Planning A/46 (2014): 2055–2064; Marres, Noortje and David Moats: “Mapping Controversies with Social Media: The Case for Symmetry”, in: Social Media and Society 1–2 (2015): 1–17. 124 In what follows, I refer to Marres, Material Participation. 125 Ibid., p. 2.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

261

positions herself in opposition to an anthropocentric and discourse-centred view of critical publics. Marres shows that the contribution of things and technologies to these publics is undeniable in the world of today. The “Arab Spring” provides just one example of the kind of technology-based interpretive competencies Jasanoff ascribes to publics. Nevertheless, these devices are rarely viewed symmetrically—in the spirit of ANT— as constitutive of public participation and, according to Marres, there are historical reasons for this. Occidental societies, she contends, are based essentially on an ontology rooted in language and writing. While the “practice turn” and the “pragmatic turn” have already driven a swathe through these certainties, ultimately even sociologies declaring themselves committed to “theories of practice” or “pragmatism” have failed to move beyond discourse analysis. Marres, by contrast, advocates an empiricist and experimentalist theory-of-society of participatory research that identifies critical publics not as causes but as effects of specific ways of deploying technology. We are dealing here with objects, devices, facilities and things—not just subjects—that clearly acquire political competences, according to Marres and Javier Lezaun in a joint article.126 In addition to the trees and nuclear power stations mentioned above, we can add other candidates to the list of the usual suspects (language, ideas, organisations, parliaments, elections, and so on), such as water containers and water filters, lifeboats on the Mediterranean or devices measuring energy consumption and emissions. These artifacts have political and moral competencies, which Marres and her colleagues have made it their task to fathom.127 We could relate this to Collins and Evans’s examination of the definition of experts. If technologies are “read” as the starting point for critical publics (we might think of the recent air quality measurements in Beijing or Paris indicating severe smog levels), they enable and structure specific forms of public (and often heterogeneous) co-operation. Marres and Lezaun note that objects have only rarely departed from their latent status even in STS and ANT, despite their claims of symmetry.128 They criticise STS for having opened the black box of science and technology only to keep it closed when it comes to the materiality of political processes. Latour’s parliamentarisation of things deviates only to a limited extent from the political latency of objects, because, as Latour sees it, their politicisation requires recourse to a category of the political in the form of the parliament. Here we might combine Marres and Lezaun’s critique with the cosmopolitan social ecology put forward by Descola, who also extends the concept of the political. “Material participation” as envisaged by Marres, thus, makes the empiricist assumption that things are potent regarding “everyday publics”, and she brings this out with reference to sustainable model homes or cloud computing. The capacity of technological devices to carry out highly complex

See Marres, Noortje and Javier Lezaun: “Materials and Devices of the Public. An Introduction”, in: Economy and Society 40/4 (2011), p. 491. 127 See ibid., p. 495. 128 See ibid., p. 496. 126

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

262

practices of connecting and separating distinct publics, of delimiting and reassembling, may both enable and prevent participation. As in her study on the linkage of STS and pragmatism, Marres hopes for a “material turn” in political science, though this can only be achieved if STS is capable of describing the normative political dimensions of things aptly.129 What we are seeing here is the renewal of the experimentalist theory of society, whose potential I seek to bring out. With this perspective in mind, I discuss in what follows other studies produced by STS that refer to the performing and the “interand transdisciplining” characteristics of critical publics.

5.3.2.4

Participating II: Performing, Inter- and Transdisciplining

Performing The idea that non-human actors have a constitutive function for co-operation and public participation goes back to ANT studies that spotlight the performative character of objects. Objects help to enact the social. John Law developed the concept of “relational materialism” in his aforementioned study Organizing Modernity (1994).130 He assumes that modernity is not a social order but a perpetual ordering. This is a recursive process bound up with participants’ performance. Law derived this concept from his study of the Portuguese expansion in the sixteenth century, which he described initially through the sociology-of-technology term “heterogeneous engineering”.131 The emphasis on heterogeneity and contingency is one of the core elements of ANT, which Law conceptualises in a relational fashion regarding the participation of humans and non-human entities. Materialities must be understood relationally within actor networks because their capacity to stabilize political decisions (in the form of a legal text, for example) or mobilise them (through the deployment of a rescue ship in the Mediterranean) varies in form and duration. Materialities hold networks together, disrupt or loosen them, while fostering or impeding reflexive action. The social is, thus, brought into action in a performative way. However discourse-heavy our society may be, it is difficult to identify a social situation that does entirely without non-human contributors. Marres has made this insight productive regarding the political arena. But what exactly does ANT mean by “performance”?132 Endre Dányi deals with similar issues. See Dányi, Endre: “Politics Beyond Words. Ethnography of Political Institutions”, in: Wodak, Ruth and Forchtner, Bernhard (eds.): Routledge Handbook of Language & Politics, London: Routledge 2017, p. 291–305. 130 See Law, Organizing Modernity, p. 100f. 131 See Law, John: “On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India”, in John Law (ed): Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge, Henley, 1986, p. 234–263. 132 In her important study on the “aesthetics of the performative”, Erika Fischer-Lichte has produced a sociologically informed and profound analysis of the concept of performance as it is used chiefly 129

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

263

John Law and John Urry explore the performativity of sociological research methods In their essay “Enacting the Social” (2004).133 While Collins and Evans made the possibility of social scientific co-operation with critical publics dependent on the extent to which sociologists acquire case-related expertise on a predefined set of issues, Law and Urry approach the issue at the level of methodology. In accordance with the ANT perspective and building on ethnomethodology, their initial assumption is that every sociological intervention contributes to the performative transformation of a given field. The implication here is that just as nonhuman artifacts are involved in processes of participation, the events in question are affected by sociological participants, their presence, theories and methods. This observation, which seems banal at first sight, becomes interesting when it comes to the difference between sociological representation and a co-operative research practice, as discussed at the start of this chapter. As Law and Urry see it, adopting a politics of representation—a public sociology, in other words—in order to supplant a sociological research practice intended to achieve co-operation with critical publics is not an option for two reasons: Firstly, sociological interventions are productive and performative because they contribute to social change. Law and Urry derive this assumption from the early (British) history of sociology, which, from the outset, presented itself as a “crisis science” with ameliorist aspirations. Sociological knowledge was supposed to provide an enhanced understanding of social ills and, if possible, help resolve them. Sociology, thus, contributed significantly to the phenomenon of “reflexive modernisation”. This prompts Law and Urry to conclude that “the social sciences, including sociology, are relational or interactive. They participate in, reflect upon, and enact the social in a wide range of locations including the state.”134 Secondly, the relationality of sociological research applies in a specific way to sociological methods: “Our argument is that they are performative. By this we mean that they have effects; they make differences; they enact realities and they can help to bring into being what they also discover.”135 Hans Zeisel in his brief history of sociography many decades earlier, had dated the beginning of such social scientific interventions to the year 1641.136 What is probably the first demographic report in Western history was composed following Cromwell’s victory over the insurgent Irish. It was the basis for the colonisation of Ireland by the English and, thus, created both a country and a colony. Helen Tilley has examined these entanglements within

within the field of aesthetics and the cultural sciences. I am unable to delve further into this research here. See Fischer-Lichte, Erika: The Transformative Power of Performance. A New Aesthetics, London: Routledge 2008. 133 Law and Urry, “Enacting the Social”. 134 Ibid., p. 392, original emphasis. 135 Ibid., p. 392f, original emphasis. 136 See Zeisel, Hans: “Zur Geschichte der Soziographie”, p. 113f.

264

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

the African continent,137 and these could be broadened in light of the entire history of colonisation. Law and Urry identify Durkheim’s classic study of suicide as the first explicit sociological intervention, which was to be followed by many others. Through the use of statistics, suicide became a political and public problem in the late nineteenth century, the investigation of whose causes was, subsequently, scarcely possible without sociological theories and methods. A number of interesting studies have now appeared on the effects of the census and its interactions with politics and public life. In 2009, for example, French sociologist Emmanuel Didier produced a study entitled En quoi consiste l’Amérique? Les Statistiques, le New Deal et la Démocratie. This study reveals how the objectifying practices of statistics in the 1920s and 1930s helped constitute the US as a political entity, the organisation of its government and its social self-image.138 These historical examples demonstrate the influence of sociological studies, censuses and demography on political processes— an influence whose epistemological consequences had already preoccupied Bourdieu during his studies in Algeria. Having been sociologically processed and reformatted, the state’s regulation of issues such as deviance, criminality and socioeconomic inequalities has become a public reality. For these reasons, Law and Urry state that social reality is a “relational effect” and here, similar to Dewey, they cite Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.139 They combine realism and constructivism. What conclusions can be drawn from this? For one thing, it is clear that sociological interventions, and here the authors refer to Donna Haraway, are never innocent. The performativity of social research means that different methods produce different realities. However, not all methods can respond appropriately to novel problems and facilitate apt forms of co-operation. The investigation, for example, of public problems, such as species loss or climate change, is impeded epistemically by analytical instruments of a traditional and nationally circumscribed character: “[S]ocial science method has problems in understanding non-linear relationships and flows. [. . .] Our sense is, however, that they are urgently required if we are to make better sense of global ‘connections’.”140 Methods must, therefore, be decentred. Their performativity exhibits worrying lacunae, which engender the reproduction of outdated realities. If methods are political, then sociological methods must take active account of the transversal and transnational character of social change: “The fleeting, the ephemeral, the geographically distributed, and the suddenly proximate are of increasing importance in current senses of the social.”141 For these reasons, the authors call for a fundamental renewal of

137

See Tilley, Helen: Africa as a Living Laboratory. Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge 1870-1950, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2011. 138 See Didier, Emmanuel: En quoi consiste l’Amérique? 139 Law and Urry, “Enacting the Social”, p. 395. 140 Ibid., p. 400. 141 Ibid., p. 403.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

265

sociological methodologies,142 which must keep pace with the complex and multiple dynamics of contemporary global societies. This is in line with the “ethics of relative universalism” formulated by Descola. Both STS and ANT now offer a rich and highly mobile field of exploration in this regard. The attempt to get to grips with environmental and technological disasters, the issue of expertise and the materiality of the political has shown that the challenges identified by Law and Urry arise both within the discipline and beyond it. A form of methodological development is, thus, required that draws on inter- and transdisciplinary constellations. These form the foundation for a theory-of-society experimentalism that consists of the practice of mutual “inter- and transdisciplining”.

Inter- and Transdisciplining The admittedly somewhat cumbersome term “inter- and transdisciplining” is understood here as a prerequisite for specific cases of co-operation in which the participants are prepared to learn from one another through the process of participation. Successful and competent heterogeneous co-operation requires co-ordinates that stabilize the capacity for structuration. Wynne observed a reluctance to include everyday practices in the assessment of technological risks and disasters. Collins and Evans proposed a concept of expertise that gradually integrates these forms of practice and experiences into attempts to solve public problems. Marres declares technologies and artefacts themselves experts within critical publics, in the sense that they act as an apparatus for arguments, infrastructures and differentiation. Law and Urry brought out the performative effect of social scientific methods that take into account the geopolitical dynamics that have become a prerequisite for heterogeneous co-operation. What all these endeavours have in common is that they only make sense in interand transdisciplinary contexts. If sociologists wish to propose meaningful solutions to public problems and if these proposals are to offer ways of incorporating participants who have acquired professional knowledge or practical experience in the field at issue, sociologists must be willing and able to move away from discipline-specific limitations. As a crisis-focused discipline, and even more as an experiential one, sociology is challenged not only to carry out research on public problems but to do so in co-operation with other scholars and specialists. Science and technology studies have been practicing this for decades. Ongoing debates, however, are testimony to the need to clear up certain issues. Drawing on the criticisms of traditional sociological methodologies put forward by Descola, Marres, Law and Urry, I aim to shed light on participation on the premise of

142

John Law has lent weight to this call in a book: Law, John: After Method. Mess in Social Science Research, London: Routledge 2004.

266

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

interdisciplinary co-operation.143 Interdisciplinarity has not only become the order of the day in the academic context. It also operates within a highly complex nexus of only partially overlapping disciplinary histories and conjunctures, national peculiarities and limitations, and material and political asymmetries. The associated debate now fills entire books. I limit myself to the question of how inter- and transdisciplinary co-operation as envisaged in the approaches discussed here can be understood as a reciprocal “disciplining”. In the next section, I illustrate this by elucidating the modus operandi of ‘collaborating’. Andrew Barry and Georgina Born grapple with the relationship between interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in their introduction to the anthology Interdisciplinarity. Reconfigurations of the Social and the Natural Sciences.144 Interdisciplinarity refers to co-operation between different disciplines on a topic developed out of an academic debate. Transdisciplinarity reaches beyond interdisciplinary exchange. I understand transdisciplinarity as a form of heterogeneous co-operation in which scholars and non-scholars are involved. Rather than originating (mainly) in an internal academic debate, this co-operative endeavour takes up a public issue.145 But how might we define these forms of co-operation and political participation in today’s world? Barry and Born address the debate on “mode 2” knowledge production. Helga Nowotny and colleagues, treading similar ground to Law and Urry, advocated a form of methodological adaptation to the global political change so clearly in evidence in the early 2000s.146 “Mode 1” scholarship—in brief—corresponds to the traditional sociological research paradigms as they originated in the nineteenth century. “Mode 2” scholarship goes beyond this by assuming the following changes. (1) Interdisciplinary research is increasingly being replaced by transdisciplinary research, since the problems it deals with are of extra-disciplinary origin; (2) new criteria for evaluating good scholarship have ousted traditional and discipline-typical forms of assessment; (3) rather than a “culture of autonomy”, the present-day scholarly ethos is driven by a “culture of responsibility”; (4) the importance of the practical applicability of research results has grown; and (5) we can observe a proliferation and decentralisation of locations outside of universities in which socially relevant knowledge is produced. These observations confirm the culturalisation of the experiment that I have identified outside the science lab and provide further arguments for

143 Martin Reinhart and I have already put forward some initial ideas on this topic: Bogusz, Tanja and Martin Reinhart: “Öffentliche Soziologie als experimentalistische Kollaboration. Zum Verhältnis von Theorie und Methode im Kontext disruptiven sozialen Wandels”, in: Selke, Stefan and Annette Treibel-Illian (eds.): Öffentliche Gesellschaftswissenschaften. Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2017, p. 345–359. 144 Barry and Born, Interdisciplinarity, p. 1–56. 145 Barry and Born subsume trans- and interdisciplinarity under the term “interdisciplinarity”. They contend that the concept of transdisciplinarity is of significance in the German- and Frenchspeaking, but not in the Anglo-American world. 146 See Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons: Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Polity Press: Oxford 2001.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

267

a sociological experimentalism. At the same time, the general affirmation of interand transdisciplinarity should be treated with caution. This affirmation appears promising but can be as misleading as it is unsettling. Programmatic statements by the major research institutions in Europe and the US praise transdisciplinarity and, in particular, call for innovative research at the interface of the natural and social sciences. At the same time, however, there is a relative lack of clarity about what the interconnections between disciplines, let alone the integration of non-scholarly knowledge, might actually look like in practice.147 Interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are not historical novelties. Nor is research motivated everywhere and to the same extent by the imperatives highlighted by Nowotny and colleagues. The productivity of this debate is located at two other levels. Firstly, it points to a curiosity about and openness to the current global political situation, which is consistent with the concerns of Descola’s cosmopolitan anthropology and the transnational reorientation of sociological methodologies called for by Law and Urry. Secondly, this debate identifies a need for mutual learning processes anchored in theories of society, which is progress in itself. As Matthias Groß, Holger Hoffmann-Riehm and Wolfgang Krohn conclude in their study of “real-world experiments”, this implies an experimentalist research stance that consists of being open to surprises and able to adapt tried-and-tested instruments to unanticipated circumstances and situations.148 Thirdly, transdisciplinary research holds out the prospect of continuous epistemic change, as prefigured in Dewey’s logic of inquiry and currently advocated, quite rightly, in STS and socio-cultural anthropology. Observation of the performative production of issues and research fields makes it evident that disciplines are in themselves highly fragmented and heterogeneous undertakings. How they might co-operate with one another on a problem-related basis, however, remains an open and promising field of exploration in terms of both research practice and theories of society. Regarding the development of methods, the field of transdisciplinary research opens up a still largely untapped area of exploration for ethnography, currently a hub for efforts at methodological innovation within the social sciences. As historical examples from statistics show, however, ethnography neither invented nor has a monopoly on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Today, though, “mixed methods” are becoming increasingly important in university curricula, which can help establish interdisciplinary heuristics at the interface of social sciences and engineering, and biological and cultural sciences, and, thus, generate heterogeneous forms of co-operation. Barry and Born see a particular challenge in the question of which mode of interdisciplinarity is sought. The prerequisites for 147

Georg Krücken has highlighted the persistence of structural, organisational and institutional boundaries that continue to impede the implementation of inter- and transdisciplinary research. See Krücken, Georg: “Rezension zu Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, Michael Gibbons: ‘Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty’. Polity Press: Oxford 2001”, in: Die Hochschule 1 (2003): 237–241. 148 Groß, Hoffmann-Riehm and Krohn, Realexperimente, p. 19f.

268

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

co-operation on equal terms are often lacking, particularly when natural and social scientists work together. Instead of subordinating the “social” to “hard scientific facts”, they, therefore, advocate an integrative approach. This would culminate in what I call a practice of mutual “interdisciplining”, that is, an experiment that, like every experiment, is designed to change the elements involved in it. If the performativity of social research, as Law and Urry emphasise, implies social change, then the process of “interdisciplining” would be the opportunity to help shape such change in terms of theories of society by structuring it methodologically and testing it empirically. This process can also be applied to transdisciplinary research, in which Dewey’s justified concerns about an expertocracy can be overcome at the practical level. In keeping with the sociological experimentalism developed here, Matthias Groß and Michael Stauffacher capture the special features of such research when they write: “Transdisciplinary research is defined by its reference to and analysis of socially relevant problems. In a transdisciplinary perspective stakeholders need to be integrated (ideally) into all steps of the research process, starting from a joint process of framing the problem, moving through a core project phase involving the co-production of knowledge, and leading to a stage at which researchers and stakeholders alike are able to integrate the results that have been jointly obtained into their own respective contexts of application.”149 Participating, therefore, becomes a process of the transdisciplinary fashioning of society with structuring effects. It enables heterogeneous forms of co-operation, although in many respects their empirical implementation is still to be put to the test.

5.3.2.5

Summary

In the “engaged programme” of STS and ANT, the modus operandi of “participating” as a means of investigating and helping to shape critical publics rests on three premises. It practices heterogeneous forms of co-operation with an inter- and transdisciplinary orientation, it draws on an experience-based concept of gradually and collectively developing case-related expertise and it is informed by a normative theory of the political capacities of technologies and artefacts. Through the linkage of realism and constructivism, evidence of the social performativity of sociological interventions is used to develop experimental forms of co-operation. However, I would argue that in an “engaged programme”, elements of the external description of the sociological intervention must be integrated into the investigation, elements that contribute to the gradual stabilization of a shared problem’s epistemic bases. This process of stabilization must adhere to the principle of a capacity for structuration if it seeks to be relevant to not only theories of society but also research practice. This

Groß, Matthias and Michael Stauffacher: “Introduction. Transdisciplinary Environmental Science: Problem-Oriented Projects and Strategic Research Programs”, in: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 39/4 (2014), p. 300.

149

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

269

is congruent with the conditions for the experimental development of democracy as prefigured in Dewey’s logic of inquiry. The models discussed here suggest that STS and ANT primarily make methodrelated, perhaps even methodological, contributions to democratic experimentalism. This means it is a certain theory-of-society underdetermination, as John Law and Karel Williams emphasise in an article on the topic of “government as experiment”,150 that makes experimental action in the public sphere possible in the first place. However, so far, the problem with the relationship between theories of society and methodology has been that the former are deliberately designed in such a way as to predetermine the object of investigation. This has made it virtually impossible to generate experimental knowledge. And even if many theories of society still await empirical “verification”, the inversion of the one-way street, such that empirical and extra-sociological exploration lead to a mature theory of society, can be found at most—at the level of aspiration—in the late work of Ulrich Beck. Yet, there is no obvious reason why a theory of society could not be based on “doing theory”, as is already the case for social theory today, at least in part. If theories of society serve as hypothetical starting points for comparative social research, then it is crucial to facilitate their development through a dialogue between theory and empirical knowledge. Theories of society entail the possibility of comparing societies. Descola’s critical social ecology has already made it clear how the symmetrical comparison of different ontologies of nature can unsettle the implicit universalisms of traditional theories of society. Such unsettling, as well as the irritations and surprises induced by an experimental research style, hold out the prospect of a theory of society of heterogeneous co-operation. The crucial criterion for this is that the methodological procedures mentioned above have a capacity for structuration. These procedures should prove stabilizing, empirically speaking, for the particular case observed (social trope) and capable of structuration at the analytical level, in the sense that the resulting theory of society of heterogeneous forms of co-operation can be generalised sufficiently to provide, as a hypothesis, an occasion for further research (the constitution of objects). This criterion seems to me to be sufficiently met in the examples mentioned above. As a special form of heterogeneous co-operation, participating shows the same complementarity between social trope and investigative strategy as is characteristic of experimentalism as a whole. This complementarity finds reflection in STS regarding the integration of public problems and a collaborative approach facilitated by interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary interventions. A theory-of-society concept of participating of this kind will, thus, have to be assessed by whether and, if so, which forms of sociological intervention are intended to structure social change. This concept leads from methodology to a theory of society—and not the other way around—by comparing the material conditions and potential for scholarly and political integration. This is a concept that can “interdiscipline and transdiscipline” those involved by implementing the procedure set out by Groß and Stauffacher.

150

Law and Williams, “A State of Unlearning?”

270

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

The topic of the ecological crisis currently offers a particularly promising opportunity to implement such a procedure. Having explored the debate on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways of dealing with problems, I now examine the potential for and limits of heterogeneous co-operation with reference to transdisciplinary research on biodiversity.

5.3.3

“Collaborating”: A Marine Biology Expedition with Dewey or “Doing Biodiversity”

5.3.3.1

Biodiversity Research as a Methodological and Theory-of-Society Challenge

We can bring out the theory-of-society implications of an experimentalist concept of co-operating by considering STS in light of Dewey’s theory of inquiry. There has been a particularly intense debate on inter- and transdisciplinarity in this field, as the previous section laid bare. In what follows, I present the practice of heterogeneous co-operation with reference to a sociology-of-science study on taxonomic biodiversity research. I show here the modus operandi of “collaborating” to be a specific form of heterogeneous co-operating that is mindful that ontologies of nature vary across the world. What is “biodiversity research”? Current discussions in the environmental sciences and science studies emphasise the diverse and contingent character of this field. Since the Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 196 countries, as well as the EU Commission, have committed to implementing it; the key aim being to protect biological diversity with the backing of the state. The “Rio 20+” conference was held in the same city in 2012, updating the agreement and furnishing it with enhanced scientific monitoring mechanisms centred on promoting a ‘green’ economy and technologies, and working towards equality in global resource use. The same year, the Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was founded in Panama, which specialises in linking the natural scientific study of biodiversity loss and species protection with the deployment of socio-political instruments to monitor and manage the biodiversity crisis. In the wake of these measures, the interdisciplinary field of biodiversity research has become an established concept. As a result of the biodiversity crisis, disciplines that were still strictly separate from each other only a few decades ago have specialised in this subject and been prompted to collaborate with one another: natural, political and economic sciences, sociology, anthropology, STS, sustainability science, environmental science, geology, biology and climate science. Biodiversity research, thus, creates new alliances beyond established disciplinary boundaries, alliances that concurrently generate interesting nature–culture connections. Large-scale research programmes on biodiversity research have been announced since 2010, for example, by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

271

Forschung), the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and the European Research Council (ERC). These bodies emphasise the need to establish interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge production and co-operation. The BMBF, for example, states: “Cooperation between the natural, economic and social sciences as well as intensive collaboration with other interest groups are crucial to the success of these research projects. At the national and international level, projects are thus being developed in cooperation with decisionmakers and various actors in the target regions. This is generating strategies for action and concepts of usage intended to achieve the sustainable use of biological diversity.”151 Hence, in accordance with the arguments put forward by Nowotny, Barry and Born, we can observe a fundamental change in the socio-political framework within which heterogeneous co-operating is now being pursued in view of the ecological crisis. This also compels us to scrutinize the universalist premises inherent in species protection. Philippe Descola criticises the often anthropocentric or ecocentric approach associated with this imperative, an approach focused on the “intrinsic value granted to nature”, and he asks “Who does nature belong to? And for whom is it to be protected?”152 The universalist standpoint, Descola tells us, fails to acknowledge that “there are no absolute and scientifically sound criteria that we might adduce to establish universally recognized values governing the protection of natural and cultural goods”.153 The universality of these values must, therefore, be the “result of a debate and a compromise, that is, a collective decision”.154 In terms of experimentalism, this would mean starting with a shared definition of a problem, a definition that breaks with the aporias of modernity and naturalism when it comes to dealing with non-Western ontologies of nature. This gives rise to three key questions: (1) under what conditions should transdisciplinary biodiversity research take place? (2) How can non-academic collectives be integrated into the processes of studying biodiversity and knowledge production as a whole? (3) What theory-ofsociety consequences can be derived from the practice of heterogeneous co-operating? In what follows, I discuss these questions with reference to a report based on an ethnography I carried out in a taxonomic division of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle or MNHN), a division I accompanied on a marine biodiversity expedition to PNG in 2012.155 Heterogeneous co-operating could be observed here as an effect of a scientific practice that seeks to meet a number of different requirements, but that 151

https://www.bmbf.de/de/biodiversitaet-forschung-fuer-die-artenvielfalt-343.html, accessed 3 September 2021. 152 Descola, “Wem gehört die Natur?” 153 Ibid., p. 72. 154 Ibid. 155 This report was a first attempt to order my ethnographic data in terms of its relevance to sociological experimentalism and heterogenous cooperation. I have yet to fully analyse and evaluate this data. My thanks to the DAAD and the Fondation der Maison des Sciences de l’Homme for a postdoctoral scholarship for 2011–2012 that enabled me to carry out my laboratory study at the

272

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

largely generates the definition of the problem (species extinction) and the solution (species protection). The expedition team I studied is based at the MNHN. These are taxonomists who are dedicated to the classification of marine biological evolution and biodiversity and specialise in marine invertebrates (mussels, crustaceans, sponges). My investigation comprised a three-month laboratory study in the taxonomic laboratories of the MNHN (January–March 2012), an ethnography of an expedition to the coast of Madang province (and parts of the ‘Bismarck Archipelago’) in PNG (November and December 2012), and a follow-up study at the Biological Station of Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand II, in Besse (France), where the team carried out a first general survey of the animals collected in Madang (March 2013). The team is headed by Professor Philippe Bouchet and has many years of experience with expeditions, which began in 1968. The data collection is carried out through a variety of activities and technologies: satellite-aided mapping of the habitats of coastal flora and fauna, collecting at sea, the initial sorting of marine animals in the expedition laboratory and their preparation for molecular genetic sequencing. With the help of these techniques, knowledge of the global stock of marine life and its diversity is mobilised and continuously expanded through morphological and standardized digital classification. The information obtained and the taxonomic classifications are entered into the online survey system known as the Marine Barcode of Life (MarBOL).156 The first expedition carried out by this group, which received a great deal of media attention, took place in 2006. It took the team to Vanuatu and New Caledonia, two Pacific islands in Melanesia known to ethnologists and anthropologists due to Bronislaw Malinowski’s classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific.157 A large group of scientific experts, NGOs and two (female) anthropologists took part in this expedition.158 New Caledonia is a former French colony that is still among France’s overseas territories (French: DOM-TOM or Départements et Territoires d’OutreMer). The Vanuatu expedition, which rose to public prominence under the name “Santo 2006”, was realised with the involvement of the following organisations: the

MNHN in Paris and to the Fritz Thyssen-Stiftung for a travel grant that facilitated my participation in the expedition to PNG in 2012, AZ 50.12.0.033. 156 See http://www.marinebarcoding.org/, now “International Barcode of Life”: http://ibol.org/, accessed 5 September 2022. 157 See Malinowski, Bronislaw: Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1922 (Enhanced Edition: Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press 2013). 158 See Bouchet, Philippe, Hervé Le Guyader and Olivier Pascal (eds.): The Natural History of Santo, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2011, Faugère, Elsa: “L’exploration contemporaine de la biodiversité. Approche anthropologique de l’expédition Santo 2006”, in: Journal de la Société des Océanistes 126/127 (2008): 196–205, and Faugère, Elsa: Le making-of des grandes expéditions. Anthropologie des sciences de terrain, Marseille: Les Éditions la Discussion 2019.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

273

Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the NGO Pro Natura International159 and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), formerly the Office de la recherche scientifique et technique d’Outre-Mer (ORSTOM).160 The “Santo” expedition served as a template for the expedition to the coast of Madang in 2012/2013. The public portrayals of these expeditions are dominated by narratives of discovery and the expansion of international networks and research territories as values sui generis. This is mirrored in the anthropological report on the Santo expedition of 2006. Elsa Faugère declares: “[The Santo Expedition] represents a new type of scientific expedition, new in terms of its scale, its investigative scope, its pluridisciplinarity, its mediatization, the respect it showed for the ethical guidelines laid down by the biodiversity convention, the considerable financial contribution from private sector sponsors and the invasive invertebrate species, which represented an as yet little researched area of biodiversity.”161 But how was the unglamorous taxonomic practice of collecting and classifying rather uncharismatic species transformed into such a complex and public adventure? In order to understand the potential and limits of taxonomic biodiversity research better, in what follows, I seek to explain how this question can help us make full use of Sennett’s approach to heterogeneous co-operation. This will involve modelling the theory-of-society foundations of experimentalism to generate a heuristic.

