The Crisis of the Structures of Knowledge:
Where Do We Go from Here?(1)
by
Richard E. Lee ©
(rlee@binghamton.edu)
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Concern for the state of the social sciences worldwide is certainly not a new phenomenon and may be followed in the recurring debates about, for instance, theories and methods, objectivity, and the social role of the intellectual for at least the past century. The Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences that met over a two year period from 1993 to 1995 and issued its report, Open the Social Sciences, in 1996, sought to widen the range of relevant issues and perspectives up for discussion by including among its members not only six social scientists but two scholars from the natural sciences and two from the humanities. Nonetheless, in the main the Report concentrated first on the historical development of the intellectual cleavages that defined the divisions of the standard social science disciplines and their institutionalization in university departments over the century preceding 1945. It then went on to sketch how developments in the world since 1945 have impinged on this intellectual and institutional organization. Finally it examined a set of the most recent intellectual questions and ended with a beginning, the opening of a discussion (with some examples, and they were exactly that, tentative examples) of ways the social sciences might be intelligently restructured (Gulbenkian Commission 1996). Indeed, it was the goal of the Commission to stimulate wide discussion, rather than offer preconceived solutions, and the multiple translations of the Report and the extensive resonance of the questions it raised attest to its appurtenance.
Let me begin, therefore, with an overview of the structures of knowledge perspective that forms the framework, only implicit in the Report, for consideration of concrete action in the contemporary world and sets off the Report itself from previous interventions.
From the beginning of the long sixteenth century, the practices of knowledge production took the form of a complex of processes which produced over time a single and singular intellectual and institutional structure of knowledge with a hierarchical ordering of its parts within the whole. Unique among systems of knowing the world, determination of truth came to be separated from the discrimination of values. This hierarchy privileged, as authoritative, knowledge produced in the realm of "nature". Universal and predictive, it was to be uncovered, or dis-covered, by those disciplines that would come to be called the "sciences". Knowledge in the domain of the "human" was relegated to the opposite pole of the hierarchy. Interpretative and limited to particular social settings, it became the purview of those disciplines that would come to comprise the "humanities". The processes producing and reproducing this structure of knowledge formation, in articulation with those sets of processes associated with the spheres of production and distribution (the "economic") and decision-making and coercion (the "political"), account for the dominant relational setting "disciplining" or channeling, but not totally determining, human cognition. They have thus formed the "cultural" parameters of human action in the modern world (Lee 2000b). All of the mechanisms through which this was initiated await investigation but in the largest sense belong to our developing understanding of the "transition from feudalism to capitalism" (Sweezy et al. 1976).
Mary Poovey (1998) has developed a compelling account of how what she calls the "modern fact" emerged as the primary epistemological unit of valid knowledge and social license during the "transition" period. What makes the modern fact so interesting is that as a unit it came into existence already as a structure, a complex whole. Its parts could be affiliated with both specifics, initially, for instance, of commerce, and their generalization, within a system which ordained the individual creditworthiness of merchants and their credibility as a group. Double-entry bookkeeping appropriated the cultural authority of rhetoric, the erstwhile keystone of legitimate knowledge production to enable the metamorphosis of the merchant into the capitalist. The legitimacy of profit could thereby be rooted in the virtues of "balance" inherent in the system and with profit distinguished from usury, the accumulation of accumulation could take off. At the same time, however, there were collateral effects--especially the decline in the social prestige of rhetoric through a unilateral association with university and church men--that redefined the structures of knowledge at the same time as the material structures of the Europe-centered world-economy were being organized.
The possibility of such a double identity as displayed by the modern fact defined the contradiction between the particular and the universal that drove the processes of rationalization, the progressive privileging of formal rationality--disinterested calculation as a generalized means of instrumental action, over substantive rationality, the normatively-oriented pursuit of specifically situated ends--to produce and reproduce the structures of knowledge over time. This contradiction has constantly reappeared embedded in an array of distinctive intellectual antinomies, such as subjective-objective, anarchy/chaos-order, value-truth, agency-structure. And along with rationalization arose its confederate, the pursuit of objectivity, the view from nowhere that eliminated agency and history, values and norms. One cannot help but be reminded of Roland Barthes's "myth" that always has the alibi of being someplace else (Barthes 1972).
With the common purpose of mastering nature, two avenues in the search for eternal truths independent of received values (signaling the decline of rhetoric on which the authority of generalizations drawn from deracinated specifics had originally been erected) were charted in empiricist appeals to the senses and an inductive method and rationalist espousals of reason and a deductive method. Although already overlapping substantially, during the eighteenth century, the Newtonian fusion of these two modes produced a synthesis of experiments and empirical approaches with hypotheses and mathematical demonstrations. Classical science henceforth would be concerned with the discovery of universal laws governing an ultimately regular and constant nature that would lead to the prediction of change, both future and past. With the displacement of the divine viewpoint to man, the humanities, not concerned with the ordered certitude of regularities in the world of nature but with the chaotic finitude of the unique and unpredictable world of man-the-creator with its conflicting values, could appeal to individual agency for a "rational" understanding of emergence and change. Along these two lines, the long-term intellectual and institutional structural opposition of the sciences and the humanities, what has come to be called the "Two Cultures", reached a clear definition over the course of the nineteenth century.
This was the same period, following the French Revolution, during which it became inconceivable to envision a static world; however, modes of interpreting social change in the human world, as marked off from the natural world, made appeals to values that resulted in a tense, mutually exclusive opposition. The two extreme positions took