The Pro Natura International NGO is the main sponsor of the long-term research project “Our Planet Reviewed. Taking a Closer Look on Biodiversity Hotspots”, in the context of which the expedition to PNG was carried out. This NGO was founded in Brazil in 1985, is headquartered in Paris and headed by former Imperial Chemical Industries manager Guy Reinaud. It receives funding from numerous multinational corporations, such as Coca Cola, L’Oréal, Total, Bayer and Air France, as well as non-profit foundations such as the Natural History Museum in London, the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and the United Nations. 160 The IRD was founded in the 1930s under a different name with the goal of developing a “colonial science”. After the fall of the Vichy regime, it altered its political orientation and changed its name to ORSTOM (Office Français de la Recherche Scientique et Technique Outre Mer), which views itself as a collaborative project facilitating scientific and technological co-operation (see https://en.ird.fr/history, accessed 5 September 2021). Since the 1960s and the liberation of many former colonies, particularly in Africa, many young people in France, including Bouchet himself, have organised either their military service (see Bouchet, Philippe et al.: “A Quarter-Century of Deep-Sea Malacological Exploration in the South and West Pacific: Where Do We Stand? How Far to Go?”, in: Bouchet, Philippe et al. [eds.]: Tropical Deep-Sea Benthos 25. Mémoires du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle 196 [2008], p. 12) or their first ethnographic studies overseas through ORSTOM. The latter included the then 26-year-old Bruno Latour, who carried out a study on the sociology of development in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, from 1973 to 1976. The Abidjan study was a forerunner of Latour’s first laboratory study, which he published with Steve Woolgar in 1979 under the title Laboratory Life. On the fundamental importance of his African field experience to Latour’s later interest in the development of laboratory studies, see Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 273f. and Latour, Science in Action, p. 203f. 161 Faugère, “L’exploration contemporaine de la biodiversité”, p. 195. 159

274

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Table 5.2 The four stages of experimental action following Dewey and Callon Stage I II III IV

5.3.3.2

Dewey Determination of a problem Determining of a problem-solution Reasoning Operational character of facts-meanings

Callon Problematisation Interessement Enrolment Mobilisation

What Is Heterogeneous Co-Operation? Pragmatism and Science Studies

In the second and third “test runs”, I brought out the proximity between Dewey’s experimentalism and science studies regarding two modi operandi, identifying the potential for a “methodological pragmatism” through the modus operandi of “trialling” (social theory), and highlighting the modus operandi of “participating” (theory of society). I also discussed the theory-of-society aspect in the context of inter- and transdisciplinary co-operation. We can now clarify the theory-of-society kinship between Dewey and STS by taking another comparative look at the research stages Dewey elaborated in his Logic and the four stages of the sociology of translation as envisaged by Callon. Combining these two approaches regarding the theory-of-society potential of experimentalism offers key analytical and empirical advantages. Firstly, Dewey’s laboratory concept was intended to generate a heuristic capable of capturing the active, co-operative management of uncertainties in both scholarship and society. As he saw it, it was crucial to reform the logical thought of his day, which tended to put forward a centralist or teleological perspective. For Dewey, such reform would necessitate the development of a general method for every form of investigation. This would appear to be of tremendous contemporary relevance given the current need for methodological innovations to facilitate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that can help us cope with the biodiversity crisis. Secondly, Callon’s study of the loss of the Breton scallops and the attempt to get them back did more than provide an explicit method of investigation for ANT. In addition, this method was developed in light of the empirical problem of how marine sciences and the public might collaborate. Callon’s “classic”, therefore, offers an excellent model for the field investigated by the Parisian taxonomists, namely, the study of and threats to marine species and the question of how academic biodiversity research can be combined with a local and, at the same time, public interest in species conservation. I reproduce below the table presented in Test Run II to facilitate the comparison between Dewey and Callon. Once again, I have combined the first two stages identified by Dewey into a single stage (Table 5.2). Before elucidating the four stages with reference to my empirical material, I would like to point out some similarities and differences between the approaches of Dewey and Callon. From Dewey’s perspective, experiments generate “intelligent” or “problem-solving” action that consists of the definition, manipulation and requalification of an unfamiliar situation. But as Marres notes, the term

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

275

“problem-solving” is misleading regarding the public sphere: “[T]he term ‘issue’ is more appropriate than the notion of ‘problem’ to characterise STS perspectives on public affairs.”162 Marres’s comment criticises Dewey’s latently positivist tone, which he adopted due to his conviction that the natural scientific methods and terminology of his day articulated the concerns of experimentalism far more succinctly than the terms available in epistemology or journalism. He was concerned here with the potential to determine options for action within limited parameters. The concept of “issue formation” proposed by Marres is, in fact, a much more effective way of conveying the processual substance—as also envisaged by Dewey—of attempts to tackle political problems and of scientific co-operation. In what follows, then, I discuss “doing biodiversity”—that is, generating a shared perspective on a shared problem—through the lens of ‘issue formation’, in other words, as the processing of a problem or as problematisation, rather than problem-solving. In light of the expedition to PNG, I flesh out the process of problematisation with reference to the modus operandi of collaborating. In addition to this difference, there is a crucial congruence between Dewey and ANT. This consists of the experience-based nature of experimental knowledge production. Since the result of an experiment can be hypothetically anticipated but cannot be determined teleologically in advance, explanations informed by experimental procedures lead to a transformation of not only the object of investigation but also the experiences of those involved. This conceptual parallel between the constitution and transformation of objects underlines the fact that Dewey and ANT are pursuing a shared epistemic interest. While Dewey essentially examined the issue of co-operation in the context of public democracy, Callon’s study discusses co-operation in terms of sociotechnical translation and linkage. The “engaged programme” currently being debated by scholars has shown that, in terms of research practice, STS has shifted into the political arena, a development of significance to my investigation. Callon’s study of the co-production of a stable infrastructure intended to prevent the extinction of the Breton scallops brings together technological, human and non-human entities and collectives. These assemblages are characterised by a growing desire to co-operate at every stage. We might even say that their existence depends on the co-operation of heterogeneous participants. This brings me to the third set of heuristic instruments that I aim to render productive for the present investigation—the pragmatic sociology of critique.

5.3.3.3

The Pragmatic Sociology of Critique: Ordering Biodiversity Loss

I now discuss the general mechanisms that paved the way for research on this topic to help us to understand the political impact of biodiversity loss better. Today, these

162

Marres, “The Issue Deserves more Credit”, p. 768.

276

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Table 5.3 From experimentalism to biodiversity research: the four stages Stage I II III IV

Dewey Determination of a problem Determining of a problem-solution Reasoning

Callon Problematisation

Operational character of facts-meanings

Mobilisation

Interessement Enrolment

Boltanski & Thévenot Crisis/ controversy Generalisation Equivalence formation Trial/ compromise

Biodiversity research Ecological crisis & ecological critique ‘Biodiversity’ as a public problem Green worlds: Rio 20+, IPBES, other NGOs Citizen sciences, research, species protection

mechanisms are among the ethical and logistical prerequisites for the large-scale scientific expeditions organised and implemented by the global North. A number of interesting interpretations have been put forward in this regard. Particular attention is often paid here to the interrelationships between scholarly, expert and everyday knowledge, as well as between academic and non-academic contributions to sustainability research.163 In addition to these perspectives, I propose a four-stage model in which biodiversity research is processed and experienced through co-operating or collaborating. This model combines Dewey’s experimentalism with ANT and the pragmatic sociology of critique following Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. As discussed in “Test Run II”, Boltanski and Thévenot developed the analytical model of the “pragmatic sociology of justification and critique” in the late 1980s. This model was based on the assumption that critique can be a means of ordering diverse frames of reference. It follows that critique may trigger social transformations. Rather than understanding sociology as a critical science, in this view, sociologists investigate critical forms of social practice realised by people and objects. In this programme, critique and the public controversies it engenders act as an apparatus for social change. In a similar way, I understand taxonomic biodiversity research as a device that facilitates experimental action. The following table shows how Dewey’s and Callon’s four experimental stages transition into the sociology of critique and how they reach the theory-of-society level of biodiversity research. I then elucidate the individual stages step by step (Table 5.3).

163

See Orstrom, Elinor: Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge. Cambridge University Press 1990; Granjou, Céline and Isabelle Mauz: “Avant-propos: Gouverner par les scénarios? Comment les institutions gouvernementales anticipent l’avenir de la biodiversité”, in: Granjou, Céline and Isabelle Mauz (eds.): Les promesses de la biodiversité, special issue of Quaderni – Communication, technologies, pouvoir, Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme 2011, pp. 5–11; Mehring, Marion: “How to Frame Social-Ecological Biodiversity Research – A Methodological Comparison between two Approaches of Social-Ecological Systems”, in: Friedrich, Jan et al. (eds.): Beiträge der Fachtagung Biodiversität und Gesellschaft. Gesellschaftliche Dimensionen von Schutz und Nutzung biologischer Vielfalt, Göttingen, 14.–16.11.2012. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag 2013, p. 91–98.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

277

Stage I As Dewey sees it, a crisis is an event that invites experimental action. This is the factor in his experimental approach and Callon’s sociology of translation that induces problematisation. Following Boltanski and Thévenot, crises are engendered by critique, or themselves give rise to public critique, which generates new social modes of ordering and justification. In line with this, we can model the ecological crisis of species extinction in two ways. Firstly, we can conceptualise it as a crisis that stimulates problematisation, especially within the field of academic scholarship, which has had a decisive influence on the public concept of nature since the 1980s. Secondly, we can think of biodiversity loss as the vehicle for a social critique that has sparked public controversy over the destructive effects of industrialisation and accelerating technological development. At the same time, we need to be alert to the fact that problematisation reflects a modern ontology of nature rooted in the positive sciences. As I showed with reference to Descola’s critical social ecology, the problematisation of biodiversity loss is not a universal but a modern phenomenon.

Stage II But how does critique become a public problem? Once the problem has been institutionalized by critique, solutions or, in Marres’s terms, steps towards processing the problem are determined. In the case of species extinction, this determination was made through the formation of alliances (“interessement”) and the generalisation of a local ontology to generate a global problem, subsequently known as “biodiversity”164 or “biodiversity loss”. At the beginning of the 1990s, according to biologist Libby Robin, the term biodiversity became “both a scientific and a social tool, and a key concept for science, management and governance”.165 “Biodiversity” as a device for generalisation, also becomes a catalyst for large-scale research programmes and scientific expertise. At the same time, the term reflects a transdisciplinary fusion of nature and culture that is associated with a call for citizens, scientists and politicians to protect the environment. Heterogeneous co-operation becomes possible and is, in fact, explicitly advocated.

164

See, for example, Wilson, Edward O.: The Diversity of Life, London: Penguin Books 2001. Robin, Libby: “The Rise of the Idea of Biodiversity: Crises, Responses, and Expertise”, in: Granjou, Céline and Isabel Mauz (eds.): Les promesses de la biodiversité, special issue of Quaderni – Communication, Technologies, Pouvoir. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme 2011, p. 26.

165

278

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Stage III The “doing biodiversity” set in motion in this way has been happening at the international level since the early 1990s and integrates a large number of state, scientific and civil society interventions. This “enrolment” (Callon) is realised through the institutionalization of transnational agreements in which states and NGOs are involved. The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity was the beginning of what Boltanski and Thévenot would describe as the establishment of a justificatory order. The development of justificatory orders is understood here as the practice of creating equivalence between heterogeneous entities that are willing to collaborate and interested in processing problems. In his comparative studies of French and US-American environmental conflicts, Laurent Thévenot has added to the six justificatory orders modelled in On Justification a “green justificatory order”, which can be related directly to the “rise of the idea of biodiversity” (Robin).166 The Convention on Biological Diversity and the founding of the IPBES both contribute to the establishment of the “green justificatory order”. Biodiversity research, thus, becomes the basis of a political and social infrastructure. The various co-operative endeavours linked with this infrastructure have demonstrated their capacity for structuration and shown themselves to be stable—though this tells us nothing about whether the associated aspirations regarding politics and research practice have been fulfilled. As Callon has shown, “enrolment” cannot be equated with the idea that the conflicts between those involved have been resolved. The same applies to equivalence formation, as envisaged by Boltanski and Thévenot. Hence, this stage merely paves the way for the subsequent trialling stage.

Stage IV Once the “green justificatory order” has been established, then, according to the model, it is subjected to “reality tests”.167 According to Boltanski, those involved must carry out “on the one hand, operations exhibiting what creates value [...] and, on the other, operations aiming to recognize whether this value is materialized in the very texture of reality and to attest it by evidence aspiring to general validity”.168 This test consists of scientific and public research into biodiversity loss and ways of achieving species conservation. In Callon’s case study, the trial consists of mobilising allies interested in preserving the scallops.169 The pivotal element of this reality check comes to the fore in the anxious observation of the Pecten maximus larvae: will they enter the collectors? If the animals do so, the scientists can call themselves their representatives. The same goes for the representatives of the

See Thévenot, Moody and Lafaye, “Forms of Valuing Nature”. See Boltanski, On Critique, p. 105f. 168 Ibid., p. 106. 169 See Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 76. 166 167

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

279

fisherfolk along the Saint-Brieuc coast and, in the case of biodiversity, for the transdisciplinary bodies that claim to play representative roles for “nature”. At this point, it is important to point out again that the linkage of the four experimental stages does not adhere to a teleological model of action. Dewey emphasised that the fourth (for him, fifth) stage of trialling particularly represents a phase that opens up new investigations. In addition, each individual stage can be examined as an entire experiment featuring four further stages. In this way, the model makes it possible to delve deeper into specific stages before returning to more general levels of action. Contemporary expeditions in our post-colonial era subject the socio-political concerns inherent in biodiversity research to an intensive empirical test. This extends from the level of everyday classificatory practice170 to the organisation of the largescale measurement of biodiversity rates. “Doing biodiversity” requires localisation of ontological relationships between nature and culture, the global North and the global South, and, finally, the potential for and limits of heterogeneous forms of co-operation. The field of taxonomic biodiversity research shows that there are both communitising and contentious ways of ‘doing biodiversity’. Since 2005, the Parisian taxonomists I observed have organised several expeditions to the global South under the rubric “Our Planet Reviewed. Taking a Closer Look at Biodiversity Hotspots”. In terms of mobilising funds, experts, observers, helpers, technology and artifacts, at the time, the 2012–2013 expedition to PNG was the most ambitious project that had been undertaken. Similar to the Santo Expedition of 2006, this expedition combined marine biological research with studies on land, whose main participants were botanists and entomologists. The terrestrial operations were carried out in the district of Madang and extended from the area around Mount Wilhelm to two lowland stations. The marine biologists were working in Madang’s coastal zone, and it was these researchers on which my study focused. The marine biology expedition group included 70 marine scientists (including 50 men and 20 women) and 65 volunteers, logistical staff and media specialists (including 35 men and 30 women). It was led by Philippe Bouchet (MNHN) and Claude Payri (IRD), a New Caledonia-based specialist in the marine ecology of the Pacific. A total of 135 people from 20 countries were involved directly in the marine biological part of the expedition. According to the Interim Report, the total cost of the expedition was 4.12 million euros. Most of this was covered by the Total Foundation, the (French) Pacific Fund and the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. In the next three sections, I seek to illustrate the complexity of and the specific challenges involved in heterogeneous co-operation in the field of biodiversity research with the help of my model and in light of my study of the Parisian taxonomists. This takes place in three steps. Firstly, I elucidate the disciplinary situation of taxonomists and the interdisciplinary challenges thrown up by the biodiversity crisis. A second step deals with the transdisciplinary challenges posed

170 See Bowker, Geoffrey and Susan Leigh Star: Sorting Things Out. Classification and Its Consequences, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press 1999.

280

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

by heterogeneous co-operation during the expedition to PNG, in light of which I make a distinction between participating and collaborating. In a third variant of the model, I then describe a specific local event during the expedition as an experimental process that might exemplify the modus operandi of collaborating.

5.3.3.4

Biodiversity Research as a Disciplinary Challenge: Taxonomy Between the Molecular Genetic Revolution, Ecological Critique and Species Protection

Initially, taxonomy seemed to benefit the least from the emergence of transdisciplinary biodiversity research as part of a new global “green” community. In the early 1990s, taxonomy, especially the marine biological classification of uncharismatic species, was regarded within biology as necessary but rather unsophisticated basic research that faced three interdisciplinary challenges: firstly, the molecular genetic revolution, secondly, the digital revolution and, thirdly, environmental movements, along with the increasing importance of species protection as a socio-political demand made of research. The tension between the periods, often lasting years if not decades, between the collection of species and their taxonomic classification, on the one hand, and the urgency of species protection, on the other, did not seem to predestine taxonomy to provide an appropriate response to the ecological crisis, as underlined by Philippe Bouchet, Hervé le Guyader and Olivier Pascal in an article on the 2006 Santo Expedition. Due to their different temporal regimes, taxonomy and conservation seemed irrevocably antithetical: “[W]e now live in an age of environmental anxiety, and taxonomists are not good at delivering in a timely fashion facts and data that are meaningful for nature management and conservation.”171 Taxonomists sought to compensate for this by speeding up the publication of texts presenting their identification of previously unknown species. They also made more effort to integrate other researchers, whose on-site activities were focused on species conservation and the public communication of expedition goals.172

Stage I When the public debate on biodiversity loss reached its provisional climax in the early 2000s, classic taxonomy was considered an old-fashioned, outdated subdiscipline within biology. Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis and Bryan Wynne highlight the confluence of a radical upheaval and an equally fundamental disciplinary crisis within the taxonomic sciences at the time in the introduction to their book

Bouchet, Philippe, Hervé Le Guyader and Olivier Pascal: “The SANTO 2006 Global Biodiversity Survey: An Attempt to Reconcile the Pace of Taxonomy and Conservation”, in: Zoosystema 31/3 (2009), p. 402. 172 Ibid., p. 402f. 171

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

281

Barcoding Nature.173 The roots of this crisis lay in the fact that surveys had shown the rate of extinction of biological life to be far higher than previously assumed. Taxonomists had to grapple with the fact that there was little knowledge of biodiversity loss, however, this is of vital importance to species protection: “Mounting concerns over ‘The Sixth Great Extinction’ of global biodiversity, together with the naming of a distinct new geological epoch referring to the comprehensive material domination of nature’s fate by human activities served as a potent backdrop to biodiversity experts’ assessments of the rate of biodiversity loss.”174 Taxonomists continued to emphasise that their research has always been biodiversity research. But the concurrence of the ecological crisis and the genetic revolution put classical taxonomy under considerable pressure. In view of the tremendous success of the “genome revolution”, the discipline suddenly seemed extremely backward. The radical upheaval identified by Waterton and colleagues consisted of the establishment of genetics as the new core method in the life sciences, which triggered profoundly contentious debates between practitioners of the genetic and morphological approaches and spurred the radical restructuring of research and teaching in the life sciences.175 Classical morphological taxonomy, based largely on the external description and measurement of species, seemed to have become obsolete overnight. This placed a major question mark over the discipline’s legitimacy. How did Bouchet and his team respond to this situation?

Stage II In response to the establishment of taxonomic datafication through the Digital Barcode of Life (BOLI) in 2003,176 the taxonomists at the MNHN in Paris advocated the integration of the new taxonomy and the old collections,177 also known as “integrative taxonomy”.178 This field was to be integrated into the MarBOL system, itself a collaboration between the BOLI consortium and the digital survey and classification system known as the Census of Marine Life (CML). The revival of the great marine biological expeditions, whose goal is to investigate the extent of

See Waterton, Claire, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne: “Introduction”, in: Waterton, Claire, Rebecca Ellis and Brian Wynne: Barcoding Nature. Shifting Cultures of Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity Loss, London and New York: Routledge 2013, p. 9. 174 Ibid., p. 9f. 175 On this fundamental process of epistemological transformation, see Bowker, Geoffrey: “Biodiversity Datadiversity”, in: Social Studies of Science 30/5 (2000): 643–683. 176 See Nadim, Tahani: “Data Labour. How the Sequence-Databases GenBank and EMBLBank Make Data”, in: Science as Culture 25/4 (2016): 496–519. 177 See Puillandre, Nicolas et al.: “New Taxonomy and Old Collections: Integrating DNA Barcoding into the Collection Curation Process”, in: Molecular Ecology Resources, London: Blackwell 2012: 2–7. 178 See Padial, José M. et al.: “The Integrative Future of Taxonomy”, in: Frontiers of Zoology 7/16 (2010): 7–16. 173

282

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

marine biodiversity, was greatly advanced by the combination of morphometric and genetic data generation. The Parisian authors explain this as follows: “The MarBOL project [...] also enhances taxonomic analyses that contribute to the discovery of new species and hence to a better knowledge of marine biodiversity.”179 Whether this will enable taxonomists to identify “earth’s species before they get extinct”180 remains an open question. However, the integrative approach—under the heading of “biodiversity research”—has undoubtedly helped breathe new life into maritime taxonomy within the life sciences. This coming together of allies was successful, with the morphologists processing the issue of biodiversity loss at three levels. Firstly, their classic method of classification attained enough scientific credibility to be re-established as a meaningful complement to genetic analysis. Secondly, they had the logistical experience crucial to organising large-scale overseas studies, which they had been carrying out for many years. Thirdly, this experience was translated into accelerated mapping and survey methods, which were becoming increasingly important given the urgency of species protection.181 Taxonomists could, thus, to some extent at least, speed up publication of their work identifying previously unknown species. And fourthly, they placed greater emphasis on the integration of researchers dealing on site with the conservation of species and the public communication of expedition goals, in other words, what Elsa Faugère has described as respect for the ethical dimensions of the Convention on Biological Biodiversity.182 In short, these expeditions were characterised by the successful attempt to transform the situated practice of producing a taxonomic inventory into a global enterprise183 that sought to combine scientific research and species protection.184

Stage III Furthermore, over the past 15 years, Bouchet and his team have been in a position to attract public attention for their expeditions, in which a number of heterogeneous collectives have been eager to participate. They have managed to get sponsors and supporters involved in their project by emphasising the general value of ‘biodiversity’ and interweaving integrative taxonomy with the global dimension of the Puillandre et al., “New Taxonomy and Old Collections”, p. 7. Costello, Marc, Robert M. May and Nigel E. Stork: “Can We Name Earth Species Before They Go Extinct?” Science 339/6118 (2013): 413–416. 181 See Bouchet, Le Guyader and Pascal, “The SANTO 2006 Global Biodiversity Survey”, p. 404. 182 Ibid., p. 402f. 183 See Faugère, Elsa and Olivier Pascal: “La fabrique de l’Information: Le cas des grandes expeditions naturalistes contemporaines”, in: Granjou, Céline and Isabel Mauz (eds.): Les promesses de la biodiversité, special issue of Quaderni – Communication, Technologies, Pouvoir, Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme 201: 39–51. 184 See Bouchet, Le Guyader and Pascal, “The SANTO 2006 Global Biodiversity Survey”: 401–406. 179 180

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

283

biodiversity as a societal challenge. They had, in fact, already been organising the ‘Tropical Benthos Sea Programme’ since the 1980s. A narrative could now be built on these experiences, one that did not hesitate to refer to the historical research expeditions of Alexander von Humboldt or Darwin and their emulators. With reference to the famous journeys of the Challenger, Albatross and Sibogae, they state: “[W]e have been privileged to undertake scientific explorations of such a magnitude and intensity that can only be compared to the great ‘historical expeditions’.”185 Their programme covered the New Caledonian exclusive economic zone and other South Pacific island groups. In 2006, 1028 molluscs were reportedly recorded at a depth of more than 100 metres. Of these, 601 (58 per cent) were “new species”,186 fuelling the hypothesis of a high concentration of biodiversity in the Pacific. These findings and the accompanying narrative generated arguments that were deployed in the context of the great expedition to PNG of 2012–2013. The organisers assumed that a large number of species unknown to science would be discovered.187 The “green justificatory order” was also underlined by the idea of the democratisation of science, that is, a transdisciplinary approach. This was framed by a strong media presence and the creation of an expedition website. On 20 September 2012, just a few days before the expedition began, a large press conference was held at the MNHN in Paris. The expedition was also accompanied by an educational programme in which 4000 French pupils at state schools took part. The organisers summed up their aspirations in a press release: “The overall objective of the expedition is to document neglected biodiversity in a key but understudied region, while integrating a training component for local players with a view to conservation.”188

Stage IV According to the model set out above, the fourth stage of the experiment consists of the trialling situation, which, Callon tells us, entails the mobilisation of allies. From November 2011 on, the government and people of PNG were involved in the implementation of the expedition and informed of its objectives through bilateral agreements, treaties and public lectures.189 When it came to ensuring the success of the expedition, they were the most important allies, because only local government Bouchet Philippe et al.: “A Quarter-Century of Deep-Sea Malacological Exploration in the South and West Pacific”, p. 10. 186 Ibid., p. 9. 187 See Press Kit: Our Planet Reviewed. Taking a Closer Look at Biodiversity Hotspots. Expedition Papua New Guinea 2013–2013, edited by Pro Natura International, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (September 2012), p. 4. 188 Ibid., p. 8. 189 Bouchet, Philippe et al.: “Papua Nuigini Biodiversity Expedition. Marine Survey of the Madang Lagoon and Bismarck Sea”, Interim Report, June 2013, p. 25–34. Like every member of the 185

284

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

or the local population could guarantee access to the waters of interest to the researchers. According to a press release issued by the expedition leaders, mobilisation would not only benefit the taxonomic census but also enable the participation and education of the local population and facilitate a long-term partnership with them, as well as providing for the dissemination of information in such a way as to aid future efforts towards species protection in this maritime region.190 In addition to representatives of the PNG state and Madang Province, staff, undergraduates and doctoral students at the University of PNG and the Divine Word University in Madang as well as citizens of Madang Province were invited to participate in the expedition and benefit from its presence and findings. In principle, this amounted to the formulation of a hypothesis of co-operation, the reality of which would only be established, in the manner of a ‘reality check’, through the expedition itself. This is the subject of the next section.

5.3.3.5

Participating or Collaborating? Four Experimental Stages During the Our Planet Reviewed Expedition to Papua New Guinea

Since international expeditions are not limited to the global North, a fundamentally new picture emerges the moment my experimental analytical model travels overseas. A problematic aspect that comes into play in ANT then becomes particularly apparent. I have already pointed out that STS has not always been well-equipped to deal with the post-colonial situation because it has primarily considered the practices and effects of modern sciences and technologies within modern societies. The critique, as articulated by Descola and, more recently, within STS, of these limitations, which lead to methodological one-sidedness and lacunae, is still a fairly new phenomenon. The agnostic attitude of ANT, which it defended so expertly against classic universalist approaches, is particularly questionable when the colonial legacy becomes an ineluctable factor in the everyday politics of the field under investigation. Marres criticised the fact that STS and ANT opened up the “black box” of science and technology, but kept the black box of politics largely closed, and this is even more true of the post-colonial situation. Anna Tsing corroborates this critique: “If we stick with connections scientists describe, what about networks they downplay or deny? Might ignoring silences limit where science studies can travel— for example in regions neglected by European scientists?”191

expedition, I was sent a copy of this report, which,h to the best of my knowledge, was not published. It provided all those involved with an attempt to take stock of the expedition’s achievements. 190 See Bouchet et al., Press Kit, p. 8. 191 Tsing, Anna: “Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora. Or, Can Actor-Network-Theory Experiment with Holism?”, in: Otto, Ton and Nils Bubandt (eds.): Experiments in Holism, Oxford: Blackwell 2010, p. 47. See also Niewöhner, Jörg: “Making Evidence in the Future Perfect. Provincialising Climate Impact Science in the Quest for More-than-Human-Liveability”, in: Historical Social

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

285

Tsing’s questions are in fact troubling when the investigation of technoscientific programmes expands into the global South. Occidental notions of PNG persistently cleave to the trope of the ‘unknown’, which pervades the Western imagination. Given that active colonisation now lies far in the past, these notions evoke outright ‘discoverer’ fantasies. This also applies to natural scientific, social scientific and anthropological ideas, as Paige West notes: “These final ‘discoveries’ fixed the place and its ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ squarely in the Western consciousness as the last primitive, as the ultimate other.”192 This thinking is reinforced by the fact that PNG was never officially a colony, but rather a protectorate of a Western power, a place where modernity has had a comparatively small influence on the social organisation and political and organisational infrastructure. Papua New Guinea has been politically independent since 1975. Although the concept of post-coloniality is, formally, somewhat inappropriate, we can still refer to such a phenomenon if the relationship to nature that produced the biodiversity crisis is defined on the basis of a modern naturalistic ontology. While the goal at the beginning of this “test run” was to distinguish heterogeneous co-operation from co-operation between similar participants or solidarity, I will now flesh out the concept of heterogeneous co-operation with reference to empirical evidence. The difference between heterogeneous co-operation and participation is not centred on its use, as discussed in the previous chapter in light of the work of Noortje Marres. Marres utilises the ‘participatory turn’ to place objects at the centre of public interventions. Conversely, the concept of participation, from which the concept of collaborating discussed here differs, is focused on classic participation research, in which participation is synonymous with “having a say”. But what is taken part in is not determined by those willing to participate; the problem is already in the world, in the sense that it is determined by others. The classic case is trade union co-determination in Germany. The parameters are laid down by economic structures and employers. Only then do employees get to contribute, in that they are granted the right to co-determination vis-à-vis projects that have already been agreed. Collaborating, on the other hand, dovetails with what Groß and Stauffacher have stated about transdisciplinary research: its special feature is the shared development of problems on the premise of epistemic equality. The distinction between participating and collaborating helps explain why ‘doing biodiversity’ in a post-colonial context, such as an expedition to PNG, may trigger conflicts, disruptions and public controversies despite the expedition leaders’ good intentions. At the same time, this distinction points up the potential and limits of heterogeneous co-operation that goes beyond the case described above. The Parisbased scientists no doubt did their best to provide an efficient infrastructure in Madang and facilitate sustainable co-operation. Most of the Papua New Guineans

Research, Special Issue “Positionality Reloaded. Dimensions of Reflexivity in the Relationship between Science and Society”, edited by Marguin, S. et al. 2021, pp. 35–58. 192 West, Paige: Conservation is our Government Now. The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea, Durham & London: Duke University Press 2006, p. 127.

286

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Fig. 5.5 Overview of the investigation of deep-sea coastal waters and coastal areas during the Our Planet Reviewed biodiversity expedition to Papua New Guinea of 2012 (taxonomic-maritime part in the province of Madang), subdivided into phases (This diagram was produced as part of an initial “mini report” at the end of the expedition. It was produced by Philippe Bouchet, Philippe Archambault, Claude Payri and Sarah Samadi on 15 January 2013 on board the research ship Alis and sent to me in confidence by Philippe Bouchet. The report summarises the contributions of many other members of the expedition and was sent to me by e-mail. As a social scientist, I was involved from the middle of the first stage (“habitat mapping”) to the end of the fourth stage (deepsea sampling known as “Madeep”). I was, thus, present during the entire stage of the sampling of coastal waters and carried out participant observation in all three branches)

who welcomed and encountered the expedition members expected such co-operation and did their best to achieve it. However, they scarcely got beyond participation in the sense outlined above. I will now discuss how this distinction operated in practice.

5.3.3.6

The Expedition

How was the expedition organised? As the following diagram shows, the marine biological part of the expedition was divided into five working stages, which corresponded with different phases of “species sampling”. This entailed exploration of deep-sea regions on the research ship Alis by means of dredging and fishing. The geomorphological and architectural survey of the diverse habitats through satellite imagery—which was compared with previous data on marine flora and fauna and with what was already known about species diversity—was particularly important to the investigation of local biodiversity rates. These images were intended to provide data to help determine protected areas. The sampling of the shore zones was conducted with the aid of inflatable or wooden boats carrying up to eight people, some of them professional divers, by hand and with the help of brushes and baskets. The research ship Alis and its crew, under Captain Claude Payri, sailed to Madang from the IRD branch in New Caledonia (Fig. 5.5). This overview reflects the scientists’ core activities, which consisted of intensive, quantitative sampling of coastal areas and a rapid assessment survey within a limited time frame. Sampling during tide dives held out hopes of special finds at night. The

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

287

most important issue, which came up constantly, was gaining unproblematic access to the sea and other waters. In addition to the taxonomic survey of biodiversity, a small team led by biologist and conservation planner Mélanie Hamel carried out a study on regional fishing practices and the local perception and use of ecological services. Hamel and her team were able to draw on the infrastructure and logistics of the expedition but remained largely autonomous. Her study was not included in the overview above, as it was conducted independently of the expedition’s sampling phases.193 Its implementation and preliminary results were, however, detailed in the 2013 Interim Report on the expedition.

Stage I Dewey understood the experimental definition of problems as follows: “The way in which the problem is conceived decides what specific suggestions are entertained and which are dismissed; what data are selected and which rejected; it is the criterion for relevancy and irrelevancy of hypotheses and conceptual structures.”194 Following Dewey and the pragmatic sociology of critique, in the case at issue here, the definition of the problem is triggered by the crisis of species loss (and its critique), so that, in line with modern naturalism, the problem is posited as a universal one. Meanwhile, a different approach is conceivable through the modus operandi of collaborating. Rather than presupposing crisis, this consists in, firstly, exploring the specific relationships with nature and nature-related problems, in light of which possible species loss is to be investigated. In this way, problematisations and other types of enrolment could be integrated into heterogeneous co-operation. Callon’s “problematisation” is also formulated in light of the scientists’ perspective. He links the problem definition—which he calls problematisation—with the scientists’ ability to make themselves an ineluctable factor in this definition.195 In the case of the scallops, however, it was originally the fisherfolk, not the scientists, who articulated the problem. A collaborative setting was, thus, possible from the outset. This marks a key difference from the biodiversity expedition when it comes to the specific way in which the scientists defined the problem at issue. They provided their partners in PNG with a form of access that was primarily of a scientific nature. The concrete living conditions of the residents of Madang province were of secondary importance. This contrasts with Hamel’s study, in which the “contributory expertise” of the local population was integrated into the marine biological study.196 The problem for the expedition as a whole, however, was already defined before the first marine biologists arrived in PNG. Collaborating and participating can be distinguished in this first stage of problem definition or problematisation as follows. 193

See Bouchet et al., Interim Report, p. 85f. Dewey, Logic, p. 108. 195 Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 68. 196 See Bouchet et al., Interim Report, p. 106f. 194

288

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

Stage I: Conflicting Problematisations Problem definition/participating Asymmetric Top-down Geared towards science

Problematisation/collaborating Symmetric Bottom-up Geared towards general issues

The contradiction between these two approaches was laid bare by the major criticisms made by those involved in the expedition and the many disputes that arose between them. While Hamel’s approach was intended to reconcile biodiversity research with local practices of subsistence and everyday life, the expedition was chiefly focused on surveying species diversity for scientific purposes.

Stage II Callon defines “interessement” as a state in which those involved, with their conflicting interests, develop a specific ability to integrate participants into a network.197 However, this definition begins to falter if the stage of problematisation already entails considerable potential for conflict. Much like Callon, Dewey understands the determination of the solution to a problem as a consequence of the way in which the first stage was implemented. Dewey concludes: “Hence the question arises: How is the formation of a genuine problem so controlled that further inquiries will move toward a solution?”198 This control is comparable to what Callon calls the use or stabilization of further actants through the establishment of an actor network. Alliance formation was also an issue for the scientists in PNG. After time-consuming and complicated negotiations with governments, foundations, sponsors, universities and their own scientific community, how would they manage to win over to the cause of the expedition those in whose waters they wished to study marine molluscs? How were the scientists to ensure that the local coastal communities, which had genuine, that is, state-independent, property rights, agreed to their problematisation? Callon remarks: “The interessement, if successful, confirms (more or less completely) the validity of the problematisation and the alliance it implies.”199 But what happened when the validity of this problematisation was questioned by those on whose support the scientists depended? By analogy with the first stage, I describe the second experimental stage of ‘doing biodiversity’ during the PNG expedition as “conflictual alliance formation”. Unlike the problem of competing interests discussed by Callon and in contrast to the first stage, this is no longer a matter of participating in the sense of co-determination. The

Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 71. Dewey, Logic, p. 108. 199 Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 73. 197 198

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

289

key issue at the alliance formation stage is which actants and collectives either participate in the network or are integrated into it and in what way. At issue here, then, is the opposition between (heterogeneous) co-operating and collaborating. In the context of interdisciplinary infrastructure research, Jörg Niewöhner refers to “colaboration”, emphasising the independence of the various participants and institutions involved in the process: “Co-laborative denotes [...] working together in a third space, in other words collective efforts to tackle a shared and jointly developed issue.”200 This is an integrative approach to investigating human-environment systems. Stage II: Conflicting Alliance Formation Co-operating Participating

Collaborating Integrating

In contrast to the approach to participating characteristic of the expedition in general, Mélanie Hamel’s sustainability project was designed to use a combination of taxonomic and socio-economic survey methods (mainly interviews and participant observation) to develop scenarios that fuse species protection and subsistence. Hamel defined her project as follows: “In the PhD project, different conservation planning scenarios will be tested for the Madang Lagoon (Madang Province) in PNG, targeting the proposition of fictive systems of marine reserves that efficiently protect marine habitats and biodiversity, while not impacting negatively the coastal communities who highly depend on the marine environment for their day-to-day lives.”201 In addition, not only were so-called local ‘para-taxonomists’ systematically introduced to modern taxonomy in the botanical part of the expedition, but their local knowledge was equally integrated into the classificatory procedure. This collaborative approach202 was made possible by the ‘Binatang Research Centre’ founded and directed by entomologist Vojtech Novotny. This small research laboratory is located in the middle of the rainforest and admits local students and interns throughout the year to survey the local flora and fauna. Novotny, who divides his time between PNG and Prague, speaks fluent pidgin and was a key mediator and

Niewöhner, “Perspektiven der Infrastrukturforschung“, p. 350. Bouchet et al., Interim Report, p. 85. 202 One gesture, which is, as it happens, viewed as an indicator of collaborative research in the life sciences, is the naming of “new” species with reference to local words. See Thompson, F. Christian: “Names: the Key to Biodiversity”, in Reaka-Kudla, Majorie L. et al. (eds.): Biodiversity II. Understanding and Protecting Our Biological Resources, Joseph Henry Press, Washington 1997, p. 199–216; Katz, Jay S. and Ben R. Martin: “What is Research Collaboration?”, in: Research Policy 26 (1997): 1–18. 200 201

290

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

arbitrator in conflict situations. He enjoys the respect of the local people and has been espousing the fusion of taxonomy and species protection for many years.

Stage III Similar to the alliance formation stage, the phase of reasoning (Dewey), enrolment (Callon) or equivalence formation (Boltanski and Thévenot) depends on the results of the previous stage. This is the stage preliminary to the trial itself, a testing situation whose outcome may be a compromise or the development of a new problem. What counted on the Saint-Brieuc coast was whether the assembled allies declared their willingness to take part in this trial in a practical sense. In PNG, facilitating such a declaration was a controversial matter, mainly in political terms. It required often lengthy and conflict-ridden, partly public, partly bilateral meetings with the clans in the various regions, which had been predetermined through mapping. Many landowners who had the power of disposal over the relevant stretches of coast were shocked that they had not been informed about the expedition in advance and had received no material compensation. This informational lacuna was due to a failure of communication between the expedition leaders and the state authorities in Madang province. It was assumed that the stretches of coast at issue were in the hands of the state and that specific agreements were unnecessary. The opposite was true. As the locals tended to see it, white biologists were taking to the sea in their boats without notice and fishing out all kinds of animals without a thought for those to whom the area belonged. Nor was there any attempt to ensure benefit sharing—a condition added to the Convention on Biological Diversity by the Nagoya Protocol of 2010203 and, as Marilyn Strathern emphasises, a fundamental prerequisite for collaborating.204 The expedition leadership quickly sought to make up for these failures, but the atmosphere was strained and a large number of discussions, visits and mediations were required to put things right. The residents of the Madang coast were already struggling with the consequences of overfishing in their seas, which had put one of their most important means of existence at risk. As if this was not enough, their valuable resources were (and are) being decimated daily by transnational seafood corporations and deep-sea mining companies.205 The impressively large research laboratory set up on the premises of the local university inevitably aroused associations with these large corporations. In contrast to the latter, however, the laboratory was open to the public on a daily basis and always had plenty of visitors. The universal self-evidence of the modern relationship with nature came to seem highly

203

See on the Nagoya Protocol: https://www.cbd.int/abs/about/, accessed 5 September 2021. See Strathern, Marilyn: “Currencies of Collaboration”, in: Konrad, Monika (ed.): Collaborators Collaborating. Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books 2012, p. 113. 205 See Rouzet, Céline: “ExxonMobil bouleverse la société papoue”, in: Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2013, p. 16–17. 204

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

291

dubious at this stage, with this theme accompanying the day-to-day progress of the expedition. What is science? What is it good for? Can it truly protect resources? The naturalistic ontology was constantly challenged in an environment in which biodiversity research was, to say the least, in need of explanation. The prevailing local scepticism required detailed clarification of the utility of natural scientific expeditions, while the tension between time-consuming taxonomic research and long-term species protection was exacerbated by ontological and epistemic differences. These conflicting enrolment processes highlighted the difference between co-operating and collaborating at the third stage with a view to the issue of epistemic relevance. Stage 3: Conflicting Enrolments Epistemic relevance Primary Secondary

Co-operating Knowledge accumulation Local problems and ecological sustainability

Collaborating Local problems and ecological sustainability Knowledge accumulation

Stage IV: Mobilisation Who speaks for whom and who represents whom are, as Callon sees it, the key questions dealt with at the fourth stage.206 The biologists went out to sea. Each trip implicitly verified the validity of the hypothesis of co-operating and showed whether or not collective mobilisation was occurring in accordance with the expedition’s goals. If landowners and the local population refused access to the sea or pelted the biologists with stones, mobilisation had failed. Such cases laid bare the one-sidedness of a premise so self-evident to Western scholars—the fact that the government was informed about the expedition and welcomed it did not mean the government represented the people. If conflicting enrolments were already constantly being tested, rejected, tried out again, and so on, the mobilisation stage, conversely, also reflected the devising of a compromise as defined by Boltanski and Thévenot: compromises were also a common occurrence and they ended most conflicts to the satisfaction of all parties. They almost always concerned the issue of rights of use. Compromises were reached through written agreements negotiated between landowners and the expedition leaders. These agreements ended disputes in the way envisaged by Boltanski and Thévenot, with the key actors putting the moment of critique behind them and

206

Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”, p. 76.

292

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

returning to the real action.207 As the previous stages showed, however, this was not a matter of establishing a justificatory order in the sense of safeguarding the common good in a ‘shared world’. The critique of the lack of integration from the point of problematisation onwards continued to apply. To sum up, then, we might state that the expedition practiced a form of heterogeneous co-operation within the framework of global society, which facilitated a certain amount of action in the modus operandi of collaborative biodiversity research. Despite the contentious issues that shaped and accompanied the expedition, compromises could, thus, be reached that allowed the participants to uphold their heterogeneity. Congruent with this observation, Boltanski and Thévenot state: “In a compromise, people maintain an intentional proclivity towards the common good by co-operating to keep present beings relevant in different worlds, without trying to clarify the principle upon which their agreement is grounded.”208

5.3.3.7

The “Smalangdun Event”

What I call the “Smalangdun event” in what follows occurred 1 day in November during a research trip by boat in coastal waters. It was the day before the full moon and the biologists were looking forward to the upcoming night-time outings. The elements involved in the Smalangdun event were two transportation drivers from Madang, several French divers, taxonomists, equipment for brushing off and collecting live samples from rocks and stones, consisting of so-called ‘brushing baskets’ and ‘parachutes’, a certain number of sea creatures, two boats, a goddess named Smalangdun and a GPS device to locate the site.209 Five French divers and two local assistants drove a pick-up truck to the small port of Kanaam, north of Madang. Satellite imagery and habitat mapping had suggested that this area would be suitable for coastal sampling using the brushing basket method.210 The scientistdivers took a motorboat to the coastal zone of the island of Sek. Diving to a depth of 26 metres, they soon found stones and corals to brush off. They stowed their samples in a basket and collected more by hand within a radius of 10 m, which they also placed in the basket. They then activated the parachute, sending the full basket to the surface before continuing the dive. The basket was supposed to be recovered by the boat.

See Boltanski and Thévenot, “The Sociology of Critical Capacity”, p. 375. Ibid., p. 374. 209 Abbreviation for global positioning system. The event was related in French on the expedition blog by Baptiste Faure, one of the participating taxonomists. In my summary I translated parts of it. The blog is unfortunately no longer available online. 210 See Bouchet et al., Interim Report, p. 43. 207 208

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

293

Stage I When the scientists resurfaced an hour later, there was a problem. To their astonishment, the basket had never made it into the boat. The assistants had not seen it. The scientists were perplexed. “What had happened?”, one of them asked later on the expedition blog. “How could the basket disappear as it rose to the surface, from a depth of less than 26 metres?” They went back into the water to look for the basket. But it appeared to be lost, along with the samples it had contained. In the context of the experimentalist heuristic, we might state that all those involved immediately agreed on the problematisation.

Stage II Soon after, the divers and assistants got together to work out what had gone wrong. A second boat was dispatched and more divers were called in. These joined the search. But despite the increase in people and material, the problem could not be solved. There was no sign of any basket. Disappointed and confused, the group returned to the port of Kanaam. An alliance had, thus, been formed spontaneously, yet, no solution was in sight.

Stage III In the port of Kanaam, the local assistants proposed a hypothesis to the scientists. They explained that the dive site was known to be under the protection of the goddess Smalangdun. The scientists learned that the local clans would never go or fish there without first asking her for permission. This seemed to clarify things: the scientists had violated protocol. The equivalence, thus, established between the lost basket and local conventions initiated the stage of enrolment. The scientists and their assistants returned to the campus for lunch. Heated debates tend to take on a more relaxed tone in the cafeteria. Was a defective parachute to blame or were there other technical problems? Or was it, in fact, Smalangdun’s anger that was responsible for the loss of the basket? The participants, therefore, put forward various hypotheses with a view to solving the problem and aroused the interest of the expedition participants and the local population. Enrolment gradually developed into a collaborative affair.

Stage IV After lunch, the group decided to return to the site and test out both hypotheses—the “mythical” and the “technical”. They found the exact location again with the help of GPS. They first agreed to take the ‘mythical’ hypothesis seriously. One of the two assistants offered to pray to Smalangdun on behalf of the scientists. After praying, he

294

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

seemed relieved and assured the scientists that all would now be well. The scientists now had permission to return to the water. After a few minutes of diving, they made out a white object in the stony depths of 36 m. And there they found the basket— fully intact and still containing all the samples. Happy and relieved, the scientists wondered how this was possible. How could the basket have got there when they had last seen it rising to the surface? They would most likely never know the answer. Perhaps it really had been returned by the ocean goddess. In contrast to Callon’s scallop study, in this case, heterogeneous co-operating is not limited to the familiar forms of inter- and transdisciplinarity, as discussed in the previous chapter with reference to the modus operandi of “participating”. This event, which triggered collective experimental problem processing, was inextricably linked with the local knowledge of the assistants. Without their enrolment in the network, the loss of the basket would have been nothing more than an irksome occurrence, which might at most have fed the suspicion that locals had seized it. The fact that the hypothesis of Smalangdun’s intervention could gain traction at all and the problematisation could be linked with the collective development of a hypothesis was bound up with the scientists’ awareness that, as the locals saw it, they had broken the rules. All too often, water access had not been arranged with the local landowners. But it was only through Smalangdun’s intervention that this incident was transformed into a truly collaborative experiment. Sceptics might ask: but were not the scientists merely taken in by a “mystical” hypothesis? Or were they being taught a lesson? Let us compare this event with the outrage triggered, especially in the global North, by the so-called Islamic State’s destruction of world cultural assets. The assumption of mystical naivety highlights a naturalistic ontology that lays bare the global asymmetries regarding what is considered worthy of protection. Unlike UNESCO, whose legitimacy seems beyond all doubt, the people of the coastal province of Madang have no global lobby crying out, “World heritage! No entry! This must be punished!” But they do have Smalangdun. They delegate this job to the oceanic goddess and make her the representative of nature and culture. Although the scientists were initially unaware of her existence, they seemed well advised to respect her as a bringer of order. We may doubt that any taxonomic record will ever mention the story of Smalangdun. But it provides an example of ‘doing biodiversity’ that goes beyond the ‘compromise’ defined by Boltanski and Thévenot. None of the participants claimed to have banished an uncertainty. Nevertheless, in the end, a solution was found with which all parties were satisfied. This is an instance of “worlding” as described by Anna Tsing. According to Tsing, “worlding” has the potential to translate different social ecologies by making suggestions about context.211 She concludes: “All researchers develop their work in context-making collaborations, whether explicit or implicit. Worlding is the only way to take difference seriously in a collaborative research practice.”212

211 212

Tsing, “Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora”, p. 49. Ibid., p. 63.

5.3 The Modi Operandi of Co-operation: Criticising, Participating and. . .

5.3.3.8

295

Summary

In this section, I have sounded out the theory-of-society potential and limits of heterogeneous co-operating through the prism of “doing biodiversity”. I updated and expanded the democratic experimentalism developed by Dewey with the help of a transdisciplinary and transregional case. The taxonomic biodiversity research presented here revealed how heterogeneous co-operating can be practiced from the perspective of a naturalistic ontology. It is true that, given the production logics characteristic of the natural scientific knowledge culture, the modus operandi of “collaborating” was only partially realisable. Nevertheless, the expedition to PNG highlighted a range of options for combining heterogeneous co-operating and a collaborative approach—and at least partially integrating the latter. Given the historical background of expeditions, these efforts should not be underestimated. Scientific expeditions emerged in the age of colonial expansion and helped shape the self-image of the natural sciences and modernity. They contributed to the mobilisation of modern classificatory systems, which fostered the division between nature and culture and between modern and non-modern societies, while also abetting the disciplinary separation of sociology from ethnology. While a number of well-researched studies of historical expeditions have now been produced, the opposite is true of contemporary expeditions.213 This research gap is all the more astonishing give that scientific expeditions remain a common practice in the life sciences that is anything but historically obsolete.214 From a sociology-of-science perspective, expeditions have the tremendous advantage of being limited in time and space. They offer good opportunities for participant observation and both multi-sited and focused ethnographies. On the other hand, expeditions215 in general, and the expedition to PNG presented here in particular, are intricate undertakings in terms of theories of society and being politically complex and ambiguous. Firstly, materially and logistically, they build on an infrastructure stemming from colonial history and imperialism. Secondly, expeditions are expensive. Scientists often have to rely on sponsors who get their funds from multinational corporations. These corporations, such as Shell, Total and Bayer, are often known more for the social and structural injustices they See for my updated reflections: Bogusz, Tanja: “Fieldwork in the Anthropocene. On the Possibilities of Analogical Thinking Between Nature and Society”, in: SozArXiv Papers, September 2021, DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/td7jk 214 See, for example, Helmreich, Stephan: Alien Sea. Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, Berkeley, etc.: University of California Press 2009. 215 The semantic origin of the noun “expedition” is significant in this respect. In the sixteenth century, “expedition” began to be used to refer to global military interventions, such as the Crusades and European colonial expansion. Only in the early nineteenth century was the term deployed—we might think here of Alexander von Humboldt—to describe journeys of exploration by Western scholars to far-off lands. The term “expedition” still has connotations of the North expanding into the global South and, nolens volens, the systematic exploitation of the natural resources of the global South to ends defined by the North. On the French variant, see Rey-Debove, Josette and Alain Rey (eds.): Le Nouveau Petit Robert, Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert 1993, p. 862f. 213

296

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

have caused in the global South than for their contributions to ecological or economic sustainability. Many accuse the NGOs that co-operate with these firms of so-called “greenwashing”216 or mere “image-building” that serves to disguise their true corporate interests, which lie in extracting the resources on which the North depends. Oil, gas and coal, along with the economic valorization of nature, are the most hotly debated topics here.217 Finally, STS itself is still seeking to determine the post-colonial and global dimensions of its research field.218 These problems might explain the relative scholarly reluctance to embrace the social scientific study of expeditions.219 Yet, it is apparent that studies of overseas expeditions facilitate specific insights into research on global ecological sustainability. These studies are exemplary of inter- and transdisciplinary research and its political ambiguity. They invite us to contemplate the production conditions for “doing biodiversity” as a complex practice within global society. From a theory-ofsociety perspective, expeditions, therefore, shed light on the analytical challenges facing a critical social ecology. Such undertakings are always intertwined with diverse locally and globally relevant practices, social inequalities, critiques and controversies, all of which lend themselves to comparative social research. As Kirsten Hastrup emphasises regarding the field of global climate research, the comparison of different approaches to nature enables cross-field theorising on societal developments.220 This form of theorising transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries and epistemologies.

216

See Bowen, Frances: After Greenwashing. Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014 and McCarthy, Donnachadh: “Only a Total Fool would be Convinced by Giraffes and Solar Panels”, in: The Guardian, 4 June 2009, http://www. theguardian.com/environment/2009/jun/04/greenwash-total-renewables, accessed 5 September 2021. 217 See Turnout, Esther et al.: “Rethinking Biodiversity: From Goods and Services to ‘Living With’”, in: Conservation Letters 6/3 (2013): 154–161 and Dickinson, Paul: “Exxon, Total and Shell are Finally Talking about Climate Change”, in: The Guardian, 29 April 2014, http://www. theguardian.com/sustainable-business/climate-change-exxon-total-shell-oil-gas-emissions-secu rity, accessed 5 September 2021. 218 See Verran, Helen: “A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies. Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners”, in: Social Studies of Science 32 (2002): 729–762. On the recent linkage of ANT and global history, see Gerstenberger, Debora and Joël Glasman (eds.): Techniken der Globalisierung. Globalgeschichte meets Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, Bielefeld: Transcript 2016. 219 For a comparable case from a systems theory perspective, however, see the early work by Engels, Anita: Die geteilte Umwelt. Ungleichheit, Konflikt und ökologische Selbstgefährdung in der Weltgesellschaft, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft 2003. On sociological research on marine missions see Hornidge, Anna-Katharina: “A research vessel: Heterotopia, boundary place, and pluriverse of epistemes”, in: Poferl, Angelika and Pfadenhauer, Michaela (eds.) Wissenrelationen, Weinheim: Beltz Juventa 2018, p. 430–441. 220 Hastrup, Kirsten: “Comparing Climate Worlds. Theorising across Ethnographic Fields”, in: Greschke, Heike and Julia Tischler (eds.): Grounding Global Climate Change, Heidelberg: Springer 2015, p. 139–154. See also Hastrup, Kirsten and Hastrup, Frida: “Waterworlds at

5.4 Interim Conclusion: The Theory of Society of Experimentalism

297

From a socioecological point of view, however, I have shown that this theory-ofsociety yield depends to a particularly large extent on the way in which species protection is problematised and by whom. Strathern states in an article on the topic of co-operating: “[L]ike any claim of equity in a transaction or a contract, what may seem co-operation to one party may appear as exploitation and intrusion to another.”221 This dissonance was characteristic of parts of the expedition in which the formation of alliances was based not on collaborating but on top-down participating. When expert panels, research funding institutions and intergovernmental research platforms call for the linkage of natural and social scientific knowledge with local experiential knowledge, it remains an open question which research methods are required for this and what theory-of-society lessons are drawn from them. The first stage of the experimental investigation, which consists of the way in which problematisation is pursued, is crucial here. “Issue formation” should ideally be organised “from below” in global biodiversity research This cannot overcome the separation of nature and culture as already inherent in biodiversity research. But from the vantage point of a democratic experimentalism, much would already be gained if the global differences in human–nature systems were accepted as a selfevident aspect of this research. The experimental heuristic outlined here opens up theory-of-society options for integrating the increasingly important inter- and transdisciplinary research in the field of environmental protection. The case of the expedition, meanwhile, has adequately demonstrated the capacity for structuration inherent in heterogeneous co-operating or the modus operandi of collaborating. The expedition produced a world society222 in miniature, one that responded to the challenges of the ecological crisis in the post-colonial situation methodologically, socio-politically and with a clear transdisciplinary orientation. Beyond the taxonomic surveys, it, thus, perpetuated experiential differences at the level of global politics, differences that can pave the way for new experiments.

5.4

Interim Conclusion: The Theory of Society of Experimentalism

This test run was an attempt to develop a critical social ecology. Drawing on Dewey’s theory of society of democratic experimentalism, I discussed this social ecology with reference to three modi operandi: “criticising”, “participating” and “collaborating”. I worked on the assumption—against the background of the global

large”, in: Hastrup, Kirsten and Hastrup, Frida (eds) Waterworlds. Anthropology in Fluid Environments, New York: Berghahn Books 2015, p. 1–22. 221 Strathern, “Currencies of Collaboration”, p. 109. 222 See Koloma Beck, Teresa: “Particularly Universal Encounters. Ethnographic Explorations into a Laboratory of World Society” in: Albert, Matthias and Tobias Werron (eds.): What in the World? Understanding Global Social Change, Bristol: Bristol University Press 2020, p. 117–137.

298

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

ecological crisis—that these three modi operandi furnish us with a methodological and conceptual compass for the pursuit of transdisciplinarity. Here, the core category of co-operating, which I updated with reference to the idea of “heterogeneous co-operation” borrowed from Sennett, enabled us to investigate current socioecological transformations regarding their structuring effects on scholarship and society. It emerged that heterogeneous co-operations may encompass both problem-solving and conflicting practices. In particular, my discussion of the modus operandi of collaborating revealed that sociological experimentalism is capable of grasping conflictual phenomena as well as the creative power of specific collectives. Heterogeneous co-operation is, thus, understood as a socioecological manifestation of the relationship of continuity between acting and thinking. In this sense, it contributes to the structuring and institutionalizing of experiential differences triggered by moments of crisis—whether through an awareness of antagonistic relationships to nature and the ontological limits of Occidental naturalism, the translation of sociotechnical experiences into “contributory expertise” or the development of an integrative approach to investigating the diversity of biological life. In the world of today, such complex constellations seem to me not only symptomatic but also a promising means of establishing transregional and transdisciplinary alliances, whose internal coherence, rather than being categorically predetermined, is established experimentally, that is, through processes of shared problematisation. I presented the modus operandi of ‘criticising’ in light of Philippe Descola’s anthropology of nature. By drawing on comparative ethnology, this anthropology facilitates the external description of the principles of sociological analysis through a “critique of prejudices” (Dewey). This is bound up with the need for a new global approach to the evident diversity of human-nature relationships. Without endorsing the normative impetus of critical theories, this external description unsettles familiar principles of analysis by leaving the radical differences in experiences of nature untouched. The heterogeneity of these experiences confirms the realism of heterogeneous co-operating, which flatly rejects the idea of a universally shared common sense. Descola’s cosmopolitanism, therefore, raises the question of how we might honour heterogeneous experiences in socioecological terms in such a way that co-operating is, nonetheless, possible. I then addressed two areas of research on science in light of this question. This I did initially through the modus operandi of “participating”, which, in STS research programmes, spotlights the emergence of critical publics as a reaction to Occidental socioecological transformation and crises, while also elucidating the characteristics of these publics. Secondly, I did so through the modus operandi of ‘collaborating’, in the context of a marine biological expedition to PNG. The STS has shown that participating, as a response to technological disasters, engenders heterogeneous forms of political integration. For Collins and Evans, this makes it vital to systematically determine the epistemic contribution of different types of experts. Marres foregrounds technologies and artefacts as agents of political participation and advocates a correspondingly materiality-oriented theory of society. Law and Urry highlight sociological participating in the sense of creative performance, from which they derive a specific responsibility associated with sociological

5.4 Interim Conclusion: The Theory of Society of Experimentalism

299

interventions in public problems. Similar to Descola, they call for the “globalisation” of sociological analytical methods with the aim of overcoming Occidental limitations. The performative contribution of sociological knowledge has been subject to particularly intense discussion in the context of inter- and transdisciplinary research on science. Heterogeneous co-operating is here thrown into relief regarding both the politics and practices of research. It remains to be seen whether the discrepancy between the persistence of traditional disciplinary boundaries and the socio-political appeal to overcome them can be resolved in the near future. In the context of climate and sustainability research, heterogeneous co-operating seems to be the order of the day. However, it ignores the tendency towards epistemic universalism and limits heterogeneity to ‘modern’ forms of interdisciplinarity. In terms of research practice, these aporias can be circumvented by implementing the procedure proposed by Groß and Stauffacher, which consists of the collective development of a problem—a collaborative approach, in other words. We can distinguish this procedure from participating with reference to the modus operandi of “collaborating”. Within the inter- and transdisciplinary framework discussed here, participating differs from the collaborative approach, in that it entails the formulation of a public problem by a collective in a way that leaves epistemic universalism untouched. Scientific expeditions, such as the one I observed, are particularly prone to such universalism due to their colonial past and positivist orientation. However, the taxonomic biodiversity expedition to PNG also showed that—and how—this universalism is subverted in practice by heterogeneous forms of co-operating that constantly go beyond the realm of interdisciplinarity to generate transdisciplinary social ecologies. Though initiated entirely by Western scientists, this project sometimes came close to a collaborative approach, in that “contributory expertise” was integrated directly into the problematisation of biodiversity loss. Despite socio-economic conflicts, compromises proved possible that, as envisaged by Descola, Boltanski and Thévenot, got by without generating a “common sense”. What we are dealing with here, then, are forms of compromise that respond to experiential differences with cosmopolitan curiosity. Dewey also doubted that the potential to configure society depended on the homogeneity of participants. Nonetheless—at a time when US society was still in the making—he referred to the “great community”, which implied such a concept of homogeneity.223 The contemporary updating of democratic experimentalism through the concept of heterogeneous co-operating distances itself from Dewey’s tendency to “sacralize science and democracy”.224 This modified experimentalism departs from the voluntaristic elements in Dewey’s theory of society, instead According to Dewey, the “great community” was the outcome of an informed public that is put in a position to articulate its views on a scientifically honest basis. In this sense, it transcends mere social existence (the “great society”) by occupying an intervening and steering role within political life. For Dewey, one crucial prerequisite for such self-empowerment was an investigative press, along with constant interdisciplinary exchange between anthropology, history, sociology, ethics, economics and political science. See Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, p. 143f. 224 See Joas, Hans: Die Entstehung der Werte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1999, p. 188. 223

300

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

foregrounding its constructivist aspect. As Matthias Kettner emphasises, Dewey’s publics were not communities of value, but they were communities.225 Within the framework of the “great community”, Dewey understood their internal heterogeneity as something that had to be integrated rather than overcome. He saw one of the great tasks of scholarship, not least of the social sciences, as the provision of experiential, orientational and interventional knowledge.226 Current debates on transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, as well as the ‘engaged programme’ in STS, bring this concern up to date by valorizing heterogeneous co-operation. The critical social ecology I have developed here has discussed the criterion of a capacity for structuration in light of a number of different fields. When heterogeneous co-operating in the form of public participation, or collaborative research in the sense of integration, succeeds, it has a capacity for structuration. This capacity is achieved through integrated expertise, material stabilization and compromises. It is the present and future task of an experimentalist theory of society to place the perpetuation of this capacity within an analytical framework. In line with this, I have presented my analysis of the interdependence of intertwined modernities, the environment and the public sphere not as an intervention in the politics of scholarship but as an experimental heuristic. This set out to take account of the practical manifestations of problems, in light of which solutions are anticipated. This raises the question: can such a heuristic be put forward as a theory of society? I introduced Dewey’s democratic experimentalism as a theory of society whose core category is “co-operating”. In this “test run”, I tested out this category with reference to those mechanisms that, to draw on the work of Uwe Schimank, meet theory-of-society criteria: I conceptualised the modi operandi of “criticising”, “participating” and “collaborating” as patterns of order underpinned by specific structural dynamics that, in turn, produce social effects whose investigation itself aspires to shape society.227 My discussion was framed by a sociology-of-science analysis of the present era that examined the challenges and limits entailed in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary studies; I also explored ways of overcoming the ecological crisis. In contrast to traditional theories of society, however, I rejected the tendency to draw a sharp boundary between academic disciplines and “premodern” societies and instead developed a symmetrical model. It emerged here that the experimentalist heuristic not only upholds the assumption of contingency found in present-day social theories.228 It is also an “extrapolation from an ideal-typical figure” that was developed “on the basis of a theory of limited scope”.229 As envisaged by Schimank, the sociological experimentalism proposed here facilitates “heuristic theoretical perspectives that shine a spotlight on different aspects of the complex epistemic object of society”, aspects that allow us to “formulate See Kettner, “John Deweys demokratische Experimentiergemeinschaft“, p. 62. See ibid., p. 63. 227 See Schimank, Uwe: Gesellschaft, Bielefeld: Transcript 2013, p. 17f. 228 See Lindemann, “Die Gesellschaftstheorie von der Sozialtheorie her denken“, p. 3. 229 Ibid., p. 6. 225 226

5.4 Interim Conclusion: The Theory of Society of Experimentalism Fig. 5.6 The modi operandi of co-operation

301

co-operating

criticising

participating

collaborating

operationalized hypotheses”.230 In this sense, the critical social ecology of experimentalism pushes the social-theoretical assumption of contingency towards a crucial question. What might the consequences of a one-sided problematisation of the global ecological crisis be for research practice? Beyond a normative theory of society, this social ecology assumes that its theory-of-society substance lies in answering this question at a practical level, a question that must be clarified in advance, both empirically and comparatively, by means of the heuristic I have presented. The explicitly transnational ontological foundation of this heuristic rules out any social analysis restricted to modern analytical categories. In fact, through the lens of this ontology, such an analysis is counterproductive. Instead, my heuristic replaces contingency with heterogeneity in order to show that co-operating neither negates differences nor excessively radicalises them in ways that contribute little to problemsolving. It aspires to produce “new knowledge” that is intended to enhance the transdisciplinary compatibility of heterogeneous relationships to nature, in accordance with Stefan Hirschauer’s proviso that “only descriptions that make a difference to existing self-descriptions” can be considered “new knowledge”.231 Finally, let us take another look at the specific elements of the capacity for social structuration within the different modi operandi, which provide an initial framework for a corresponding experimentalist theory of society. Congruent with the dual function of experimentalism, I have discussed these as both an expression and effect of (heterogeneous) co-operating (Fig. 5.6). The modus operandi of the structuralist-symmetrical “criticising” of epistemic universalism functions as an effect of experiential differences, which Descola has systematised in light of the diverse spectrum of relationships to nature, relationships he generalises on the basis of ethnographies carried out across the globe. I rendered these differences in experience productive for the project of sociological experimentalism by identifying a crucial experiential difference—namely, that which distinguishes naturalism from other relationships to nature—not as a starting point, but rather as one among a range of relationships to nature. This analytical distinction, rooted in actors’, including researchers’, experiences, inverts our gaze. Rather than producing a socioecological critique on the basis of naturalism, it is naturalism or its 230

Schimank, Gesellschaft, p. 36. Hirschauer, “Die Empiriegeladenheit von Theorien und der Erfindungsreichtum der Praxis“, p. 176, original emphasis.

231

302

5 Test Run III: What Does Co-Operation Mean? Experimentalism as a. . .

inadequate positioning within the overall edifice of possible relationships with nature that is placed at a distance and “defamiliarized” in the way described by Amman and Hirschauer. As a critique, this defamiliarization of one’s ‘own’ culture, in turn, opens up new forms of heterogeneous co-operating in that it begins neither with the ‘familiar’ or the ‘other’ but with a difference, one that is redefined through the process of defamiliarization. The key role of this process for sociological experimentalism is the unsettling of habits of thought, which turns the critique of prejudices into an opportunity to allow different social ecologies to exist in light of this difference. This critique claims to have a structuring effect, as it can explain, on the one hand, how differences in human-environment systems intervene and guide the associated actions. On the other hand, such a critique can function as an interpretation in situations such as the PNG expedition or similar transdisciplinary research contexts by lending meaning and structure to nature–culture conflicts. The modus operandi of “participating”, in the sense of the co-determining and shaping of critical publics, is also a reaction to differences in experience. These make it clear that intervening collectives often require expansion if they are to deal with the side effects of political, scientific and technological decisions. As in the cases examined by Wynne, Collins and Evans, these side-effects may be disasters. Or, as detailed by Marres, it may be that experiential differences trigger technologically induced processes of politicisation. So, whether we integrate human or non-human experts, or, similar to Law and Urry, emphasise the role of sociologists, participating as expanded integration is both the cause and effect of differences in experience. Participating is the empirically obvious form of co-operating, which is chiefly distinguished by its socio-cultural, material and ideational heterogeneity in the approaches discussed here. I have conceptualised participating as a decision to take part in specific problematisations that already exist. In this sense, participating ratifies and structures the existence of these problems by publicly demanding the right to help tackle them. When it comes to this last point, the modus operandi of “collaborating” differs from participating. It also brings us back to the critique of epistemic universalism. As the case of the marine biodiversity expedition made clear, collaborating responds to the contentious nature of problems and, thus, to an experiential difference. Collaborating is probably the most complex and demanding variant of heterogeneous co-operating because it expressly welcomes not only the heterogeneity of integrated participants but also the heterogeneity of the effects of co-operating. If we take Descola’s differential anthropology of nature seriously, collaborating is also the form of co-operating that underlines the geopolitical realism of experimentalism. It is crucial here to assess interventions that resist naturalism in terms of their social rationality and, thus, work towards a fusion of sociology and socio-cultural anthropology.232 A critical social ecology developed in this way provides a correspondingly collaborative response to the methodological nationalism criticised by Ulrich

See Bogusz, Tanja: “Ende des methodologischen Nationalismus? Soziologie und Anthropologie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung“, in: Soziologie, Issue 2/2018: 143–156.

232

5.4 Interim Conclusion: The Theory of Society of Experimentalism

303

Beck and Edgar Grande. Such a social ecology builds on transnational studies of networks and world societies in the spirit of a “cosmopolitan realpolitik”. But it goes further than the latter in moving away from expectations of political convergence without embracing an imperative to “co-operate or fail”.233 The experimentalist heuristic has shown that co-operating is capable of integrating conflicting stages, in that the resulting compromises leave experiential differences untouched. Just as the unsettling of epistemic universalism holds out the prospect of novel, heterogeneous forms of co-operating, it is reasonable to assume that the integration of different problematisations, as evident in the expedition, will lead to an expanded spectrum of possible problem-solving interventions at the level of global society.234 This brings me to the conclusion of the present book.

See Beck and Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity”, p. 411. See also Keck, Frédéric, Ursula Regehr and Saskia Walentowitz (eds.): “Anthropologie: Le tournant ontologique en action”, Special Issue of Tsantsa 20 (2015).

233 234

Chapter 6

Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

This book is centred on the thesis that contemporary sociology needs to extend its range of social interventions, which I have described as a shift from a “crisis-focused to experiential discipline”. Under “crisis-focused discipline”, I have subsumed those sociologies that declare social crises to be the starting point for a critical social science. By contrast, the sociological experimentalism developed here starts with the complex and often disparate shaping competencies characteristic of scholarship and society. My arguments have elucidated why sociology as a crisis-focused discipline is incompatible with the premises of sociological experimentalism. The first reason is methodological. The methodological specificity of experimentalism consists of the fact that it facilitates the development of a theory of the science of sociology that reflects on itself empirically. In this dual role, experimentalism’s core categories of “experience”, “testing” and “co-operating” always refer both to phenomena that occur in society and those professionalised by its sociological observers. In line with this, experimentalism rejects the notion, anchored in many social theories, of an external epistemic position, which fails to acknowledge, and, thus, exacerbates, the problem of value freedom. Sociologies that insist on an external epistemic position are no more or no less “value-free”. If they claim to be, they either negate the eminently normative claims of all social theories or, depending on their political hue, overlay them with a voluntaristic or deterministic patina. If we wished to uphold Weber’s logic, we would have to give up either the postulate of value freedom or the alleged external position. In order to retain its status as social science, the experimentalism developed here rids itself of both the postulate of value freedom and the claim of an external epistemic position.1 Rather than seeking to consolidate the latter on the basis of a value freedom that is no more than an

1

Luhmann pointed out that critical sociologies generally fail to acknowledge the conditions for the production of their contributions to societal self-reflection. By contrast, he referred to “contextdependent real-world operations”; see Luhmann, Theory of Society II, p. 328. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2_6

305

306

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

assertion, this experimentalism, with Heisenberg and Dewey, foregrounds the performative effects of the instruments that contribute to knowledge production. The reason for this is that the social impact of sociological interventions is inherent in every instance of research. An external analytical position is a fallacy. Rather than claiming to occupy such an external position, I propose, in the same vein as John Law and John Urry, that the normative claims of social theories and theories of society be put to the test in relation to a given problem through their confrontation— in terms of research practice—with critical actor competencies, transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives, and a conscious methodological opening. This allows us to resolve the (apparent) contradiction between pragmatism and critique simultaneously, as discussed in light of the trope of “fair-weather theory” (Test Run III). The second reason is theoretical. Just as experimentalism assumes that the constitution of sociological objects always co-produces the social tropes it observes, a theory cannot anticipate what is yet to be observed. Within the framework of the experimentalist heuristic, then, the development of hypotheses takes precedence over theoretical closure, which often occurs before a phenomenon has even been empirically investigated. As the case of the marine biodiversity expedition has shown, sociology is not alone with this problem. The question of theoretical closure, which becomes manifest in the mode of problematisation, is, above all else, an issue of which epistemic objects are integrated and in what way. But what a crisis is must be defined empirically and with the participation of those who are associated with the crisis or expected to be enrolled in crisis management. Ulrich Beck, the post-colonial disciplines and Descola’s anthropology of nature have shown how theoretically complex the definition of crises is. Sociologists would be well-advised to adopt a far more sceptical attitude towards supposedly universal assumptions, of which the fight against species extinction based on a naturalistic ontology of nature is just one particularly prominent example. The same argument could be made about democracy and human rights. Crisis scenarios, such as the biodiversity crisis, thus, provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary co-operating and the theory-of-society reflections to which it gives rise. The third reason relates both to the pragmatics of research and the analysis of the present era. As a truly crisis-focused discipline, sociology would have much to do. However, its inherent academic and disciplinary inertia leaves little scope for practical, in situ interventions. Research applications are virtually outdated before they are approved, articles are published with an average shelf life of 1 or 2 years, studies sometimes take decades, which is also true of the publication of their results, while books are more problematic still. If sociologists get involved in situations of social crisis at all over shorter time scales, it is in an inter- or transdisciplinary context. This applies to research on war and conflict, migration, and science and technology. Apart from the fact that there are surprisingly few “critical” sociologies to be found here, with the exception of migration research, sociology is rarely consulted as a crisis-focused discipline. It is no secret that sociologists will be unable to prevent forest fires, floods, terrorist attacks, pandemics, nuclear accidents, plane crashes, chemical explosions or tsunamis. Instead, as experience-focused social scientists, they are called in to collect information on actors’ experiences of specific

6.1 Experience Rather than Crisis

307

every day or crisis situations or asked how crises become inscribed in actor experiences in such a way that their response is not co-operation but exclusion and violence. They can, therefore, be sources of relevant “contributory expertise”, as envisaged by Collins and Evans, by signing up for STS’s “engaged programme”, as outlined by Sismondo. This is far from insignificant. The shift from a crisis-focused to experiential discipline, therefore, seems imperative for a number of reasons relating to the analysis of the contemporary world, theory, methodology and the pragmatics of research. But there is a problem. Sociology must finally keep its almost one-hundred-year-old promise to be an experiential discipline. The intense debates on an increasingly “theorised empiricism” have paved the way for this approach but without furnishing it with what it urgently needs: a concept of experience. This brings us back to the three core criteria of sociological experimentalism which are crucial to the development of such a concept of experience: reflexivity, revisability and the capacity for structuration. We may sum up the concept of experience in experimentalism as follows. “Experience” is both a category of observation and constitutive of the generation of sociological knowledge—faire une expérience. In this dual sense, the concept of experience impacts on the fields of epistemology, social theory and the theory of society. In epistemology, the assumption of an external sociological position is being superseded by the pluralisation of experience-laden knowledge production. In the spirit of pragmatism, it is assumed that it is primarily experiential differences that generate knowledge. Once again, actor experiences and the resulting reflexivity do not differ here in any fundamental way from sociological research experiences and the reflexivity they may generate. In contrast to the actors observed, however, the sociological experiential difference is actively and systematically induced in line with the goal of ensuring comparability (“actively” in the sense of organising an experiment). Sociological experiential knowledge is generated in a special way through ethnographic research experiences, but is not limited to this. The concept of experience is broad and incorporates experiences of theoretical or quantitative modelling, the comparison of theories and the correlation of different datasets. What is at issue here epistemologically is the competent processing of an experiential difference that triggers reflexivity.

6.1

Experience Rather than Crisis

William James made the concept of experience the connecting link between empiricism and rationalism. He and Dewey understood this sensory-cognitive connection as a way out of the rationality-driven epistemologies of their time. For Dewey and Mead, experience also highlights the link between crisis and knowledge. However, as they saw it, a crisis situation in itself does not constitute experience in the sense of knowledge. This requires the active transformation of the crisis situation through the element of reflexivity. Reflexivity, they believed, is not a purely cognitive matter either. As Dewey demonstrated in his 1896 critique of the reflex arc theory in

308

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

psychology, reflexivity for him is a sensory-cognitive and evolutionary process of crisis management. Crisis analysis can, therefore, only be translated into useful options for action if it leads to an experience in the sense of additional knowledge. Applied to sociology, this means that a crisis-focused discipline becomes an experiential one, which also implies an epistemology of sociology or a theory of the science of sociology. Within the core, Dewey-inspired category of experience, I defined the criterion of reflexivity2 as a social trope and a contribution to the constitution of sociological objects. Regarding the analysis of the contemporary world, reflexivity—as discussed by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash—is a means for contemporary societies to process their inherent contingencies, risks and creative potential in a knowledge-producing way. Reflexivity enables heterogeneous participants to be integrated into experimental formats by virtue of the fact that their epistemic contributions generate situational, processual and material experiential values. The sociological experimentalism that I have developed here required the fleshing out of the pragmatist concept of experience. In modern societies, it is not just experiences that are decisive but differences in experience. Hence, reflexivity is based on how actors deal with differences in experience resulting from crisis situations. These differences may be of endogenous or exogenous origin, as demonstrated by the epistemological discussion of the category of experience in Test Run I. They manifest themselves in observed social collectives and in the sociological research experience. I tested this thesis in light of three approaches that have attained classic status and have grounded the complementarity of experimentalism epistemologically on the basis of ethnographic studies. The starting point for this epistemological perspective was the school-forming programme of urban research in the United States, which built on the pragmatist movement in Chicago. The Chicago School of Sociology tested out—through the lens of urban sociology—the modus operandi of “situating” by investigating the great economic and cultural transformation of Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century. The evolutionary perspectives gleaned from the pragmatism of James and Dewey were concretized by construing the city of Chicago as a human-ecological laboratory. In the investigative epistemic style established by Robert Park and his colleagues, the influence of Dewey’s theory of inquiry implied a situativity of experimentalist thinking, a situativity tailored to the urban realm. This situativity directed the sociological gaze to the spatial-geographic and the (quantitatively and qualitatively) localisable experiential differences in human-environment relationships. The modus operandi of “situating” entails the spatio-temporal concentration of aggregate social states, which, under the magnifying glass of ethnographic thick description, is capable of generating experiential knowledge. The Chicago sociologists combined

2

For an updated discussion on the notion of reflexivity and its importance in the knowledge society, see “Positionality Reloaded. Debating the Dimensions of Reflexivity in the Relationship between Science and Society”, special issue Historical Social Research 46/2 (2021), edited by Séverine Marguin, Juliane Haus, Anna Juliane Heinrich, Antje Kahl, Cornelia Schendzielorz and Ajit Singh.

6.1 Experience Rather than Crisis

309

the observer level with reflections on the way they themselves were imbued by the city and its various socio-cultural milieus. The sociology that emerged from the social ecology of Chicago made the shift from crisis-focused to experiential discipline through the epistemological heroism of participant observation, an approach that had nothing but contempt for social work, most of which was done by women. This suggests that the Chicago School either hoped to converge on the then prestigious cultural anthropology through the use of ethnography or was simply afraid of being considered an unserious branch of scholarship. The question of scientificity may have been decisive in either case. From an epistemological point of view, the criterion of reflexivity was a core element of Chicago urban research at two levels. Firstly, it situated complex action orientations by recognising their causes—in line with the epistemological theories of pragmatism—in the specific crisis situations of economic and cultural upheaval facing the residents of the various Chicago districts. Rather than examining this situation in light of economic dispositions and class differences, as in many other studies of the time, the Chicago urban sociologists embraced an approach rooted in evolutionary theory and, thus, took up Dewey’s impulse to link science and society. Secondly, the principle of reflexivity implied the premise that sociological experiential knowledge is generated by participant observation and the epistemic asymmetry between scholarship and society must, therefore, be eliminated. The path from crisis-focused to experiential discipline, therefore, entailed the establishment of an independent sociological epistemic style inspired by the theory of evolution. Conversely, Pierre Bourdieu, who I deal with in what follows, pursued an inverse route in the course of his work—from an experimentalist experience-focused to a crisis-focused discipline. My survey of Bourdieu’s contribution to sociological experimentalism foregrounded his early research on Algeria, which saw him deploy ethnography to explore the upheavals in Algerian society induced by colonialization and war in the 1950s and 1960s. The circumstances of his studies, which he also described as a laboratory situation, are testimony to the contingency of all research, which is fundamental to the experimentalist epistemology. How research will turn out may be hypothetically anticipated but can never be fully determined in advance. In a colonial and warlike context characterised by particularly radical socioeconomic experiential differences, the relatively underdetermined character of Bourdieu’s research subjected the relationship between crisis-focused and experiential discipline to a particularly tough test. Bourdieu resolved the conflicts between asymmetrical geopolitical positions, on the one hand, and incoherent classificatory systems, on the other, through a theory of practice realised through the modus operandi of “correlating”. This means, on the one hand, the development of a reflexive methodology that fuses ethnographic and quantitative data. On the other hand, it entails establishing a relationship between one’s own position as a researcher and the actors under investigation with the help of field theory and concepts of habitus. Sociological reflexivity, as Bourdieu repeatedly emphasised, arises not only from the observation of crisis situations but also from the confrontation with epistemic impediments. The experiential differences lived in this way within sociological research provide insights into the specific character of the field under

310

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

investigation, its limits and the potential it opens up. Bourdieu’s experimental research practice consisted of relating ethnography and statistical category formation to one another—that is, correlating them. Through the concept of habitus that he developed on this basis, Bourdieu implicitly confirmed the line of continuity drawn by Dewey between experience, practice and knowledge. At the same time, he applied this analytical perspective to his own research activities and the experiential knowledge they generated. In Bourdieu’s later work, however, this experimentalist approach to empirical, experiential knowledge was increasingly lost. This applied to the criterion of reflexivity both regarding those observed and Bourdieu’s own sociological observation. On the one hand, Bourdieu’s critical sociology narrowed the question of the capacity for reflection to the issue of social inequalities. On the other hand, the concepts of field and habitus he developed allowed less scope for escaping the inertia of these inequalities. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that Bourdieu’s intellectual opponents almost unanimously excluded the Outline of a Theory of Practice from their criticism. Bourdieu’s Algerian experience provided the first impetus for a concise linkage of practice theory and experimentalism, a linkage pursued elsewhere and partly in marked opposition to the later Bourdieu. In France, this could be observed in the establishment of STS and the pragmatic sociology of critique. The sociological experimentalism I have developed is based on the assumption that STS, contrary to its widespread reception in the German-speaking countries, is more than just a methodological innovation within a specific area of sociology. I take it as read that STS has brought about a disciplinary paradigm shift at the levels of epistemology, social theory and theories of society. The STS seeks to move towards a problem-centred research style, something that has become indispensable in the age of inter- and transdisciplinary research. In terms of contemporary history, the path from a crisis-focused to experiential discipline can be explained in light of the need for the empiricalization of philosophical epistemology. This empiricalization was a reaction to the cracks that had appeared in the certainties cherished by the natural sciences due to the environmental and technological disasters of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast to critical theory, which responded with scepticism towards technology and science, empiricalization entailed the active investigation of everyday experiences of natural scientific thinking. The roots of STS’s growing tendency to formulate a theory of science lay in the modus operandi of “materialising” sociological knowledge, as exemplified by Karin Knorr-Cetina’s laboratory studies. Here, as in early Bourdieu and pragmatism, knowledge and practice were examined at a single level of analysis. However, in contrast to these and pragmatism-oriented approaches, such as ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism and grounded theory, this symmetrization was carried out explicitly through the medium of materialities,3 or, more precisely, through the

3

Laboratory studies and STS undoubtedly owe much to these approaches. But my concern here is with the direct, empirical-epistemological translation of the linkage of scholarship and society achieved by Dewey, a linkage first systematised by laboratory studies and STS.

6.2 Testing Rather than Positing

311

medium of scientific machines, devices, instruments, substances and records. At the same time, from the outset, this was an interdisciplinary approach to the materiality of knowledge in which sociological and anthropological cultures of knowledge interacted. Knorr-Cetina’s “anthropology of natural science” adumbrated Philippe Descola’s “anthropology of nature” in sociology-of-science terms, by lending consistency to the materiality of relationships to nature through ethnographic reflection on the scientific exploration of the environment. The epistemological category of experience generated by the criterion of empirically situated, correlated and materialised reflexivity forms the basis for the concept of experience in sociological experimentalism. This, however, is not identical to the concept of an experience-focused discipline. Sociological experimentalism only becomes an experience-focused discipline if the categories of experience, testing and co-operating and their core principles are combined. This brings together epistemology, social theory and theories of society.

6.2

Testing Rather than Positing

In the history of sociology, sociological explanations’ closeness to reality has always been derived from the tension between theory and empiricism, with the dispute over which of the two elements should be given more weight continuing to this day. Dewey’s theory of inquiry sought to integrate both sides of this equation—thus, laying the foundations for an experimentalist social theory that remedies the now much-lamented loss of practical relevance in two ways. It does so, firstly, by conceptualising the anchorage in experience as a connective continuum between everyday-practical and investigative explanation. Secondly, the experimentalist approach foregrounds the epistemological consequences of this focus on experience not only regarding the constitution of objects of investigation but also vis-à-vis theoretical narratives and the way they are fed back into the researcher’s realm of experience. The criterion of revisability, so crucial to the social theory of experimentalism, makes the shift from crisis-focused to experiential discipline via the category of testing, as discussed in Test Run II. Testing situations operationalise experiential differences. Within the experiment, they constitute the event that both determines whether there is agreement on a given problematisation and paves the way for the co-operation to which the problematisation may give rise. While the trope of the “crisis-focused discipline” assumes that the processing of crises occurs by means of an a priori hypothetical closure, which is, for the most part, merely verified or falsified in the testing situation, the principle of revisability operates within an evolutionary-holistic rather than a priori framework: “preparing”, “trialling” and “modelling” form the building blocks for a complex process of theory formation, which are not necessarily put in place in succession but are essential to ensuring revisability. Revisability is also contingent upon the observability of the experiment. As we saw in the study by Shapin and Schaffer, the experiment in

312

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

seventeenth-century England attained its specifically democratic status by dint of the fact that science in the making was exposed to the observation of observers or a specific public. This also applies to the theory building characteristic of sociological experimentalism. This theory building is prepared in such a way as to be accessible to an external description. It adheres to a logic of trialling by means of a stage-based heuristic that guarantees revisability by integrating problem-related epistemic participants. Finally, this theory building is modelled in such a way as to place an analytical compromise on an enduring basis. The modus operandi of “preparing” I have developed here, which takes its lead from Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social differentiation, is a way of laying the theory-of-science ground for the social-theoretical constitution of research objects. Revisability is guaranteed by a theoretical conception that always observes uncertainties on the premise that we can approach them non-teleologically. Since the constitution of sociological objects is based here on the identification of society with evolution, the test is tantamount to the concept of selection found in theories of difference, a concept based on previous theoretical closures. This “operational a priori” (Luhmann) replaces the heuristic a priori with a processual form of theory development. Luhmann’s decision not to practice sociology as an experiential science is no obstacle to a shift away from a crisis-focused discipline towards a theory of the science of sociology that integrates researcher and actor experiences into the constitution of research objects. Similar to the “variations” posited by Luhmann through the lens of evolutionary theory, it is the experiential difference, as defined in experimentalism, that ensures revisability for the purpose of external description, both theoretically and in terms of research practice. I elucidated the modus operandi of “trialling” with reference to the sociology of translation developed in STS and ANT, a sociology that arose out of the laboratory studies established by Knorr-Cetina and others and studies of scientific controversies. In accordance with “methodological pragmatism”, trial situations become manifest as local epistemic events through experiments within the natural sciences. Conversely, STS and ANT have also contextualized the experiment as a paradigmatic research practice within social scientific and anthropological routes to knowledge. Testing formats vary depending on the field and the problem at issue. The issue of the determination, pluralisation, and integration of heterogeneous human and non-human epistemic objects is key to the trial. In light of this constitution of objects, theories are constructed in an inter- and transdisciplinary way as “doing theory”, which is an empiricist and exploratory process. This leads to a primacy of methodology in theory building, as prefigured in the modus operandi of “preparing”. Revisability is ensured through competent interventions by heterogeneous participants. The black box of academic scholarship is rendered accessible through a symmetrical form of research on scholarship and, thus, opened up to corresponding spaces of experience. This is a species of research on research that concurrently reflects on the effects of its own investigative process. On the one hand, STS shifts from a crisis-focused to an experiential discipline through the intensive use of the ethnographic method, which generates specifically sociological experiential knowledge. On the other hand, explored through Dewey and Callon, the experimentalist

6.3 Co-operation Rather than Solidarity

313

heuristic enables extensive integration of diverse participants into the trialling event or experiment. The modus operandi of “modelling” fulfils the criterion of revisability through a social theory of procedural normativity tailored to actors’ critical competencies. I elaborated this social theory in the spirit of sociological experimentalism in light of the pragmatic sociology of critique developed by Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot and Ève Chiapello. Boltanski and Thévenot solve the problem of the sociological postulate of value freedom, discussed above, through the actor-related investigation of the creation of justificatory orders. In line with the premise mentioned at the start of the book, namely, that I have developed sociological experimentalism on the basis of social shaping competencies, French neopragmatism is centred on the actors’ ability to resolve contentious issues by generating such orders. Differences in social and cultural experience are processed through public controversies that Boltanski and Thévenot refer to as testing situations. Actors react to such tests by modelling justificatory orders that simultaneously manifest conflicting action orientations and help reconcile them. These authors execute the shift from crisis-focused to experiential discipline by both observing actors’ critical competencies as a social trope and understanding these competencies as contributing to the constitution of research objects. They integrate actor competencies into the social-theoretical model of justificatory orders. Equivalence formation through the modelling of the social— with the help of shared justificatory orders—evokes and processes contingent reactions to crisis situations with a view to developing normative action orientations. This “procedural normativity” (Boltanski) is envisaged as a link between scholarship and society. The pragmatic sociology of critique also represents a theory of social configuration and transformation rooted in epistemic uncertainties, a theory based on the interplay between critical interventions and the formation of compromises. This theory is pragmatist rather than voluntarist: compromises are not to be equated here with the production of a shared meaning, but merely ensure a capacity for action. It is precisely in this sense that sociological experimentalism stands for the analysis and practice of heterogeneous co-operating, which both challenges and characterises contemporary global society.

6.3

Co-operation Rather than Solidarity

I understand sociological experimentalism as a contribution to a theory of society whose core category is co-operating. The necessity for co-operation or heterogeneous co-operation is surely one of the greatest challenges facing contemporary world society.4 In the context of the dissolution of the bipolar political conflict between East and West, the inter- and transdisciplining of scholarship and society

4

I understand world society here not as the sum of distinct processes of globalisation but as an autonomous translocal sociality.

314

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

observable across the world and ongoing civil wars and migration, the need to process and operationalise experiential differences appears to have become so great as to redefine socialities. Drawing on the work of Richard Sennett, I characterised this in Test Run III as a shift from “solidarity” to forms of “heterogeneous co-operating”. This shift also reflects the path from a crisis-focused to experiential discipline, in the sense of a contemporary updating of Dewey-style democratic experimentalism. The concept of solidarity originally embodied a response to the socio-economic and colonial anomies of modernity and the structural failure of its promise of equality by performatively placing diverse social collectives on an equal footing. However, the concept of solidarity after 1900 had already become so generalised politically that it has often been unclear whether reference is being made to socio-economic or ethnonationalist forms of equality; this tendency is even more pronounced today. “Solidarity” is, therefore, no longer a unique characteristic of critical, that is, socialist or left-liberal, concepts of society. Despite all the sympathy expressed by Sennett and others, “solidarity” today, viewed soberly, stands for a nostalgic retreat into a specific historical form of socio-cultural communitisation and the refusal to face up conceptually to the diversity and complexity of contemporary socialities. By contrast, heterogeneous co-operating, such as the formation of compromises in the pragmatic sociology of critique, is based on neither a socio-economic equality nor a “common sense” of whatever political hue. The search for certainty here is no longer ended by a presupposed a priori consensus on alleged universals. Instead, this search is instigated again and again. Obviously, this does not mean that “critique” is no longer a relevant variable when it comes to experiential differences in the context of intertwined modernities, or the environment and public sphere. Experimentalism makes a theory-of-society contribution to a critical social ecology that intervenes in scholarship and society through the modi operandi of ‘criticising’, “participating” and “collaborating”. Regarding the principle of a capacity for structuration, I used the modus operandi of “criticising” to examine heterogeneous co-operating with reference to Philippe Descola’s anthropological analysis of nature–culture relationships across the world. As became clear, this modus operandi is a form of social scientific critique that contests the external epistemic position of traditional social theories and theories of society, as well as the disciplinary division between “modern” (sociology) and “premodern” (ethnology/anthropology) social sciences. This critique makes global comparisons based not on a thesis of inequality, for example, between global North and global South, but, instead, based on a thesis of symmetry. This approach is capable of integrating experiential differences by relating them to one another as equally valid ontologies of nature. This can only be done on the general assumption that heterogeneous co-operating is possible—the concept of solidarity would not get us very far here. The path from crisis-focused to experiential discipline is taken here in a particularly explicit way, in that the empirical data on these ontologies of nature, which are different but are considered of equal value, are largely generated based on

6.3 Co-operation Rather than Solidarity

315

ethnographic material.5 Hence, this analytical model’s capacity for structuration, particularly within the framework of heterogeneous co-operating intended to respond to the ecological crisis, must be tested repeatedly in accordance with the tenets of an experience-focused discipline. Against the background of a global comparison of differing ontologies of nature, in the second part of Test Run III, I scrutinized those critical social ecologies that examine heterogeneous co-operating within modern societies. The STS and ANT have provided theory-of-society impulses of direct relevance to the capacity for the structuration characteristics of heterogeneous co-operating by establishing an “engaged programme” through the modus operandi of “participating”. In STS, the processing of experiential differences as a response to environmental or technological disasters has led many authors to practice STS as an experiential discipline that explicitly seeks to help construct new social formats of testing and assembling. This entails an unceasing expansion of the field of potential participants, with practitioners of STS crafting heuristics for their experimental integration.6 Against the background of the transformation of academe and the growing social legitimacy of social scientific experiential knowledge, I have shown that the shift away from a crisis-focused discipline does not imply an end to critique. Nonetheless, the idea of a homogeneous community, as suggested by the concept of solidarity, has been reduced to absurdity, not least in light of the integration of non-human participants. The shift from grappling with natural scientific “matters of fact” to publicly relevant “matters of concern”, as proclaimed by Latour in 2004, corrected the tendency to try to return, via the observation of scholarly activity, to the normative external standpoint typical of critical sociologies. In line with the work of John Law and John Urry, the modus operandi of “participating” through heterogeneous forms of co-operating also holds out the prospect of targeted, performative interventions in society. Social actors, technologies and artefacts are affected by sociological epistemic cultures just as sociologists accumulate experience through research. If an experience-focused discipline takes this experimentalist premise seriously, there would be consequences for the development of a theory of the science of sociology. Based on critical social ecologies, a cosmopolitan anthropology and the experimental heuristics developed by STS and ANT, this would mean envisaging the possible effects of social scientific interventions, interventions that are, in turn, subjected to revisable empirical tests. Natural scientific expeditions impose paradigmatic parameters on such revisable empirical testing situations. In light of my study of a marine biodiversity expedition to PNG, I elaborated the problems thrown up by “co-operating” if crises are 5

This entails the systematic inclusion of quantitative data. Descola rightly emphasises that quantitative surveys long formed part of the educational canon in the international history of cultural and social anthropology; furthermore, their neglect over the last few decades has led to highly problematic curtailments and an excessive embrace of symbol-based theories, which, he contends, have needlessly impeded co-operation with the natural sciences. See Descola, Philippe: La composition des mondes, p. 88. 6 This includes consideration of digital socialities. See Marres, Noortje: Digital Sociology, Cambridge: Polity 2017.

316

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

problematised in an asymmetrical fashion. Inter- and transdisciplinary research that is conducted outside the investigative frame of naturalism-based knowledge cultures sheds light on the implicit assumptions of symmetry found in the social sciences, which may paradoxically lead to asymmetrical strategies of problematisation. As a result, the heterogeneity of such transdisciplinary co-operating may lead to conflicting definitions of a given problem, engendering further conflicts. The modus operandi of “collaborating” addresses this problem. In the context of the biodiversity research I studied, this modus operandi takes us from a crisis- to experience-focused discipline by integrating actor-related experiential differences into the process of problematisation as “contributory expertise”. In the course of the experimental heuristic, this may then lead to the review of a shared diagnostics for processing problems. Here, too, the way the procedure unfolds reflects the two-sidedness of experimentalism: actor and researcher experiences complement one another and provide the basis for a critical social ecology under conditions of heterogeneous co-operating. At the level of theory building, the dual role of experience as a category of observation and an instrument for gaining knowledge highlights the relationship between theory and empirical knowledge. The logic underlying the production of a theoretical narrative means we can only approach social theories and theories of society through exploration or modelling. This is because, firstly, the concept of experience presupposes the primacy of experience over theory, that is, the theoryladenness of an observation is a lived experience of a theory of observation that helps constitute the observation. Secondly, what is observed always feeds back into this theoretically preformed experience of observation and helps shape the social theory that emerges from it. It is this revisable, back-and-forth process that constitutes the social-theoretical contribution of experience, which operationalises the external description of sociological theory formation. The theoretical processing of experiential differences, for example, through tests, thus, enables them to interface with extra-sociological problems, as well as facilitating the integration of non-social participants. In theory-of-society terms, the concept of experience established in this way leads to a collaborative conception of the sociological processing of problems. Experiential differences, whose socio-theoretical operationalisation enables the external description of sociological thinking and acting, are observed in theory-of-society terms at the level of their compatibility and capacity for integration. The point of departure here is not experiential differences, as lived individually, that connect researchers and actors with one another epistemologically but rather divergent experiential differences that divide them from one another and among themselves. From a world society perspective, these differences have always been great. But they come together in today’s global society in a way that makes mutual connections and integration particularly difficult—they often appear too complex. To simplify: differences in experience lead either to violence or co-operation. Sociological experimentalism opts for “heterogeneous co-operation” by refraining from papering over this discrepancy in experiential differences with time-honoured universals and, instead, accepting and integrating it. The normativity of the idea of experience

6.4 Outlook

317

anchored in the concept of heterogeneous co-operating consists in positing this discrepancy, which must be taken as read if co-operating is to be possible. We might also hope that this will facilitate the final abandonment of the paternalistic and Eurocentric approaches that have always failed to grant the experiences of “the other” the same epistemic status as Occidental ones. Heterogeneous co-operating, therefore, embodies the call for a problem-oriented structuring of divergent experiential differences. What is sought here is not an affect-laden “solidarity”, whose claims to common ground expect too much of the members of a complex global society, but rather the acceptance of experiential differences combined with the means to connect them in novel ways.7 In terms of a theory of society, the concept of experience, thus, amounts to a radicalisation of differences in experience. However, rather than making these differences the subject of a culturally pessimistic complaint, they are processed in a pragmatist fashion with a view to their problemoriented capacity for structuration. The sociological experimentalism that culminates in an experiential discipline is, thus, composed of the core categories of experience, testing and co-operating and their corresponding criteria of reflexivity, revisability and capacity for structuration. This experimentalism, consequently, also furnishes us with the prerequisites for an empirically informed theory of the science of sociology.

6.4

Outlook

Jürgen Habermas geared the development of the discipline towards this distinction in his 1962 essay “The Critical and Conservative Tasks of Sociology” (“Kritische und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie”).8 In its early days as an academic subject, Habermas contended, sociology was already somewhere between a “crisis-focused”, “oppositional” and “experiential” discipline of either a “critical” or “conservative” character. In the wake of the great social crisis of the French Revolution, Habermas went on, sociology’s utopian character (Saint Simon) and pursuit of stability (De Bonald) constituted an early contrast within a discipline that had yet to establish a clear profile. Habermas’s brief history of sociology as a crisis-focused discipline made no mention at all of the more moderate positions of Comte, Durkheim, Simmel or Tönnies. Hence, his leap from Marx to the crisis-focused discipline of the 1960s—which Habermas believed had tamed a once politicised intellectual current by incorporating it into the academy—was correspondingly prodigious. He asserted that the geopolitical conflict between capitalism and state socialism had “relieved”

7

See also Latour, Bruno: Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climate Regime, Cambridge: Polity 2018. 8 To the best of my knowledge, there is no English translation of the article.

318

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

this discipline of “the pressure of contemporary opinion”.9 The “scientification of practice” already postulated by Weber10—Habermas left open what he meant by practice—led him to the conclusion that sociology can only be critical by preserving the critical strand of its history. This was a paradox, as he himself admitted. But it is precisely this scientification and political taming that Habermas subordinated to a “stricter pragmatism” that “instrumentalizes sociology as an ancillary discipline in the service of administrations”.11 It is hard to imagine a starker contrast: contemplative or supposedly “practical” criticism on one side and the disdainful administration of social self-reflection on the other. Who would not go for the former if given the choice? The experimentalism developed here, by way of contrast, concludes that this ‘strict pragmatism’ is characterised by the very fact that it sets itself the task, as envisaged by Dewey, of dealing with real-world problems in a meaningful way. It is hard to see why there should be no critical potential in this, unless critical action is reserved for a caste of academics who observe society. Luhmann, Habermas’s antipode, referred caustically to the distinction between “critical” and supposedly “affirmative” sociologies as a as “great bourgeois tradition of crisis and critique”,12 a tradition that ensures its capacity for critique without reflecting on its epistemological prerequisites. According to Luhmann, however, this is the core business of sociology, along with the feeding-in of self-reflection, because it is (perhaps only) sociology that has the requisite tools at its disposal.13 The fact that to this day there is no empirically grounded theory of the science of sociology as an experiential discipline may be related to two limitations implied by Luhmann’s sympathies for pragmatism. Firstly, for Luhmann, the critique of the externalised character of critical theories did not imply the need to integrate a concept of experience informed by evolutionary theory. Secondly, he remained extremely reserved about the potential of social scientific advice to help configure society. Instead, Luhmann’s strategy of critiquing critique entailed incorporating it into the system of social observers, a group to which Luhmann saw himself as belonging. This solution was as brilliant as it was difficult to criticise and, once again, confirmed his systems theory, drawing the ire of his opponents.

Habermas, Jürgen: “Kritische und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie”, in: Habermas, Jürgen: Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1974, p. 298. 10 Ibid., p. 299. 11 Ibid. 12 Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 2, p. 327. A few lines later he becomes more concrete still: “Social critique is part of the system criticized; it can be inspired and subsidized, it can be observed and described. And under present-day conditions, it can be quite simply embarrassing if it claims to have the better morality and better insight” (ibid., p. 328). In this sense, writer Heiner Müller was an out-and-out Luhmannian when he responded to the question of why he never left the GDR by stating: “Living in the GDR was first and foremost living in a material” (Heiner Müller in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 3 September 1994, quoted in Tschapke, Reinhart: Heiner Müller. Berlin: Morgenbuch 1996, p. 40f.). 13 See Luhmann, Theory of Society, Vol. 2, p. 335f. 9

6.4 Outlook

319

However, developments in global society and in science and technology, the increased and steadily growing number of non-sociological observers of society, the erosion of established political certainties and the routinization of events that were once understood as exceptional, such as civil wars and the ecological crises, make such a theory of the science of sociology, informed by a normative concept of experience, seem ever more urgent. There are good reasons for the growing number of approaches within the discipline that are reaching beyond diagnoses of crisis in search of the experiences, competencies and potential inherent in forms of social co-operation, while developing fitting theoretical programmes.14 Against this background, it now seems less presumptuous or naive to refuse to content oneself with the explanation of latent crises, no matter how expertly it may be articulated. This is partly due to the fact that sociology has developed into the influential bridging discipline reviled by Habermas, one whose knowledge is deployed to moderate a diverse range of complex constellations in which society is configured. Hence, contrary to all fears either of the social insignificance of sociological knowledge or of its purely “socio-technological and affirmative” role, the sociological injection of self-reflection was highly successful. In line with the “new spirit of capitalism”, sociological know-how has made a remarkable contribution to the structuring of public problems and shone a light on ways of processing them, which have flowed into scholarship, work, politics and the economy as a matter of course. Like the effects of any academic discipline and like democracy itself,15 these effects are not “good” or “bad” per se, but are complex, heterogeneous and often asymmetrical and conflictual. If, for example, the IPBES, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) integrate social scientists to help alleviate the global ecological crisis, then this is testimony to a significant increase in the relevance of sociological experience-based knowledge, a trend that invites interventions. This does not mean that we cannot identify tangible normative, political and structural asymmetries. A comparable interdisciplining of sociology, economics, politics and psychology is also becoming manifest in the field of work and business. This interdisciplining attests to the dramatic aporias inherent in the figure of the “entrepreneurial self” as developed by Ulrich Bröckling, but also articulates a need for spheres of freedom, a need that has emancipatory potential in the age of the

14

The most prominent exponent of this approach at present is Hartmut Rosa. See Rosa, Hartmut: Resonance. A Sociology of the Relationship in the World, Cambridge: Polity 2019. 15 Dewey, thus, commented on Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public as follows: “To borrow the language of James Harvey Robinson, democracy did not emerge as the realization of an ideal, good or bad. What is called popular government is rather the consequence of a large and varied number of particular happenings. It was Carlyle, no friend of democracy, who said that given the printingpress, democracy was inevitable.” As Dewey saw it, the same applied to the sciences. See Dewey, John: “Practical Democracy. Review of The Phantom Public, by Walter Lippmann. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1925. 205 pages”, in: John Dewey – The Later Works 2, 1925–1953 (1925–1927), edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press 1988, p. 217.

320

6 Conclusion: From Crisis-Focused to Experiential Discipline

network society.16 Ethnographic studies also point to the socio-political ambiguity of these phenomena and to the way they are imbued by the social sciences.17 Experimentalism addresses this situation in the two respects mentioned above. Firstly, it offers a concept of experience capable of providing a theory of the science of sociology with an empirical foundation. Secondly, experimentalism unproblematically accepts the experience-focused sociology established in this way as a bridging discipline, one that informs itself of the epistemological dimensions and practical consequences of its interventions in society only through a “doing theory” and, thus, in light of the possibility of a critical external description of its own professional action. Such an experiential discipline, I have argued, is premised on two fundamental changes in sociology—or at least parts of it. Both the digitisation and globalisation of everyday life in global society should be reflected in the sociological and social scientific syllabus in a far more concrete way than hitherto. The long-standing interand transdisciplinary anchoring of sociological perspectives in the context of science, technology and the public sphere requires both theoretical and logistical stabilization. Furthermore, there is a need for clear systematisation of the intertwining of sociology, ethnology and anthropology, which has already been practiced in social and cultural anthropology and the “studies” movements but has, as yet, barely been institutionalized. The de facto normalisation of global societal and transdisciplinary issues at the level of social observation is still streets ahead of the professional globalisation and transdisciplining of sociology. However, this problem does not apply to the entire discipline, nor is it equally virulent across the world. By the same token, the integration of sociological and anthropological experiential knowledge into the educational canon of the natural sciences and engineering as well as policy research would do much to improve the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary processing of problems. It is not enough for this to be demanded at the level of science policy if it has not been practiced and routinized in educational contexts. “Rethinking science” in the way intended by Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons now also means rethinking discipline-specific educational traditions and research structures within the academy. We are beginning to see this in an incipient form. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cultures of knowledge and research are welcomed and promoted today within society and science policy to a perhaps unprecedented extent. This is a positive scenario for the sociological experimentalism developed here. This experimentalism believes that situations of social crisis—the kind of situations discussed by John Dewey—embody a call for an experiential discipline practiced with the curiosity, uncertainty and courage that always accompany the opening up of 16

See Laux, Henning: Soziologie im Zeitalter der Komposition. Koordinaten einer integrativen Netzwerktheorie, Velbrück: Weilerswist 2014. 17 On the fields of economy and labour, see Seitz, Tim: Design Thinking and the New Spirit of Capitalism. Sociological Reflections on Innovation Culture, London et al.: Palgrave Pivot 2020 and Schendzielorz, Cornelia: Berufliche Soft Skill Trainings. Aushandlungsraum einer sozial akzeptablen Subjektivität, Weinheim: Beltz Juventa 2017.

6.4 Outlook

321

unfamiliar terrain. These were the impulses that prompted Robert E. Park and his colleagues to get their hands dirty in the demi-monde of 1920s Chicago, Pierre Bourdieu to look for interview partners on the dusty roads of Kabylia during the Algerian War in the late 1950s, and Karin Knorr-Cetina to knock on the door of a US laboratory of nutritional science in the mid-1970s, where she opened up a new field of sociological research. This is the past and future task of sociological experimentalism: to make available attractive laboratories for heterogeneous co-operations on a long-term basis.

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

Postface for my English-Speaking Readers The present book reflects an epistemic journey through transformative socioecological developments over the last 12 years. Realized between 2007 and 2018, it summarizes my inquiry into the relationship between science, society and nature as well as my attempt to illuminate the purpose of sociology today. When I started working on the book, New York had faced the terrorist attacks of 9/11 just 6 years before, the United States of America was a year away from electing its first black president and one of the most serious world financial crises of recent decades lay 1 year in the future. Around the same time, alarming reports from natural scientists went viral, warning of the irreversible human impact on nature across the globe. Local grass-roots initiatives, such as urban gardening and sustainable global production chain campaigns emerged, while inter- and transdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of the ecological crisis became more and more common within academia and beyond. In 2016, when I had finished my book in the form of a German post-doctoral “habilitation”, times had changed again, while global challenges, at least from a European standpoint, even seemed to have intensified. Accelerated digitization had transformed the organization of the world’s workplaces and communication, fragmented former social bonds but also created new forms of cooperation and engagement. Barack Obama had been re-elected but the UK was preparing to “Brexit” from the European Union and nationalist movements were gaining ground. When the book was published in German in 2018, Donald Trump was president of the United States and science was under pressure, while climate change, ocean warming and species extinction had ceased to be abstract phenomena. The degradation of nature now mobilized school kids to take to the streets worldwide and was an everyday challenge for farmers, citizens, city planners, scientists, engineers and economic hubs the world over. Yet this also triggered an unprecedented wave of

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2

323

324

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

activity aimed at enhancing conservation laws and measures, intergovernmental exchanges, attempts to reintroduce endangered plant and animal species and transnational efforts to elaborate science-based strategies to overcome the harmful consequences of the Anthropocene. Many other global events have changed the relationship between nature and politics since then; among the latest and still the most potent as I write this is a zoonosis emerging in 2020 that brought Covid-19 to global society. This non-human entity, viewed by many as a consequence of human expansion into areas previously occupied mostly by wildlife, demonstrates the vulnerability of life and makes science even more important to society. In addition to the pandemic, the summer of 2021 was characterized once again by serious environmental upheavals: yet another earthquake in Haiti, extreme heat in the United States, forests burning in southern Europe and massive flooding in western Germany—all of which destroyed households and caused many deaths. All these natural and public health disasters reflected societal shortcomings over the previous decades, illustrating a serious erosion of modern everyday certainties and routines. Neither the coronavirus nor the degradation of nature is restricted to specific parts of the globe, with their effects extending even into rich enclaves. They are planetary phenomena we all have to deal with. Confronted by these often disruptive and seemingly heterogeneous events, for me and a number of fellow scholars and friends certain fundamental questions arose. How do human and nun-human collectives experience such upheavals and hustle their way to decent liveworlds? And what transformations does sociology need if it is to respond adequately to the ontological shifts in the relationship between science, nature and society in this world of change? For classical figures of sociology such as Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, sociology was not only a descriptive science but also introduced reflexivity into society in order to improve social cohesion. For many decades, natural scientists and engineers saw such normative claims as a no-go area despite the undeniable importance of science and technology to society. But climate change, biodiversity loss, geopolitical turbulence and global health crises have modified these well-defined disciplinary positionalities.1 Moreover, these issues have not only blurred the boundaries between nature and society but have also changed the relationship between science and politics, as well as between observer and observed. The crisis of democracy and the crisis of nature have returned the sciences to their early beginnings, when the discovery of the uncharted went hand in hand with the social fabrication and infrastructuring of epistemic cultures. This entanglement was the starting impulse for science and technology studies (STS) in the late 1970s. Today, however, STS insists not only on observing the practices of science and technology and their societal impact but also on co-elaborating with them to create sustainable futures in the Anthropocene. As a consequence, current upheavals have

See for a recent discussion Bogusz, Tanja and Moritz Holtappels: “Third Knowledge Spaces between Nature and Society. A Dialogue”, in: ‘Positionality Reloaded. Debating the Dimensions of Reflexivity in the Relationship between Science and Society’, Special Issue Historical Social Research 46/2 (2021), eds. Marguin, Séverine et al.: 264–286. 1

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

325

epistemic consequences. These include questions such as: who defines what a problem is? On the basis of which empirical reality do they do so, that is, derived from which concrete experiences and assessed in light of which empirical data? Why do we struggle to deal with disasters such as flooding, burning forests and recently a pandemic only once they have occurred, rather than following a “preparedness”2 approach rooted in the multivariate concerns and forms of knowledge that emerge through the entanglement of heterogeneous disciplines and collectives, including human, nature and non-human citizens of earth? In many ways, then, STS’s initial aspiration to rethink the relationship between science and society and to open the black box of the laboratory has proved an urgent task for the social sciences. Compared to the Anglo-American and French worlds, however, in Germany STS has had a much harder time achieving integration into the academy. If young German scholars in particular now often embrace STS’s core assumptions with great enthusiasm, such as the methodological honouring of non-human beings within social analysis, an exploratory understanding of doing social theory and STS’s inter- and transdisciplinary openness, most senior sociologists have long been reluctant to endorse STS. This has to do with the unorthodox empiricism expounded by both STS and pragmatism, an empiricism that still has no equivalent in Germany. Within this situated epistemic framework, I decided not to compose yet another book “criticizing” or seeking to “expand” a field such as pragmatism by drawing on other social theories. Instead, I concluded that the priority must be to revisit the methodological foundations of social scientific epistemologies and of STS through an empiricist social theory in its own right. In Doing Sociological Experimentalism I have traced a variety of analytical approaches back to the empiricist legacy of John Dewey. At a time of socio-ecological transition, such a theory accounts for natural scientific cultures of knowledge not through the positivist reheating of “rational choices” but through experimental reflection on diverse sociological engagements with social change. The subtitle of the book, “From Crisis to Experience”, is the heuristic expression of this investigation. Experience matters—to science as well as society. On the level of naturalist epistemology, experience relates knowledge and practice. On the social level, it is a precondition for mutual understanding and social cohesion. Today, we have available to us an immense amount of detailed data on climate change and biodiversity loss, eventually transformed into striking models that forecast our planet’s future. Global inequality and social injustice have also been assessed in depth. Global society undoubtedly needs these assessments to give us an accurate picture of present realities. But STS, anthropology and postcolonial theory have shown that the factual is always situated and practised. The ontological heterogeneity of ways of inhabiting this world is often masked by modes of classification and the reduction of complexity. Yet the premises of the constructivist critique of science and knowledge

See Bogusz, Tanja and Frédéric Keck 2020. “Silent Spring in Europe calls for a New Social Ecology”, Online-Journal Somatosphere, Series “Dispatches from the Pandemic” http:// somatosphere.net/2020/silent-spring-in-europe.html/

2

326

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

are currently being hijacked by a “postfactual” movement in a most disturbing way. A sociological re-articulation of the methodological relationship between research and knowledge thus seemed to me an urgent necessity. Drawing on classical experimentalism, I decided to pursue this imperative by taking a fresh look at the ontological status of “experience” within social theories of knowledge. William James made a clear-cut distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. The latter, James contended, is a mode of knowledge based on experience, or, as I call it with a nod to the work of John Dewey, “experiential knowledge”. In the era of the Anthropocene, knowledge by description—that is, factual expertise—is important. But as natural scientists know all too well, data alone cannot change minds, let alone persuade those who reject the evidence of science as such. The missing link is a form of expertise that allows for translation between different disciplines, epistemologies and social milieus. This is an engagement with alterity, a way of establishing acquaintance with unfamiliar modes of thought and experience, with what Ariel Hochschild calls “the deep stories”,3 which are as crucial to democracy as they are to nature. Sociological experimentalism in the Anthropocene not only reminds us to take experience seriously as an important feature of science and of nature but also to consider lifeworlds that are commonly marginalized by established epistemic cultures—be they “natural” or “sociological”. In her masterful book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), Ariel Hochschild studied the foundations of “empathy walls” that have, as she explains, laid the ground for the current political polarization and fragmentation of Western democracies, especially the United States. Such experiential differences, as I would put it, are a consequence of structural differentiation that began in early modernity but has now reached a radical turning point because “[o]ur polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt”.4 Hochschild studied the cultural milieu of a Tea Party stronghold in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which later became a heartland of right-wing voters and Trump supporters. To understand this troubling political polarization, she focused on cases in which ecological and social imperatives clash. She described temporary situations of unease while doing participant observation, yet her findings were ground-breaking, surprising and a profound challenge to “common sense” views. The search for and creation of “uncommon ground” as a device for overcoming true ignorance seems to me a core task for sociologists today. Because ignorant we are, too—though we often don’t know it. Akin to Western global politics, social analysis has long been commentary from a rather comfortable distance based on the “spectator theory of knowledge”, a stance so harshly criticized by Dewey. Even now, sociological analysis of today’s world has not fully embraced the benefits of the anthropological “writing culture” debate back in the 1980s, which laid bare the epistemic and normative standpoint of the

3 See Hochschild, Ariel: Strangers in Their Own Land. Anger and Mourning on the American Right, New York and London: The New Press, 2016. 4 Ibid, p. xiv.

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

327

social scientific “reporter” as anything but neutral or innocent. While the “writing culture” perspective gave us a first taste of what later became the postcolonial critique of Western social epistemology, it is still difficult to integrate its consequences into the practice of “doing social analysis”. In the present book, I blame the view of sociology as a crisis focused discipline for this long delay in catching up with transnational developments in anthropological theory that foreground heterogeneous perspectives and approaches not just geographically but also at the level of methodology—with crucial consequences for social theory. If sociology seeks to comment meaningfully on the fundamental upheaval represented by, first, the global degradation of the planet, second, the crisis of democracy and, third, the persistent inequality between the former colonial states and those regions and countries once dominated by them, it must revisit and to some extent break away from the ontological and epistemological fragmentation of this very modernity, out of which sociology emerged as a discipline. To do so will require sociologists to abandon the spectator position and immerse themselves in unfamiliar dimensions of nature and society. Sociology is thus challenged to reframe its special strength as an empiricist science of experience. It shares this position with anthropology. As a long-term consequence of the colonial division of the world, however, anthropology and sociology have been separated, with sociology being responsible for the “moderns” and anthropology for the “non-moderns”—a separation, in the era of globalization, that is more absurd than ever. As Julian Go and postcolonial social theory have demonstrated,5 sociology is a product of colonialism, one that builds on the dichotomy between “us” and “them”, with “them” being those societies that have as yet supposedly failed to “reach” a certain level of civilization, cultural complexity and technology. This picture of Western superiority is false in many ways, while also failing to capture the West’s outsize contribution to global climate change and biodiversity loss. Today, then, it has evidently become harder to maintain this epistemic universalism. Ongoing social and ecological turmoil lends credence to the anti-universalist creed of pragmatism and the assumptions of experimentalism. Rather than the exception, uncertainty and the encounter with alterity have become commonplace in global society. The link between knowledge as a practice—a core topic in STS, anthropology and collaborative research with the natural sciences—and the epistemic consequences of experiencing alterity prompted me to identify a fundamental baseline for the improvement of sociology. This baseline is a capacity to engage with contemporary global challenges and to build a general theory that cobbles together differing livelihoods, materialities and textures, as well as humans and non-humans, to form something that makes sense. This means that, rather than being obstacles to sociological expertise, heterogeneity, difference and alterity are in fact its precondition. This has implications not only for the relationship between science and society but also for our prospects of achieving social cohesion.

5

Go, Julian: Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

328

After Experimentalism: Fieldwork in the Anthropocene

The upcoming tasks of sociological experimentalism, as I conceive it in this book, include dealing with uncertainty in productive ways by reconfiguring sociological analysis and methodologies. We need more empirical knowledge about positive instances of collaboration based on heterogeneous entities, concerns and experiences. The heuristic shift from sociology as a crisis science towards a science of experience thus underlines the social importance of heterogeneous cooperation in times of geopolitical, environmental and epistemic upheaval. Yet heterogeneous cooperation is enacted practically. It cannot be realized through “knowledge by description” only—not in this book, not in sociological research and not in daily life. Instead it must be enacted through collaborative fieldwork in the Anthropocene. Sociological experimentalism embraces this difficult and exciting task and invites us to set forth on an epistemic journey through the uncommon grounds of our times, paving the way for a sociology to come. Hamburg (Germany), December 2021

Bibliography

Abbott, Andrew. 1997. On Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School. Social Forces 75 (4): 1149–1182. ———. 2001. The Chaos of Disciplines. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2004. Methods of Discovery. Heuristics for the Social Sciences. New York: Norton. Addams, Jane. 1914. A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil. New York: The MacMillian Company. Adloff, Frank, and Sebastian Büttner. 2013. Die Vielfalt soziologischen Erklärens und die (Un)Vermeidbarkeit des Ekklektizismus. Zeitschrift für theoretische Soziologie 2: 253–268. Adorno, Theodor W. 1964. Soziologie und empirische Forschung. In Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Ernst Topitsch, 511–525. Köln and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Akrich, Madeleine, Michel Callon, and Bruno Latour. 2006. Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs. Paris: Presses des Mines de Paris. Albert, Gert, and Steffen Sigmund, eds. 2010. Soziologische Theorie kontrovers, Special Issue 50, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Amann, Klaus, and Stefan Hirschauer, eds. 1997. Die Befremdung der eigenen Kultur. Zur ethnographischen Herausforderung soziologischer Empirie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Amelang, Katrin. 2012. Laborstudien. In Science and Technology Studies. Eine sozialanthropologische Einführung, ed. Stefan Beck, Jörg Niewöhner, and Estrid Sørensen, 145–171. Bielefeld: Transcript. Anderson, W. 2002. Introduction. Postcolonial Technoscience. Social Studies of Science 32 (5/6): 643–658. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Asdal, Kristin, and Noortje Marres. 2014. Performing Environmental Change: The Politics of Social Science Methods. Environment and Planning A 46: 2055–2064. Baciocchi, Stéphane, and Jean-Louis Fabiani. 2013. Das verlorene Argument in Durkheims Pragmatismus-Vorlesung (1895–1955). Kritisches zu Methode und Wahrheit. In Émile Durkheim. Soziologie, Ethnologie, Philosophie, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz, 433–471. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Baker, Paul J. 1981. Die Lebensgeschichten von W.I. Thomas und Robert E. Park. In Geschichte der Soziologie. Beiträge zur kognitiven, sozialen und historischen Identität einer Disziplin, ed. Wolf Lepenies, vol. 1, 244–270. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 T. Bogusz, Experimentalism and Sociology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92478-2

329

330

Bibliography

Barry, Andrew, and Georgina Brown, eds. 2014. Interdisciplinarity. Reconfigurations of the Social and the Natural Sciences. London: Routledge. Barthe, Yannick, et al. 2013. Sociologie pragmatique: Mode d’emploi. Politix 26 (103): 175–204. Bauer, Susanne, Torsten Heinemann, and Thomas Lemke, eds. 2017. Science and Technology Studies. Klassische Positionen und aktuelle Perspektiven. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2008. Eine Welt voller Erlebnisse. In Erleben, Erleiden, Erfahren. Die Konstitution sozialen Sinns jenseits instrumenteller Vernunft, ed. Junge Kay, Daniel Šuber, and Gerold Gerber, 45–62. Bielefeld: Transcript. Bayly, Christopher A. 2004. The Birth of the Modern World. Malden: Blackwell. Beck, Stefan. 1997. Umgang mit Technik. Kulturelle Praxen und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschungskonzepte. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. ———. 2008. Natur | Kultur. Überlegungen zu einer relationalen Anthropologie. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 104 (2): 161–199. Beck, Stefan, Jörg Niewöhner, and Estrid Sørensen, eds. 2012. Science and Technology Studies. Eine sozialanthropologische Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. ———. 2016. Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande. 2010. Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research. British Journal of Sociology 61 (3): 409–443. Beck, Ulrich, Boris Holzer, and André Kieserling. 2001. Nebenfolgen als Problem soziologischer Theoriebildung. In Die Modernisierung der Moderne, ed. Ulrich Beck and Wolfgang Bonß, 63–81. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Beckert, Jens, and Hans Joas. 2001. Action Theory. In Handbook of Sociological Theory, ed. Jonathan Turner, 269–285. New York: Plenum. Beetz, Michael, et al. 2014. Was bewegt Deutschland? Sozialmoralische Landkarten engagierter und distanzierter Bürger in Ost- und Westdeutschland. Weinheim: Beltz/Juventa. Belliger, Andréa, and David J. Krieger, eds. 2006. ANThology. Ein einführendes Handbuch zur Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Bielefeld: Transcript. Bernstein, Richard J. 2010a. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2010b. John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy. In The Pragmatic Turn, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, 70–88. Cambridge: Polity. Berthoin-Antal, Ariane, Michael Hutter, and David Stark, eds. 2015. Moments of Valuation. Exploring Sites of Dissonance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biagioli, Marc, ed. 1999. The Science Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Bischoff, Christine. 2014. Empirie und Theorie. In Methoden der Kulturanthropologie, ed. Christine Bischoff, Karoline Oehme-Jüngling, and Walter Leimgruber, 14–31. Bern: Haupt Verlag. Bloor, David. 1976. Knowledge and Social Imagery. London: Routledge. Blume, Eugen, Matilda Felix, Gabriele Knapstein, and Catherine Nicols, eds. 2015. Black Mountain. Ein interdisziplinäres Projekt 1933–1957. Leipzig: Spector Books. Bogusz, Tanja. 2007. Institution und Utopie. Ost-West-Transformationen an der Berliner Volksbühne. Bielefeld: Transcript. ———. 2009. Erfahrung, Praxis, Erkenntnis. Wissenssoziologische Anschlüsse zwischen Pragmatismus und Praxistheorie – ein Essay. Sociologia Internationalis 2: 197–228. ———. 2010. Zur Aktualität von Luc Boltanski. Einleitung in sein Werk. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2011. Nicht Naturalismus – nicht Konstruktivismus. Wissenschaftstheoretische ‘turns’ als Paradigmenjäger. In Naturalismus | Konstruktivismus. Zur Produktivität einer Dichotomie, Berliner Blätter. Ethnographische und Ethnologische Beiträge. Sonderheft 55, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Estrid Sørensen, 93–111. Berlin: Panama Verlag. ———. 2012. Experiencing Practical Knowledge. Emerging Convergences Between Pragmatism and Sociological Practice Theory. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2: 32–54.

Bibliography

331

———. 2013a. Synchronisationen. Bourdieu, Durkheim und die Ethnologie. In Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz, 348–361. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 2013b. Dekolonisierung des Denkens. Was wir von Descola lernen. Mittelweg 36 (22): 46–62. ———. 2013c. Experimentalismus statt Explanans? Zur Aktualität der pragmatistischen Forschungsphilosophie John Deweys. Zeitschrift für theoretische Soziologie 2: 239–252. ———. 2013d. Was heißt Pragmatismus? Boltanski meets Dewey. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 3 (4): 311–328. ———. 2014. Why (Not) Pragmatism? In The Spirit of Luc Boltanski. Essays on the “Pragmatic Sociology of Critique”, ed. Simon Susen and Bryan S. Turner, 129–152. London, New York & Delhi: Anthem Press. ———. 2015. ‘Ich will jetzt mehr mit Muslimen zusammenarbeiten’. Französische Sozialwissenschaftler nach dem 7.1.2015 – ein Bericht, published online on the Homepage of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie am 19.1.2015. Accessed November 2016, from http:// www.soziologie.de/uploads/media/15-01_Ich_will_jetzt_viel_mehr_Projekte_mit_Muslimen_ machen.pdf ———. 2017. Kritik, Engagement oder Experimentalismus? STS als pragmatistische Soziologie kritischer Öffentlichkeiten. In Pragmatismus und soziale Praktiken, ed. Hella Dietz, Fritjof Nungesser, and Andreas Pettenkofer, 283–300. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 2018a. Ende des methodologischen Nationalismus? Soziologie und Anthropologie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung. Soziologie 42 (2): 143–156. ———. 2018b. From Crisis to Experiment. Bourdieu and Dewey on Practice and Political Cooperation. In Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory, ed. Theodore R. Schatzki and Anders Buch, 156–175. London & New York: Routledge. ———. 2021. Fieldwork in the Anthropocene. On the Possibilities of Analogical Thinking Between Nature and Society. SozArXiv Papers. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/td7jk. Bogusz, Tanja, and Heike Delitz, eds. 2013a. Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 2013b. Renaissance eines penseur maudit? Émile Durkheim zwischen Soziologie, Ethnologe und Philosophie. In Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz, 11–43. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Bogusz, Tanja, and Moritz Holtappels. Third Knowledge Spaces Between Nature and Society. A Dialogue. Historical Social Research 46 (2): 264–286. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.46.2021.2. 264-286. Bogusz, Tanja, and Martin Reinhart. 2017. Öffentliche Soziologie als experimentalistische Kollaboration. Zum Verhältnis von Theorie und Methode im Kontext disruptiven sozialen Wandels. In Öffentliche Gesellschaftswissenschaften, ed. Stefan Selke and Annette TreibelIllian, 345–359. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Bogusz, Tanja, and Estrid Sørensen. 2011. Einleitung. In “Naturalismus | Konstruktivismus – Zur Produktivität einer Dichotomie”, Berliner Blätter, Ethnographische und Ethnologische Beiträge, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Estrid Sørensen, vol. 55, 6–21. Boltanski, Luc. 1996. Endless Disputes. From Intimate Injuries to Public Denunciations, Working Papers in Networks and Interpretation, Cornell University, Department of Sociology Nr. 96-2. ———. 1999. Distant Suffering. Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2000. Une sociologie sans société? Actualités du contemporain 2000: 303–311. ———. 2003. Usages faibles, usages forts de l’habitus. In Travailler avec Bourdieu, ed. Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave, 153–161. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 2009. Autour de De la justification. Un parcours dans le domaine de la sociologie morale. In Compétences critiques et sens de la justice, ed. Marc Breviglieri, Claudette Lafaye, and Dany Trom, 15–35. Paris: Economica. ———. 2012. Love and Justice as Competences. London: Wiley & Polity Press.

332

Bibliography

———. 2013. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation. London: Polity Press. ———. 2014. Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels and the Making of Modern Societies. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2021. Macht des‚Volkes’. Die Krise des Liberalismus entfaltet nationale Affekte. Die Zeit, 11.10.2012. Accessed November 2021, from http://www.zeit.de/2012/42/Essay-Volk-KriseLiberalismus Boltanski, Luc, and Mauro Basaure. 2008. Die pragmatische Soziologie der Kritik heute. Luc Boltanski im Gespräch mit Mauro Basaure. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 10: 1–32. Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York: Verso Press. Boltanski, Luc, and Arnaud Esquerre. 2020. Enrichment. A Critique of Commodities. Cambridge: Polity. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot, eds. 1989. Justesse et justice dans le travail. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France & Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi. ———. 1999. The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory 2 (3): 359–377. ———. 2000. The Reality of Moral Expectations. A Sociology of Situated Judgment. Philosophical Explorations 3: 208–231. ———. 2006. On Justification. Economies of Worth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Böschen, Stefan, and Peter Wehling. 2004. Wissenschaft zwischen Folgenverantwortung und Nichtwissen. Aktuelle Perspektiven der Wissenschaftsforschung. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Bouchène, Abderrahmane, et al. 2012. Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale. Paris & Alger: Éditions La Découverte & Éditions Barzakh. Bouchet, Philippe, Hervé Le Guyader, and Olivier Pascal. 2009. The SANTO 2006 Global Biodiversity Survey: An Attempt to Reconcile the Pace of Taxonomy and Conservation. Zoosystema 31 (3): 401–406. ———, eds. 2011. The Natural History of Santo. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bouchet, Philippe, et al. 2008. A Quarter-Century of Deep-Sea Malacological Exploration in the South and West Pacific: Where Do We Stand? How Far to Go? In “Tropical Deep-Sea Benthos 25”. Mémoires du Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, ed. Philippe Bouchet et al., vol. 196, 9–40. Weisbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2013 June. Papua Nuigini Biodiversity Expedition. Marine Survey of the Madang Lagoon and Bismarck Sea, Interim Report. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1958. Sociologie de l’Algérie. Paris: PUF. ———. 1964. Pierre und Abdelmalek Sayad: Le déracinement. La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1968. Structuralism and Theory of Sociological Knowledge. Social Research 35 (4): 681–705. ———. 1974. Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1975. Méthode scientifique et hierarchie sociale des objets. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 1 (1): 4–6. ———. 1977. Algérie 60. Structures économiques et structures temporelles. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1980. Le sens pratique. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. ———. 1982. Leçon sur la leçon. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1987. Fieldwork in Philosophy. In Choses Dites, ed. Pierre Bourdieu, 13–46. Paris: Minuit. ———. 1990a. The Logic of Practice. London: Polity Press. ———. 1990b. In Other Words. Essays Toward a Reflective Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1992. Fieldwork in Philosophy. In Rede und Antwort, ed. Pierre Bourdieu, 15–49. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bibliography

333

———: “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason”, in Biaglioli, Mario (Hg.): The Science Studies Reader, London: Routledge 1999a, p. 31-50. ———. 1999b. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000a. Die zwei Gesichter der Arbeit. Interdependenzen von Zeit- und Wirtschaftsstrukturen am Beispiel einer Ethnologie der algerischen Übergangsgesellschaft. Konstanz: UVK. ———. 2000b. Pascalian Meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000c. Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique. Précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2002. Ein soziologischer Selbstversuch. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2004. Science of the Science and Reflexivity. London: Polity Press. ———. 2010a. Algerische Skizzen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2010b. Vom richtigen Gebrauch der Ethnologie. Ein Gespräch mit Moulod Mammeri. In Algerische Skizzen, ed. Pierre Bourdieu, 339–413. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1991b. Soziologie als Beruf. Wissenschaftstheoretische Voraussetzungen soziologischer Erkenntnis. Berlin: De Gruyter. ———. 1991c. Einleitung: Wissenschaftstheorie und Methodenlehre. In Bourdieu, Chamboredon and Passeron: Soziologie als Beruf. Wissenschaftstheoretische Voraussetzungen soziologischer Erkenntnis, 1–36. Berlin: De Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre, Jean-Luc Chamboredon, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1991a. The Craft of Sociology. Epistemological Preliminaries. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Abdelmalek Sayad. 2020. Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Agriculture in Algeria. London: Polity Press. Bowen, Frances. 2014. After Greenwashing. Symbolic Corporate Environmentalism and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowker, Geoffrey. 2000. Biodiversity Datadiversity. Social Studies of Science 30 (5): 643–683. Bowker, Geoffrey, and Susan Leigh. 1999. Star: Sorting Things Out. Classification and It’s Consequences. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Boyle, Robert. 1662. New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air and Its Effects. Oxford: Robinson. Breidenstein, Georg, Stefan Hirschauer, Herbert Kalthoff, and Boris Nieswand. 2013. Ethnografie. Die Praxis der Feldforschung. Wien: UVK & UTB. Bröckling, Ulrich. 2013. Der Mensch ist das Maß aller Schneider. Anthropologie als Effekt. Mittelweg 22 (1): 68–88. Brunkhorst, Hauke, ed. 1998. Demokratischer Experimentalismus. Politik in der komplexen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bruno, Isabelle, Emmanuel Didier, and Julien Prévieux. 2014. Statactivsme. Comment lutter avec des nombres. Paris: La Découverte/Collection Zones. Burgess, Ernest W. 1948. William I. Thomas as a Teacher. Sociology and Social Research 32: 760–764. Accessed November 2016, from https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Burgess/ Burgess_1948.html ———. 1967. The Growth of the City. An Introduction into a Research Project. In The City, ed. Ernest W. Burgess, Robert E. Park, and Roderick McKenzie, 47–62. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Burke, F. Thomas, D. Micah Hester, and Robert B. Talisse. 2002a. Editors’ Introduction. In Dewey’s Logical Theory. New Studies and Interpretations, xi–iv. Nashville: Vanderbildt University Press. ———, eds. 2002b. Dewey’s Logical Theory. New Studies and Interpretations. Nashville: Vanderbildt University Press. Bushnell, C.T. 1919. Scientific Method in Sociology. American Journal of Sociology 25 (1): 41–58. Calcaterra, Rosa M. 2008. Truth in Progress. The Value of the Facts and Feelings Connection in William James. In American and European Values: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives,

334

Bibliography

ed. Matthew C. Flamm, John L. Lacks, and Kryszt P. Skowronski, 90–105. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Calhoun, Craig. 2005. The Promise of Public Sociology. The British Journal of Sociology 56 (3): 355–363. ———. 2007a. Sociology in America. An Introduction. In Sociology in America. A History, ed. Craig Calhoun, 1–38. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———, ed. 2007b. Sociology in America. A History. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Callon, Michel. 1981. Pour une sociologie des controverses technologiques. Fundamenta Scientiae 2 (3–4): 381–399. ———. 1999. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation. Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In The Science Studies Reader, ed. Marc Biagioli, 67–83. London: Routledge. Camic, Charles. 1986. The Matter of Habit. American Journal of Sociology 91 (5): 1039–1087. ———. 2007. On Edge. Sociology During the Great Depression and the New Deal. In Sociology in America. A History, ed. Craig Calhoun, 225–280. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Camic, Charles, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont. 2011. Social Knowledge in the Making. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Campbell, James. 1999. Dewey and Democracy. In Dewey Reconfigured. Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple, 1–17. Albany/New York: SUNY Press. Canguilhem, Georges. 1979a. Theorie und Technik des Experimentierens bei Claude Bernard. In Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie, ed. Georges Canguilhem, 75–88. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Carson, Rachel. 2002. Silent Spring. Boston, Massachussetts. ———. 1979b. Zur Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Leben seit Darwin. In Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie, ed. Georges Canguilhem, 134–153. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Charbonnier, Philippe. 2014. Descola, Philippe – La composition des mondes. Entretiens avec Pierre Charbonnier. Paris: Flammarion. Chateauraynaud, Francis. 1991. La faute professionnelle. Une sociologie des conflits de responsabilité. Paris: Métailié. Claverie, Elisabeth. 2009. La Violence, le procès, et la Justification. In Compétences critiques et sens de la justice, Actes du Colloque de Cerisy, ed. Marc Breviglieri, Claudette Lafaye, and Dany Trom, 107–123. Paris: Economica. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Collins, Harry M., and Robert Evans. 2001. The Third Wave of Science Studies. Studies of Expertise and Experience. Social Studies of Science 32 (2): 235–296. Conrad, Sebastian, and Andreas Eckert. 2007. Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, Multiple Modernen. Zur Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt. In Globalgeschichte. Theorien, Ansätze, Themen, ed. Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, and Ulrike Freitag, 7–49. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Conrad, Sebastian, and Shalini Randeria, eds. 2013. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Corbin, Juliet, and Anselm Strauss. 1990. Grounded Theory Research: Procedures, Canons, and Evaluative Criteria. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19 (6): 418–427. Corsi, Giancarlo. 1997a. Evolution. In GLU: Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, ed. Giancarlo Corsi, Claudio Baraldi, and Elena Esposito, 52–55. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997b. Kommunikation. In GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, ed. Giancarlo Corsi, Claudio Baraldi, and Elena Esposito, 89–93. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bibliography

335

Costello, Marc, Robert M. May, and Nigel E. Stork. 2013. Can We Name Earth Species Before They Go Extinct? Science 339 (6118): 413–416. D’Ambrosio, Ubiratan. 1997. Ethnomathematics. Challenging Eurocentrism. In Mathematics Education, ed. Arthur B. Powell and Marilyn Frankenstein, 13–24. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dányi, Endre. 2017. Politics Beyond Words. Ethnography of Political Institutions. In Routledge Handbook of Language & Politics, ed. Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner, 291–305. London: Routledge. Darwin, Charles. 1844. Letter to Leonard Jenyns 12 October 1844. In Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 782” [1844]. Accessed August 2021, from https://www.darwinproject.ac. uk/letter/DCP-LETT-782.xml ———. 1985. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favourite Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Penguin Classics. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dellwing, Michael, and Robert Prus. 2012. Einführung in die interaktionistische Ethnografie. Soziologie im Außendienst. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Descola, Philippe. 1996. Constructing Natures. Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice. In Nature and Society. Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Philippe Descola and Gisli Pálsson, 82–102. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. Par delà la nature et la culture. Le Débat 114: 86–101. ———. 2008. Wem gehört die Natur? Warum der Schutz der Artenvielfalt kein universelles Prinzip sein kann. Lettre International 83 (Winter): 70–73. ———. 2009. The Two Natures of Lévi-Strauss. In The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss, ed. Boris Wiseman, 103–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Diversité des natures, diversités des cultures. Montrouge: Bayard. ———. 2013a. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2013b. The Ecology of Others. Chicago: Prickly. Desrosières, Alain. 2003. Une rencontre improbable et ses deux héritages. In Travailler avec Bourdieu, ed. Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave, 209–218. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 2014a. Deux senses d’évaluation: Des expérimentations aléatoires. In Prouver et gouverner, ed. Alain Desrosières, 60–69. Paris: La Découverte. ———. 2014b. Pays en développement et innovations conceptuelles. In Prouver et gouverner, ed. Alain Desrosières, 111–121. Paris: La Découverte. DeVault, Marjorie L. 2007. Knowledge from the Field. In Sociology in America. A History, ed. Craig Calhoun, 155–182. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dewey, John. 1896. The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. The Psychological Review III (4): 355–370. ———. 1910. The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy. In The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought, ed. Dewey, John, 1–19. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Accessed August 2021, from https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1 910b/Dewey_1910_01.html ———. 1916. Introduction. In John Dewey: Essays in Experimental Logic, 1–74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Accessed October 2021, from https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/ Dewey/Dewey_1916/Dewey_1916_01.html ———. 1917. The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy. In Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude, ed. John Dewey, 3–69. New York: Holt. ———. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Modern Library. ———. 1929. Experience and Nature. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Internet Archive. Accessed October 2021, from https://archive.org/details/experienceandnat029343mbp/page/n1 65/mode/2up ———. 1930. From Absolutism to Experimentalism. In Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, eds. Adams, George P. and Wm. Pepperell Montague, 13–27. Russell

336

Bibliography

and Russell. Accessed August 2021, from https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Dewey/Dewey_1930. html ———. October 24, 1940. The Vanishing Subject in the Psychology of James. The Journal of Philosophy 37 (22): 589–599. ———. 1944. Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Free Press. ———. 1954. The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Swallo Press & Ohio University Press. ———. 1955. Foreword. In Primitive Man as Philosopher, ed. Paul Radin, XVII–XX. New York: Dover. ———. 1977a. A New Social Science. In John Dewey, The Middle Works 11 1899-1924 (19181919), ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 87–92. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1977b. The Experimental Theory of Knowledge. In John Dewey. The Middle Works 3. 1899-1924 (1903–1906), ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 107–127. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1980. The Development of American Pragmatism. In John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. J.A. Boydston, vol. 2, 3–21. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1981a. From Absolutism to Experimentalism. In Dewey, John The later Works (19251953), ed. Jo Anne Boydston, vol. 5, 147–160. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1981b. Philosophy. In Dewey, John The later Works (1925-1953), ed. Jo Anne Boydston, vol. 5, 161–177. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1986. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The Later Works (1925-1953), ed. Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1988a. The Unfinished Introduction 1949-1951. In John Dewey: Experience and Nature, The Later Works, ed. Joseph Ratner and Jo Ann Boydston, vol. 1, 329–364. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1988b. Practical Democracy. Review of the Phantom Public, by Walter Lippmann. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1925. In John Dewey – The Later Works 2, 1925–1953 (1925–1927), ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 213–220. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1988c. Three Contemporary Philosophers: William James, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russel. In John Dewey. The Middle Works 12, 1899–1924 (1920), ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 203–250. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1988d. Experience, Knowledge and Value. A Rejoinder. In The Later Works (1925-1953), ed. John Dewey and Jo Anne Boydston, vol. 14, 3–90. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1991a. John Dewey. The Later Works 15, 1925–1953 (1942–1948). Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1991b. William James as Empiricist. In John Dewey. The Later Works 15, 1925–1953, (1942–1948), ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 9–17. Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 1995. Does Reality Posess Practical Character? In Pragmatism. A Contemporary Reader, ed. Russel B. Goodman, 79–92. New York & London: Routledge. ———. 1998a. “Science and Society” (from: Philosophy and Civilization). In The Essential Dewey, Vol 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, ed. Larry Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, 363–368. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 1998b. What Pragmatism Means by ‘Practical’. In The Essential Dewey, Vol 2: Ethics, Logic, Psychology, ed. Larry Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, 377–386. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. The Quest for Certainty. A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action. In John Dewey, The Later Works (1925-1953), Vol. 4: 1929, ed. Jo Anne Boydston, 1–254. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Bibliography

337

Diaz-Bone, Rainer, ed. 2011. Soziologie der Konventionen. Grundlagen einer pragmatischen Anthropologie. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Dickinson, Paul. 2014 April 29. Exxon, Total and Shell Are Finally Talking About Climate Change. The Guardian. Accessed November 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/sustainablebusiness/climate-change-exxon-total-shell-oil-gas-emissions-security Dickstein, Morris. 1999a. The Revival of Pragmatism. New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture. Durham & London: Duke University Press. ———. 1999b. Pragmatism Then and Now. In The Revival of Pragmatism. New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein, 1–18. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Didier, Emmanuel. 2009. En quoi consiste l’Amérique? Les statistiques, le New Deal et la démocratie. Paris: La Découverte. Dietz, Hella. 2015a. Theorien erzählen: Überlegungen im Anschluss an John Dewey. In Gründungsszenen soziologischer Theorie, ed. Sina Farzin and Henning Laux, 217–231. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2015b. Prozesse erzählen oder was die Soziologie von der Erzähltheorie lernen kann. In Prozesse – Formen, Dynamiken, Erklärungen, ed. Rainer Schützeichel and Stefan Jordan, 321–336. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Dietz, Hella, Frithjof Nungesser, and Andreas Pettenkofer, eds. 2017. Pragmatismus und Theorie sozialer Praktiken. Sozialtheoretische Perspektiven. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Dodier, Nicolas. 1991. Agir dans plusieurs mondes. Critique 529–530: 427–458. ———. 2005. L’espace et le mouvement du sens critique. Annales Histoire et Sciences Sociales 1: 7–31. Dörre, Klaus, and Tine Haubner. 2011. Einzelbesprechung ›Theorie ‹ – Luc Boltanski: Soziologie und Sozialkritik. Frankfurter Adorno-Vorlesungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Soziologische Revue 34 (3): 395–400. Dreyblatt, Arnold. 2015. Das Black Mountain-Archiv als Aufführungskunst. In Black Mountain. Ein interdisziplinäres Projekt 1933-1957, ed. Eugen Blume, Matilda Felix, Gabriele Knapstein, and Catherine Nicols, 16–21. Leipzig: Spector Books. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1915. The Negro. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2007. The Souls of the Black Folks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1911. La Division du travail social. Paris: Alcan. ———. 1952. Suicide. A Study in Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. 1960. Sociology and Its Scientific Field. In Essays on Sociology & Philosophy, ed. Kurt H. Wolff, 355–375. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1964. The Rules of Sociological Method. London & New York: The Free Press. ———. 1983. Pragmatism and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1997. The Division of Labour in Society. New York: The Free Press. ———. 2001. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckert, Andreas, and Albert Wirz. 2013. Wir nicht, die Anderen auch. Deutschland und der Kolonialismus. In Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichtsund Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad, Shalini Randeria, and Regina Römhild, 372–392. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Eder, Klaus. 1988. Die Vergesellschaftung der Natur. Studien zur sozialen Evolution der praktischen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ed. 2002. Multiple Modernities. Piscataway & New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Elias, Norbert. 2012. What Is Sociology? Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Elias, Norbert, and John L. Scotson. 1965. The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems. London: Frank Cass & Co. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Douglas W. Maynard. 2011. Pragmatism and Ethnomethodology. Qualitative Sociology 34: 221–261. Encrevé, Pierre, and Rose-Marie Lagrave, eds. 2003. Travailler avec Bourdieu. Paris: Flammarion.

338

Bibliography

Endruweit, Günter, Gisela Trommsdorf, and Nicole Burzan, eds. 2014. Wörterbuch der Soziologie. Konstanz and München: UVK/UTB. Engels, Anita. 2003. Die geteilte Umwelt. Ungleichheit, Konflikt und ökologische Selbstgefährdung in der Weltgesellschaft. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft. Esposito, Elena. 1997. Operation/Beobachtung. In GLU. Glossar zu Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme, ed. E. Esposito, C. Baraldi, and G. Corsi, 123–128. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Esser, Hartmut. 1993. Soziologie. Allgemeine Grundlagen. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 1999. Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen. Bd. 1: Situationslogik und Handeln. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 2000. Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen. Bd 3: Soziales Handeln. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Fabiani, Jean-Louis. 1997. Controverses Scientifiques, Controverses Philosophiques. Figures, Positions, Trajets. Enquête. Anthropologie, Histoire, Sociologie 5: 11–34. ———. 2006. A quoi sert la notion de discipline? In Qu’est-ce qu’une displine? ed. Jean-Louis Fabiani, Jean Boutier, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Jacques Revel, 11–34. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Fanon, Frantz. 2017. The Wretched of the Earth. Cape Town: Kwela. Farzin, Sina, and Henning Laux, eds. 2014. Gründungsszenen soziologischer Theorie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Faugère, Elsa. 2008. L’exploration contemporaine de la biodiversité. Approche anthropologique de l’expédition Santo 2006. Journal de la Société des Océanistes 126 (127): 196–205. Faugère, Elsa, and Olivier Pascal. 2011. La fabrique de l’information: Le cas des grandes expeditions naturalistes contemporaines. In Les promesses de la biodiversité, Schwerpunktheft Quaderni – Communication, Technologies, Pouvoir, ed. C. Granjou and Isabel Mauz, 39–51. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Fischer, Joachim. 2013. Durkheims Soziologie als Sozioprudenz. In Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz, 95–118. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Fischer, Marilyn. 2019. Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorizing. Constructing ‘Democracy and Social Ethics’. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Fitzgerald, Des, and Felicity Callard. 2014. Social Science and Neuroscience Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements. Theory, Culture and Society 30: 1–30. Fleck, Christian. 2011. A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences. Robber Barons, The Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Flick, Uwe. 2007. Qualitative Sozialforschung. Eine Einführung. Reinbeck: Rohwohlt. ———. 2014. Explorationsstudie. In Wörterbuch der Soziologie, ed. Günter Endruweit, Gisela Trommsdorf, and Nicole Burzan, 118–119. Konstanz & München: UVK. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The Order of Discourse. In Untying the Text: A Post-structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, 48–78. London: Routledge. Frega, Roberto. 2006. Pensée, expérience, pratique. Essai sur la théorie du jugement de John Dewey. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2019. Pragmatism and the Wide View on Democracy. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Füllsack, Manfred. 2010. Die Habermas-Luhmann-Debatte. In Soziologische Kontroversen. Beiträge zu einer anderen Geschichte von der Wissenschaft vom Sozialen, ed. Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius, 154–181. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Gehlen, Arnold. 2004. Urmensch und Spätkultur. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Gerstenberger, Debora, and Joël Glasman, eds. 2016. Techniken der Globalisierung. Globalgeschichte meets Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Bielefeld: Transcript. Gieryn, Thomas F. 2006. City as Truth Spot. Laboratories and Field Sites in Urban Studies. Social Studies of Science 36 (1): 5–38. Goodman, Russel B. 1995. John Dewey. In Pragmatism. A Contemporary Reader, ed. Russel B. Goodman, 76–77. New York & London: Routledge.

Bibliography

339

Granjou, Céline, and Isabelle Mauz. 2011. Avant-propos: Gouverner par les scénarios? Comment les institutions gouvernementales anticipent l’avenir de la biodiversité. In “Les promesses de la biodiversité”, Special Issue Quaderni – Communication, technologies, pouvoir, ed. Céline Granjou and Isabelle Mauz, 5–11. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Greshoff, Rainer. 2010. Die Theorievergleichsdebatte in der deutschsprachigen Soziologie. In Soziologische Kontroversen. Beiträge zu einer anderen Geschichte von der Wissenschaft vom Sozialen, ed. Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius, 182–216. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Groß, Matthias. 2014. Experimentelles Nichtwissen. Umweltinnovationen und die Grenzen sozialökologischer Resilienz. Bielefeld: Transcript. Groß, Matthias, Holger Hoffmann-Riehm, and Wolfgang Krohn. 2005. Realexperimente. Ökologische Gestaltungsprozesse in der Wissensgesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript. Groß, Matthias and Linsey McGoey (Hg.): Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, London: Routledge 2015. Groß, Matthias, and Michael Stauffacher. 2014. Introduction. Transdisciplinary Environmental Science: Problem-Oriented Projects and Strategic Research Programs. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 39 (4): 299–306. Gross, Neil. 2003. Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism. A Case Study in the Sociology of Ideas. Theory and Society 32: 93–148. ———. 2007. Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth Century American Sociology. In Sociology in America, A History, ed. Craig Calhoun, 183–224. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Guggenheim, Michael. 2012. Laboratizing and De-laboratizing the World: Changing Sociological Concepts for Places of Knowledge Production. History of the Human Sciences 25 (1): 99–118. Habermas, Jürgen. 1974a. Kritische und konservative Aufgaben der Soziologie. In Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien, ed. Jürgen Habermas, 290–306. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1974b. Dogmatismus, Vernunft und Entscheidung. Zur Theorie und Praxis in der verwissenschaftlichten Zivilisation. In Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien, ed. Jürgen Habermas, 307–335. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1986. Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. London: Wiley. ———. 1989. Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon. Habermas, Jürgen, and Niklas Luhmann. 1971. Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie – Was leistet die Systemforschung? Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hackett, Ed, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, eds. 2007. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hacking, Ian. 1992. The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences. In Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering, 29–64. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. ———. 2004. La science de la science chez Pierre Bourdieu. In La liberté par la connaissance. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), ed. Jacques Bouveresse and Daniel Roche, 147–162. Paris: Odile Jacob. Hall, Stuart. 1992. The West and the Rest. Discourse and Power. In Formations of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben, 275–320. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hampe, Michael. 2007. Kleine Geschichte des Naturgesetzbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2009. Editorial Schwerpunkt: John Dewey. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 34 (3): 299–303. Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599. Hardt, Lucas. 2012. Rezension zu Germaine Tillion: Les ennemis complémentaires. Guerre d’Algérie. Préface par Jean Daniel, Paris 2005. Francia-Recensio 4, 19/20. Jahrhundert – Histoire contemporaine. Accessed October 2021, from http://www.recensio.net/rezensionen/

340

Bibliography

zeitschriften/francia-recensio/2012-4/19.-20.-jahrhundert-histoire-contemporaine/les-ennemiscomplementaires/ Hartmann, Martin. 2009. Vertiefung der Erfahrung. John Dewey in der deutschsprachigen Rezeption. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 34 (3): 415–440. Hassenpflug, Dieter. 1993. Sozialökologie. Ein Paradigma. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Hastrup, Kirsten. 2015. Comparing Climate Worlds. Theorising Across Ethnografic Fields. In Grounding Global Climate Change, ed. Heike Greschke and Julia Tischler, 139–154. Heidelberg: Springer VS. Hastrup, Kirsten, and Frida Hastrup. 2015. Waterworlds at Large. In Waterworlds. Anthropology in Fluid Environments, ed. Kirsten Hastrup and Frida Hastrup, 1–22. New York: Berghahn Books. Heilbron, Johan. 2011. Practical Foundations of Theorizing in Sociology. The Case of Pierre Bourdieu. In Social Knowledge in the Making, ed. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont, 181–205. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Heinich, Nathalie. 2020. A Pragmatic Redefinition of Value(s). Toward a General Mode of Valuation. In Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 37/5, 75–94. Heintz, Bettina. 1993. Wissenschaft im Kontext. Neuere Entwicklungstendenzen der Wissenschaftssoziologie. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. 45 (3): 528–552. Helmreich, Stephan. 2009. Alien Sea. Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Héritier, Françoise. 2018. L’identique et le différent. En dialogue avec Caroline Broué. Avantpropos inédit. La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube. Hetzel, Andreas. 2008. Zum Vorrang der Praxis. Berührungspunkte zwischen Pragmatismus und kritischer Theorie. In Pragmatismus – Philosophie der Zukunft? ed. Andreas Hetzel, Jens Kertscher, and Marc Rölli, 17–57. Weilerswist: Velbrück. Hetzel, Andreas, Jens Kertscher, and Marc Rölli, eds. 2008. Pragmatismus – Philosophie der Zukunft? Velbrück: Weilerswist. Hirschauer, Stefan. 2008. Die Empiriegeladenheit von Theorien und der Erfindungsreichtum der Praxis. In Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, ed. Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, and Gesa Lindemann, 165–187. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Honneth, Axel. 1998. Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation. John Dewey and the Theory of Democracy today. Political Theory 26 (6): 763–783. Hornidge, Anna-Katharina. 2018. A Research Vessel: Heterotopia, Boundary Place, and Pluriverse of Epistemes. In Wissenrelationen, ed. Angelika Poferl and Michaela Pfadenhauer, 430–441. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Hörnig, Karl H., and Julia Reuter. 2004. Doing Culture. Neue Positionen zum Verhältnis von Kultur und sozialer Praxis. Bielefeld: Transcript. Ingold, Tim. 2008. Anthropology Is Not Ethnography. Proceedings of the British Academy 154: 69–92. Jaeggi, Rahel. 2018. Critique of Forms of Life. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Jahoda, Marie. 2002. Ich habe die Welt nicht verändert. In Lebenserinnerungen einer Pionierin der Sozialforschung, ed. Brigitte Hasenjürgen and Steffani Engler. Beltz: Weinheim & Basel. Jahoda, Marie, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. 1971. Marienthal. The Sociography of an Unemployed Community. London: Routledge. James, William. 1907. Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. ———. 1912a. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman Green and Co. ———. 1912b. Does Consciousness Exist? In Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. William James, 1–38. New York: Longman Green and Co. ———. 1950. Principles of Psychology I. New York: Dover Publications. ———. 1975. Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1977. A Pluralistic Universe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography

341

Jasanoff, Sheila. 1999. STS and Public Policy: Getting Beyond Deconstruction. Science, Technology & Society 4 (1): 59–72. ———. 2007. Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jenkins, Alejandro, and Gilad Perez. 2013. Leben im Multiversum. Spektrum der Wissenschaft/ Highlights 3: 74–82. Joas, Hans. 1993a. Pragmatism and Social Theory. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 1993b. Durkheim and Pragmatism: The Psychology of Consciousness and the Social Constitution of Categories. In Pragmatism and Social Theory, ed. Hans Joas, 55–78. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. Pragmatismus/Neopragmatismus. In Lexikon der Politik. Vol. 1: Politische Theorien, ed. Dieter Nohlen and Rainer O. Schulze, 493–497. München: C.H. Beck. ———. 1996. The Creativity of Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999a. Die Entstehung der Werte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1999b. The Inspiration of Pragmatism. Some Personal Remarks. In The Revival of Pragmatism. New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein, 190–198. Durham: Duke University Press. ———, ed. 2000a. Philosophie der Demokratie. Beiträge zum Werk John Deweys. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2000b. Einleitung. John Dewey – der Philosoph der Demokratie. In Philosophie der Demokratie. Beiträge zum Werk John Deweys, ed. Hans Joas, 7–19. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———, ed. 2007. Lehrbuch der Soziologie. Campus: Frankfurt am Main & New York. ———. 2011. Die Sakralität der Person. Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2012. Antwort auf Hermann Deuser. In Hans Joas in der Diskussion. Kreativität – Selbsttranszendenz – Gewalt, ed. Heinrich W. Schäfer, 49–55. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 2016. Sind die Menschenrechte westlich? München: Kösel. Joly, Marc. 2012. Devenir Norbert Elias. Paris: Fayard. Kalthoff, Herbert, Stefan Hirschauer, and Gesa Lindemann, eds. 2008. Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karsenti, Bruno. 2013. Durkheims Theorie des Totemismus revisited. In Émile Durkheim. Soziologie – Ethnologie – Philosophie, ed. Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz, 529–558. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Katz, Jay S., and Ben R. Martin. 1997. What Is Research Collaboration? Research Policy 26: 1–18. Keck, Frédéric. 2015. Anthropologie: Le tournant ontologique en action. Tsantsa 20: 4–11. ———. 2020. Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts. Durham: Duke University Press. Keck, Frédéric, Ann Kelly, and Christos Lynteris. 2019. The Anthropology of Epidemics. London: Routledge. Kehl, Christoph, and Tom Mathar. 2012. Eine neue Wissenschaftssoziologie: Die Sociology of Scientific Knowledge und das Strong Programme. In Science and Technology Studies. Eine sozialanthropologische Einführung, ed. Stefan Beck, Jörg Niewöhner, and Estrid Sørensen, 103–122. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kloppenberg, James. 1998. Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking? Journal of American History 83 (1): 100–138. Knecht, Michi. 2013. Nach Writing Culture, mit Actor-Network: Ethnografie/Praxeografie in der Wissenschafts-, Medizin und Technikforschung. In Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte, ed. Sabine Hess, Johannes Moser, and Maria Schwertl, 79–106. Berlin: Reimer Kulturwissenschaften.

342

Bibliography

Kneer, Georg. 2010a. Die Debatte über Konstruktivismus und Postkonstruktivismus. In Soziologische Kontroversen. Beiträge zu einer anderen Geschichte der Wissenschaft vom Sozialen, ed. Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius, 314–341. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2010b. Social Order from an Association Theory Perspective. In Soziologische Theorie kontrovers. Special Issue Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, ed. Gert Albert and Steffen Sigmund, 270–278. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Kneer, Georg, and Stephan Moebius, eds. 2010. Soziologische Kontroversen. Beiträge zu einer anderen Geschichte von der Wissenschaft vom Sozialen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Kneer, Georg, and Armin Nassehi. 1997. Niklas Luhmanns Theorie sozialer Systeme. Eine Einführung. München: Fink-Verlag & UTB. Knöbl, Wolfgang. 2011. Makrotheorie zwischen Pragmatismus und Historismus. In Handlung und Erfahrung. Das Erbe von Historismus und Pragmatismus und die Zukunft der Sozialtheorie, ed. Wolfgang Knöbl, Bettina Hollstein, and Matthias Jung, 273–315. Campus: Frankfurt am Main & New York. Knoblauch, Hubert. 2005. Wissenssoziologie. Konstanz: UVK UTB. Knoll, Lisa. 2013. Die Bewältigung wirtschaftlicher Unsicherheit. Zum Pragmatismus der Soziologie der Konventionen. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 23 (3–4): 367–387. Knorr Cetina, K., Hannes Krämer, and R. René Salomon. 2019. Die Ethnomethodologie umzirkeln: Karin Knorr-Cetina im Gespräch mit Hannes Krämer & René Salomon. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 20 (2): 1–30. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. 1981a. Time and Context in Practical Action. Underdetermination and Knowledge Use. Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 3 (2): 143–165. ———. 1981b. Anthropologie und Ethnomethodologie. Eine theoretische und methodische Herausforderung. In Grundfragen der Ethnologie. Beiträge zur gegenwärtigen TheorieDiskussion, ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Korwazk, 107–123. Berlin: Reimer. ———. 1981c. The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press. ———. 1988. Das naturwissenschaftliche Labor als Ort der ‘Verdichtung’ von Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17 (2): 85–101. ———. 1989. Spielarten des Konstruktivismus. Einige Notizen und Anmerkungen. Soziale Welt 40: 86–96. ———. 1992a. Zur Unterkomplexität der Differenzierungstheorie. Empirische Anfragen an die Systemtheorie. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 21 (6): 406–419. ———. 1992b. The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory. On the Relationship Between Experiment and Laboratory in Science. In Science as Practice and as Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering, 113–138. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. ———. 1999. Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002. Die Fabrikation von Erkenntnis. Zur Anthropologie der Naturwissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2008. Theoretischer Konstruktivismus. Über die Einnistung von Wissensstrukturen in soziale Strukturen. In Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, ed. Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, and Gesa Lindemann, 35–78. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Knorr-Cetina, Karin, and Michael Mulkay, eds. 1983. Science Observed. Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. London: Sage. Koloma Beck, Teresa. 2012. The Normality of Civil War. Armed Groups and Everyday Life in Angola. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. ———. 2020. Particularly Universal Encounters. Ethnographic Explorations into a Laboratory of World Society. In What in the World? Understanding Global Social Change, ed. Matthias Albert and Tobias Werron, 117–137. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Koloma Beck, Teresa, and Klaus Schlichte. 2014. Gewalttheorien zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Koloma Beck, Teresa, and Tobias Werron. 2018. Violent Conflictition. Armed Conflicts and Global Competition for Attention and Legitimacy. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 31 (3): 275–296.

Bibliography

343

Konrad, Monica, ed. 2012. Collaborators Collaborating. Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations. New York & Oxford: Berghan Books. Kosselleck, Reinhart. 1988. Erfahrungswandel und Methodenwechsel. Eine historischanthropologische Skizze. In Historische Methode, ed. Christian Meier and Jörn Rüsen, 13–61. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Krohn, Wolfgang, and Johannes Weyer. 1989. Gesellschaft als Labor. Die Erzeugung sozialer Risiken durch experimentelle Forschung. Soziale Welt 40: 349–373. Krücken, Georg. 2003. Rezension zu Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, Michael Gibbons: Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press, Oxford 2001. Die Hochschule 1: 237–241. Krüger, Anne, and Martin Reinhart. Theories of Valuation. Building Blocks for Conceptualizing Valuation Between Practice and Structure. Historical Social Research 42 (1): 263–285. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kurent, Heather P. 1982. Francis A. Donovan and the Chicago School of Sociology: A Case-Study in Marginality. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of doctor of Philosophy. Accessed October 2021, from https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/20198 Lamla, Jörn. 2013a. Verbraucherdemokratie. Politische Soziologie der Konsumgesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp. ———. 2013b. Arenen des demokratischen Experimentalismus. Zur Konvergenz von nordamerikanischem und französischem Pragmatismus. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 23 (3–4): 345–365. Lamont, Michèle. 2012. Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation. Annual Review of Sociology 38: 201–221. Latour, Bruno. 1987. Science in Action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard: Harvard University Press. ———. 1990. The Force and the Reason of Experiment. In Experimental Inquiries. Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, ed. Le Grand and Homer Eugène, 49–80. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. 1993a. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1993b. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1999. Circulating Reference. Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest. In Pandoras Hope, ed. Bruno Latour, 24–79. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. Il ne faut plus qu’une science soit ouverte ou fermée. Rue Descartes 41 (3): 66–81. ———. 2004. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30: 225–248. ———. 2007. Turning around Politics. A Note on Gerard de Vries’ Paper. Social Studies of Sciences 37 (5): 811–820. ———. 2009. Perspectivism: ‘TYPE’ or ‘Bomb’? Guest Editorial. Anthropology Today 25 (2): 1–2. ———. 2013. An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2014. Formes élémentaires de la sociologie, formes avancées de la théologie. Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 167 (3): 255–275. ———. 2018. Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime. London: Polity. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Laux, Henning. 2010. In Memoriam Rationalität ({). In Neuere Entwicklungen des Konzepts der Rationalität und ihre Anwendungen. Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie, ed. Joachim Behnke, Thomas Bräuninger, and Susumu Shikano, 13–46. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2013. Richard Rorty und die Reanimation des Pragmatismus im Zeitalter der Komposition. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 23 (3–4): 389–415.

344

Bibliography

———. 2014. Soziologie im Zeitalter der Komposition. Koordinaten einer integrativen Netzwerktheorie. Weilerswist: Velbrück. ———. 2017. Habitus oder Habits? Die feinen Unterschiede zwischen Pierre Bourdieus Praxistheorie und John Deweys Pragmatismus. In Pragmatismus und Theorie sozialer Praktiken. Sozialtheoretische Perspektiven, ed. Hella Dietz, Frithjof Nungesser, and Andreas Pettenkofer, 163–192. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Law, John. 1986. On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the Portuguese Route to India. In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? ed. John Law, 234–263. London: Routledge. ———. 1994. Organizing Modernity. London: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2004. After Method. Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routlegde. ———. 2008. On Sociology and STS. The Sociological Revue 56 (4): 623–649. ———. 2015. STS as Method. Accessed Through John Law’s Homepage “Heterogenities”, October, 2021, from http://heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2015STSAsMethod.pdf Law, John and Wen-Yuan Lin. 2015. Provincialising STS. Postcoloniality, Symmetry and Method. Accessed Through John Law’s Homepage “Heterogenities” Decmber, 2021, from http:// heterogeneities.net/publications/LawLinProvincialisingSTS20151223.pdf Law, John, and John Urry. 2004. Enacting the Social. Economy and Society 33 (3): 390–410. Law, John, and Karel Williams. 2014. A State of Unlearning? Government as Experiment. In CRESC Working Paper 134. Accessed October, 2021, from https://hummedia.manchester.ac. uk/institutes/cresc/workingpapers/wp134.pdf Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1965. Wissenschaftslogik und empirische Sozialforschung. In Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, ed. Ernst Topitsch, 37–49. Köln & Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ———. 1975. Vorspruch zur neuen Auflage. In Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Ein soziographischer Versuch, ed. Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel, 11–23. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Leggewie, Claus. 2008. Brüder im Geiste. Kleine Soziologie wissenschaftlicher Kollegenschaft. In Erleben, Erleiden, Erfahren. Die Konstitution sozialen Sinns jenseits instrumenteller Vernunft, ed. Kay Junge, Daniel Šuber, and Gerold Gerber, 215–228. Bielefeld: Transcript. Lemov, Rebecca. 2005. World as Laboratory. Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men. New York: Hill & Wang. Lepenies, Wolf. 1977. Soziologische Anthropologie. Berlin & Wien: Ullstein. ———, ed. 1981. Geschichte der Soziologie. Beiträge zur kognitiven, sozialen und historischen Identität einer Disziplin. Vol. 1–4. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2002. Ernst und Elend des sozialen Lebens. Theorie aus Verantwortung. Zum Tode von Pierre Bourdieu. Süddeutsche Zeitung 25: 1. Leuillot, Paul. 1950. Documents Algériens. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 3: 428–429. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Lewis, Diane. 1973. Anthropology and Colonialism. Current Anthropology 14 (5): 581–602. Lewis, Herbert S. 2001. Boas, Darwin, Science, and Anthropology. Current Anthropology 42 (3): 381–406. Lightman, Alan. 2012. The Accidental Universe. In The Best American Essays 2012, ed. David Brooks and Robert Atwan, 207–217. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston & New York. Lindemann, Gesa. 2005. Theorievergleich und Theorieinnovation. Plädoyer für eine kritischsystematische Perspektive. In Was erklärt die Soziologie? Methodologien, Modelle, Perspektiven, ed. Uwe Schimank and Rainer Greshoff, 44–64. Berlin: LIT. ———. 2009. Die Gesellschaftstheorie von der Sozialtheorie her denken – oder umgekehrt? Forum Zeitschrift für Soziologie 3 (1): 1–19. ———. 2014. Weltzugänge. Die mehrdimensionale Ordnung des Sozialen. Weilerswist: Velbrück. Lindner, Rolf. 1981. Die Angst des Forschers vor dem Feld: Überlegungen zur teilnehmenden Beobachtung als Interaktionsprozeß. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 77 (1): 51–66. ———. 1996. The Reportage of Urban Culture. Robert Park and the Chicago School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

345

———. 2000. Experience as a Keyword of Modernity. In Metropole Wien. Texturen der Moderne, Vol. 2 (¼ Wiener Vorlesungen, Konservatorien und Studien Band 9/II), ed. Roman Horak et al., 20–22. Wien: WUV. ———. 2004. Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Luhmann, Niklas. 1981. Wie ist soziale Ordnung möglich? In Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik 2, ed. Niklas Luhmann, 195–207. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1984. Soziale Systeme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1990. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997. Die Lebenswelt – nach Rücksprache mit Phänomenologen. In Protosoziologie im Kontext.“Lebenswelt” und “System” in Philosophie und Soziologie, ed. Preyer Gerhard, Peter Georg, and Ulfig Alexander, 268–289. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. ———. 1999. Das Handeln und die Spezifikation seiner Zwecke. In Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität, ed. Niklas Luhmann, 18–54. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 2008. Ökologische Kommunikation. Kann die moderne Gesellschaft sich auf ökologische Gefährdungen einstellen? Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2012. Theory of Society I. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2013. Theory of Society II. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maasen, Sabine, Mario Kaiser, Martin Reinhart, and Barbara Sutter, eds. 2012. Handbuch Wissenschaftssoziologie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1978. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mannheim, Karl. 1982. Structures of Thinking. London: Routledge. Marcus, George E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System. The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Marres, Noortje. 2007. The Issue Deserves More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy. Social Studies of Science 37 (5): 749–780. ———. 2012a. The Experiment in Living. In Inventive Methods. The Happening of the Social, ed. Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford, 76–95. London: Routledge. ———. 2012b. Material Participation. Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. London: Palgrave MacMillian. ———. 2017. Digital Sociology. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2018. Why We Can’t Have Our Facts Back. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 4: 423–443. ———. 2020. As ANT Is Getting Undone, Can Pragmatism Help Us Re-Do It? In The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, ed. Anders Blok, Ignacio Farias, and Celia Roberts, 112–120. London and New York: Routledge. Marres, Noortje, and Javier Lezaun. 2011. Materials and Devices of the Public. An Introduction. Economy and Society 40 (4): 489–509. Marres, Noortje, and David Moats. 2015. Mapping Controversies with Social Media: The Case for Symmetry. Social Media and Society 1–2: 1–17. Marres, Noortje, and David Stark. 2020. Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing. The British Journal for Sociology 71 (3): 423–443. McCarthy, Donnachadh. 2009 June 4. Only a Total Fool Would Be Convinced by Giraffes and Solar Panels. The Guardian. Accessed December 2021, from http://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2009/jun/04/greenwash-total-renewables McKenzie, Roderick D. 1967. The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community. In The City, ed. Roderick D. McKenzie, Robert E. Park, and Ernest W. Burgess, 63–79. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mead, George H. 1929. A Pragmatic Theory of Truth. In Studies in the Nature of Truth, ed. George H. Mead, 65–88. Berkeley: University of California Press.

346

Bibliography

———. 1972. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Mehring, Marion. 2013. How to Frame Social-Ecological Biodiversity Research – A Methodological Comparison Between Two Approaches of Social-Ecological Systems. In Beiträge der Fachtagung Biodiversität und Gesellschaft. Gesellschaftliche Dimensionen von Schutz und Nutzung biologischer Vielfalt, Göttingen, 14.–16.11.2012, ed. Jan Friedrich et al., 91–98. Göttingen: Universitätsverlag. Menand, Louis. 2002. The Metaphysical Club. A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farar, Straus, and Giroux. Mitterrand, Frédéric. 2015. Germaine Tillion. Combats d’une ethnologue. Entretiens avec Frédéric Mitterrand. Paris: INA/EHESS. Mol, Annemarie. 2010a. Actor-Network-Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions. In Soziologische Theorie kontrovers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, ed. Gert Albert and Steffen Sigmund, vol. 50, 253–269. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. ———. 2010b. A letter to Georg Kneer. In Soziologische Theorie kontrovers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, ed. Gert Albert and Steffen Sigmund, vol. 50, 279–282. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Morris, Aldon D. 2007. Sociology of Race and W.E.B DuBois: The Path Not Taken. In Sociology in America. A History, ed. Craig Calhoun, 503–534. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Morris, Charles W. 1970. The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy. New York: Braziller. Müller, Hans Peter. 2007. Max Weber. Eine Einführung in sein Werk. Köln, Weimar & Wien: Böhlau. Münch, Richard. 2007. Soziologische Theorie, Vol. 2: Handlungstheorie. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Nadim, Tahani. 2016. Data Labour. How the Sequence-Databases GenBank and EMBLBank Make Data. Science as Culture 25 (4): 496–519. Nassehi, Armin. 2008. Rethinking Functionalism. Zur Empiriefähigkeit systemtheoretischer Soziologie. In Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, ed. Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, and Gesa Lindemann, 79–106. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Niewöhner, Jörg. 2014a. Ökologien der Stadt. Zur Ethnografie bio- und geopolitischer Praxis. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 110 (2): 184–214. ———. 2014b. Perspektiven der Infrastrukturforschung: care-full, relational, ko-laborativ. In Schlüsselwerke der Science and Technology Studies, ed. Matthias Wieser and Diana Lengersdorf, 341–352. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2021. Making Evidence in the Future Perfect. Provincialising Climate Impact Science in the Quest for More-than-Human-Liveability. Historical Social Research 2021: 35–58. Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. 2001. Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Oxford: Polity Press. Nungesser, Frithjof, and Franz Ofner, eds. 2013. Special Issue “Potentiale einer pragmatistischen Sozialtheorie. Beiträge anlässlich des 150. Geburtstags von George Herbert Mead”, Österreichischen Zeitschrift für Soziologie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Oehler, Klaus, ed. 2000. William James: Pragmatismus. Ein neuer Name für einige alte Wege des Denkens. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Orcutt, James D. 1996. Teaching in the Social Laboratory and the Mission of SSSP: Some Lessons from the Chicago School. Social Problems 43 (3): 235–245. Orstrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otway, Harry, and Brian Wynne. Risk Communication: Paradigm and Paradox. Risk Analysis 9 (2): 141–145. Padial, José M., et al. 2010. The Integrative Future of Taxonomy. Frontiers of Zoology 7: 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-9994-7-16.

Bibliography

347

Palmer, Vivien. 1928. Field Studies in Sociology. A Students Manual. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Pape, Helmut. 2007. Assertibility. In American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia, ed. John Lachs and Robert Talisse, 59. London & New York: Routledge & Chapman. ———. 2009. Deweys Situation. Gescheitertes Handeln, gelingendes Erkennen und das gute Leben. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie 34 (3): 331–352. Park, Robert E. 1928. Human Migration and the Marginal Man. American Journal of Sociology 33 (6): 881–893. ———. 1941. Methods of Teaching, Impressions and a Verdict. Social Forces 20 (1): 39–40. ———. 1972. The Crowd. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. ———. 1974. Die Stadt als räumliche Struktur und als sittliche Ordnung. In Materialien zur Siedlungssoziologie, eds. Atteslander, Peter and Bernd Hamm, 90–100. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch (orig.: “The Urban Community as a Spatial Pattern and a Moral Order”, in: Publications of the American Sociological Association, Vol 20 [1925]: 1–14). Park, Robert E., and Ernest W. Burgess. 1924. Introduction into the Science of Sociology. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Park, Robert E., Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie. 1984. The City. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Passeron, Jean-Claude. 2004. La sociologie politique et vice versa: Enquêtes sociologiques et réformes pédagogiques dans les années 1960. In La liberté par la connaissance. Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002, ed. Jacques Bouveresse and D. Roche, 15–104. Paris: Odile Jacob. Passoth, Jan-Hendrik. 2009. Technik und Gesellschaft. Sozialwissenschaftliche Techniktheorien und Transformationen der Moderne. Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Peirce, Charles S. 1877. The Fixation of Belief. Popular Science Monthly 12: 1–15. ———. 1997. Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Peirce, See, and Charles Sanders. 1973. Lectures on Pragmatism/Vorlesungen über Pragmatismus. Hamburg: Meiner. Pettenkofer, Andreas. 2014. Symbolischer Interaktionismus. In Wörterbuch der Soziologie, ed. Günter Endruweit, Gisela Trommsdorf, and Nicole Burzan, 525–528. UVK: Konstanz & München. Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre, Ounassa Siari Tengour, and Sylvie Thénault. 2012. 1830–1880: La conquête coloniale et la résistance des Algériens. In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, ed. Abderrahmane Bouchène, 17–44. Paris & Alger: Éditions La Découverte & Éditions Barzakh. Phillips, D.C. 1975. Popper and Pragmatism. A Fantasy. Educational Theory 25 (1): 83–91. Pickering, Andrew, ed. 1992. Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Pinch, Trevor. 1983. Review of the Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina. Technology and Culture 25 (1): 130–131. ———. 1987. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science. A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory. Sociology of Health and Illness 9 (2): 219–220. Pinch, Trevor, and Christine Leuenberger. 2005. Studying Scientific Controversy from the STS Perspective. In Paper Presented at the EASSTS conference Science, Controversy and Democracy. Accessed August 2021, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265245795_ Studying_Scientific_Controversy_from_the_STS_Perspective Pinkowski, Marc. 2008. Julian Steward, American Anthropology, and Colonialism. Histories of Anthropology Annual 4: 172–204. Press Kit. 2012 September. Our Planet Reviewed. Taking a Closer Look on Biodiversity Hotspots. Expedition Papua New Guinea 2013–2013. Paris: Pro Natura International, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle and the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). Przyborski, Aglaja, and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr. 2010. Qualitative Sozialforschung. Ein Arbeitsbuch. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag.

348

Bibliography

Puillandre, Nicolas, et al. 2012. New Taxonomy and Old Collections: Integrating DNA Barcoding into the Collection Curation Process. In Molecular Ecology Resources, 2–7. London: Blackwell. Quemeneur, Tramor. 2001. La mémoire mise à la question: le débat sur les tortures dans la guerre d’Algérie, juin 2000-septembre 2001. Regards sur l’actualité 276: 29–40. Rammert, Werner. 2003. Technik in Aktion: Verteiltes Handeln in soziotechnischen Konstellationen. In Autonome Maschinen, ed. Thomas Christaller and Josef Wehner, 289–315. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. ———. 2007a. Technik – Handeln – Wissen. Zu einer pragmatistischen Technik- und Sozialtheorie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2007b. Weder festes Faktum noch kontingentes Konstrukt. Natur als Produkt experimenteller Interaktivität. In Technik – Handeln – Wissen. Zu einer pragmatistischen Technik- und Sozialtheorie, ed. Werner Rammert, 65–78. Wiesbaden: Spinger VS. Randeria, Shalini. 1999. Jenseits von Soziologie und soziokultureller Anthropologie. Zur Ortsbestimmung der nichtwestlichen Welt in einer zukünftigen Sozialtheorie. Soziale Welt 50 (4): 373–382. Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. The Status of the ‘Material’ in Theories of Culture: From ‘Social Structure’ to ‘Artefacts’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32 (2): 195–217. Reichertz, Jo. 2013. Die Abduktion in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Über die Entdeckung des Neuen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Renn, Joachim. 2006a. Übersetzungsverhältnisse. Perspektiven einer pragmatistischen Gesellschaftstheorie. Weilerswist: Velbrück. ———. 2006b. Rekonstruktion statt Repräsentation. Der ‘pragmatische Realismus’ John Deweys und die gesellschaftstheoretische Revision des wissenssoziologischen Konstruktivismus. In Special Issue 6 “Wissenssoziologie”, Soziologische Revue, ed. Hans-Georg Soeffner and Regine Herbrik, 13–37. München: Oldenbourg. Rey-Debove, Josette, and Alain Rey, eds. 1993. Le Nouveau Petit Robert. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, and Peter McLaughlin. 1984. Darwins Experimental Natural History. Journal of History and Biology 17 (3): 345–368. Ritsert, Jürgen. 2010. Der Positivismus-Streit. In Soziologische Kontroversen. Beiräge zu einer anderen Geschichte von der Wissenschaft vom Sozialen, ed. Georg Kneer and Stephan Moebius, 102–130. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Robin, Libby. 2011. The Rise of the Idea of Biodiversity: Crises, Responses, and Expertise. In Special Issue “Les promesses de la biodiversité”, Quaderni – Communication, Technologies, Pouvoir, ed. Céline Granjou and Isabel Mauz, 25–37. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme. Rorty, Richard. 1990. Solidarity or Objektivity? In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers, ed. Richard Rorty, 21–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1998. Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin. In Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, ed. Richard Rorty, 290–306. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. Kant vs. Dewey. The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy. In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 184–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosa, Hartmut. 2013. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2019. Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. London: Polity. Rosiek, Jerry Lee, and Scott Pratt. 2013. Jane Addams as a Resource for Developing a Reflexively Realist Social Science Practice. Qualitative Inquiry 19 (8): 578–588. Rouzet, Céline. 2013. ExxonMobil bouleverse la société papoue. Le Monde Diplomatique 2013: 16–17. Sacriste, Fabien. 2011. Germaine Tillion, Jacques Berque, Jean Servier et Pierre Bourdieu. Des ethnologues dans la guerre d’indépendance algérienne. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Bibliography

349

Schatzki, Theodore R., and Anders Buch, eds. 2018. Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory. London & New York: Routledge. Scheffer, Thomas. 2008. Zug um Zug und Schritt für Schritt. Annäherungen an eine transsequenzielle Analytik. In Theoretische Empirie. Zur Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, ed. Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, and Gesa Lindemann, 368–398. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Scheffer, Thomas, and Jörg Niewöhner. 2008. Thick Comparison. How Ethnography Produces Comparability. Comparative Sociology 7 (3): 273–285. Scheffer, Thomas, and Robert Schmidt. 2009. Soziologie als modus operandi. Wie interdisziplinaritätsfähig ist die Soziologie? Soziologie 38 (3): 291–306. Scheffler, Israel. 1974. Four Pragmatists. A Critical Introduction to Peirce, Mead, and Dewey. London: Routledge. Schendzielorz, Cornelia. 2017. Berufliche Soft Skill Trainings. Aushandlungsraum einer sozial akzeptablen Subjektivität. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. Schimank, Uwe. 2007. Die unmögliche Trennung von Natur und Gesellschaft. Bruno Latours Diagnose der Selbsttäuschung der Moderne. In Soziologische Gegenwartsdiagnosen I. eine Bestandsaufnahme, ed. Uwe Schimank and Ute Volkmann, 157–169. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. ———. 2013. Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript. Schimank, Uwe and Rainer Greshoff (Hg.): Was erklärt die Soziologie? Methodologien, Modelle, Perspektiven, Berlin: LIT 2005a. Schimank, Uwe, and Rainer Greshoff. 2005b. Einleitung: Was erklärt die Soziologie? In Was erklärt die Soziologie? Methodologien, Modelle, Perspektiven, 7–42. Berlin: LIT. Schluchter, Wolfgang. 2005. Handlung, Ordnung und Kultur. Studien zu einem Forschungsprogramm im Anschluss an Max Weber. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ———. 2015. Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht. Vol. I. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Schmid, Michael. 2004. Kultur und Erkenntnis. Kritische Bemerkungen zu Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre. Berliner Journal für Soziologie 4: 545–560. Schmidgen, Henning. 2013. Bruno Latour zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius [transl.: Bruno Latour in Pieces. An Intellectual Biography, New York: Fordham University Press, 2015]. Schubert, Hans-Joachim. 2009. Pragmatismus und Symbolischer Interaktionismus. In Handbuch Soziologische Theorien, ed. Georg Kneer and Markus Schroer, 345–368. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Schultheis, Franz. 2007. Pierre Bourdieus Wege in die Soziologie. Genese und Dynamik einer reflexiven Sozialwissenschaft. Konstanz: UVK. ———. 2008. Bourdieu und Lévi-Strauss. Eine ambivalente Beziehung. In Wirkungen des wilden Denkens. Zur strukturalen Anthropologie von Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Michael Kauppert and Dorett Funcke, 98–110. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Schütz, Alfred. 1970. On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2004. Relevanz und Handeln 1. Zur Phänomenologie des Alltagswissen, Herausgegeben von Elisabeth List, unter Mitarbeit von Cordula Schmeja-Herzog. Konstanz: UVK. Schützeichel, Rainer. 2003. Sinn als Grundbegriff bei Niklas Luhmann. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Seibel, Claude. 2004. Les liens entre Pierre Bourdieu et les statisticiens à partir de son expérience algérienne. Courrier des statistiques 112: 19–26. Seitz, Tim. 2020. Design Thinking an the New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sennett, Richard. 2012. Together. The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. London: Penguin Books. Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb. 1972. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Knopf. Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Airpump. Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

350

Bibliography

Shook, John R. 2000. Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1989. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe 2: Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Studie. Dahme, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Sismondo, Sergio. 2004. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. London: Blackwell. ———. 2007. Science and Technology Studies and an Engaged Program. In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. E. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, 13–32. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sørensen, Estrid. 2009. The Materiality of Learning. Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2013. Human Presence: Towards a Posthumanist Approach to Experience. Subjectivity 6 (1): 112–129. Spivak, Gayatri. 1994. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Grisman, 66–111. Harester Wheatsheaf: Hermel Hemstaed. Star, Susan Leigh. 1991. Power, Technologies and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions. In A Sociology of Monsters. Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed. John Law, 26–56. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3): 377–391. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420. Stavo-Debauge, Joan. 2012. La sociologie dite ‘pragmatique‘ et la philosophie pragmatiste, une rencontre tardive, unpublished discussion paper for the conference Why pragmatism? The importance of Pragmatism for the social and human sciences (I), Villa Vigoni, Italy. Stichweh, Rudolf. 2007. Niklas Luhmann 1927-1998. In Klassiker der Soziologie 2. Von Talcott Parsons bis Anthony Giddens, ed. Dirk Kaesler, 240–264. München: C.H. Beck. Stora, Benjamin. 2009. Le mystère De Gaulle. Son choix pour l’Algérie. Paris: Robert Laffont. Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect. Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: The Athlone Press. ———. 2012. Currencies of Collaboration. In Collaborators Collaborating. Counterparts in Anthropological Knowledge and International Research Relations, ed. Monika Konrad, 109–125. New York & Oxford: Berghan Books. Strauss, Anselm L. 1991. Grundlagen qualitativer Sozialforschung. Datenanalyse und Theoriebildung in der empirischen soziologischen Forschung. München: Fink. Strübing, Jörg. 2008. Pragmatismus als epistemische Praxis. Der Beitrag der Grounded Theory zur Theorie-Empirie-Frage. In Theoretische Empirie, ed. Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, and Gesa Lindemann, 279–311. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Šuber, Daniel. 2008. Zum Erfahrungsbegriff in der Soziologie – einige theoriegeschichtliche Anmerkungen. In 33. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie ‘Die Natur der Gesellschaft’ 2006 in Kassel, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Suchmann, Lucy. 2007. Feminist STS and the Sciences of the Artificial. In New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward G. Hackett et al., 139–163. Cambridge & London: MIT Press. Suhr, Martin. 2005. John Dewey zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Susen, Simon, and Bryan S. Turner, eds. 2014. The Spirit of Luc Boltanski. Essays on the ‘Pragmatic Sociology of Critique’. London, New York & Delhi: Anthem Press. Sutter, Barbara. 2012. Wissenschaftssoziologie der Soziologie. In Handbuch Wissenschaftssoziologie, ed. Sabine Maasen et al., 429–441. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. Sutterlüty, Ferdinand, and Peter Imbusch, eds. 2008. Abenteuer Feldforschung. Soziologen erzählen. Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus. Swartz, Ronald. 1985. Dewey and Popper on Learning from Induction. Interchange 16 (4): 29–51. Swedberg, Richard. 2014. The Art of Social Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Bibliography

351

Tengour, Ounassa Siari. 2012. 1945-1962: Vers l’indépendance de l’Algérie. In Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale, ed. Abderrahmane Bouchène et al., 463–493. Paris & Alger: Éditions La Découverte & Éditions Barzakh. Thénault, Silvie. 2005. Histoire de la Guerre d’indépendance d’Algérie. Paris: Flammarion. Thévenot, Laurent. 2011. Power and Oppression from the Perspective of the Sociology of Engagements: A Comparison with Bourdieu’s and Dewey’s Critical Approaches to Practical Activities. Irish Journal of Sociology 19 (1): 35–67. Thévenot, Laurent, Michael Moody, and Claudette Lafaye. 2000. Forms of Valuing Nature: Arguments and Modes of Justification in French and American Environmental Disputes. In Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology. Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States, ed. Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot, 229–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, William I. 1928. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Thome, Helmut. 2007. Methoden der Sozialforschung. In Lehrbuch der Soziologie, ed. Hans Joas, 39–72. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Thompson, F. Christian. 1997. Names: The Key to Biodiversity. In Biodiversity II. Understanding and Protecting Our Biological Resources, ed. Majorie L. Reaka-Kudla et al., 199–216. Washington: Joseph Henry Press. Tiles, J.E. 1999. The Fortunes of ‘Functionalism’. In Dewey Reconfigured. Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, ed. Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple, 39–61. Albany & New York: SUNY Press. Tilley, Helen. 2011. Africa as a Living Laboratory. Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge 1870-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tillion, Germaine. 2005. Les ennemies complémentaires. Guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Éditions Tirésias. Tschapke, Reinhart. 1996. Heiner Müller. Berlin: Morgenbuch. Tsing, Anna. 2010. Worlding the Matsutake Diaspora. Or, Can Actor-Network-Theory Experiment with Holism? In Experiments in Holism, ed. Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt, 48–66. Oxford: Blackwell. Tufts, James H. 1918. The Ethics of Coöperation. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Turnout, Esther, et al. 2013. Rethinking Biodiversity: From Goods and Services to ‘Living With’. Conservation Letters 6 (3): 154–161. Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision. Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Verran, Helen. 2002. A Postcolonial Moment in Science Studies. Alternative Firing Regimes of Environmental Scientists and Aboriginal Landowners. Social Studies of Science 32: 729–762. Voss, Julia. 2008. Charles Darwin zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius. Wacquant, Loïc. 2004. Following Bourdieu into the Field. Ethnography 5 (4): 387–414. ———. 2018. Bourdieu Comes to Town: Pertinence, Principles, Applications. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42 (1): 90–105. Wagner, Peter. 2004. Soziologie der kritischen Urteilskraft und der Rechtfertigung. Die Politik- und Moralsoziologie um Luc Boltanski und Laurent Thévenot. In Französische Soziologie der Gegenwart, ed. Stephan Moebius and Lothar Peter, 417–448. Konstanz: UVK. Waterton, Claire, Rebecca Ellis, and Brian Wynne. 2013. Introduction. In Barcoding Nature. Shifting Cultures of Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity Loss, ed. Ellis Waterton and B. Wynne, 1–15. London & New York: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1949a. “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy. In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Max Weber, 49–112. New York: Free Press. ———. 1949b. Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences. In Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Max Weber. New York: The Free Press. ———. 1949c. The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics. In Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Max Weber. New York: The Free Press. ———. 2004. Science as Vocation. In The Vocation Lectures, ed. Max Weber, 1–31. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

352

Bibliography

Wehling, Peter. 2005. Im Schatten des Wissens? Perspektiven der Soziologie des Nichtwissens. Konstanz: UVK Verlag. Wenzel, Harald. 2007. Medien und Massenkommunikation. In Lehrbuch Soziologie, ed. Hans Joas, 425–426. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. West, Cornel. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy. A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. West, Paige. 2006. Conservation Is Our Government Now. The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Westbrook, Robert B. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Wiedemann, Rainer E. 2013. Rezension zu ‘Descola, Philippe: Jenseits von Natur und Kultur’. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 65 (2): 359–363. Wietschorke, Jens. 2005. Soziales Settlement und ethnografisches Wissen. Zu einem Berliner Reformprojekt 1911–1933. In Grenzen & Differenzen. Zur Macht sozialer und kultureller Grenzziehungen, 35. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, Dresden 2005, ed. Thomas Hengartner and Johannes Moser, 309–316. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Wilson, Edward O. 2001. The Diversity of Life. London: Penguin Books. Witzel, Andreas and Günter Mey: 2004. “I am NOT Opposed to Quantification or Formalization or Modeling, but Do Not Want to Pursue Quantitative Methods that Are Not Commensurate with the Research Phenomena Addressed”, Aaron Cicourel in Conversation with Andreas Witzel and Günter Mey. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 5/3. Accessed December 2021, from http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0403412 Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. 2013. The Wrong Bin Bag: A Turn to Ontology in Science and Technology Studies? Social Studies of Science 43 (4): 321–340. Wulf, Andrea. 2016. Alexander von Humboldt und die Erfindung der Natur. München: C. Bertelsmann. Wynne, Brian. 1988. Unruly Technology. Practical Rules, Impractical Discourses and Public Understanding. Social Studies of Science 18: 147–167. ———. 1989. Sheepfarming After Chernobyl. A Case Study in Communicating Scientific Information. Environment 31 (2): 10–39. ———. 2010. Strange Weather, Again: Climate Science as Political Art. Theory, Culture and Society 27 (2–3): 289–305. Yacine, Tassadite. 2003. L’Algérie, matrice d’une oeuvre. In Travailler avec Bourdieu, ed. Pierre Encrevé and Rose-Marie Lagrave, 333–345. Paris: Flammarion. ———. 2010. Die Entstehung einer singulären Ethnosoziologie. In Algerische Skizzen, ed. Pierre Bourdieu, 24–68. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Zamorra, Justo Zerrano. 2021. Democratization and Struggles Against Injustice. A Pragmatist Approach to the Epistemic Practices of Social Movements. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Zask, Joëlle. 2015. Introduction à John Dewey. Paris: La Découverte. Zeisel, Hans. 1971. Toward a History of Sociography. In Marienthal. The Sociography of an Unemployed Community, ed. Marie Jahoda, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel, 99–125. London: Routledge.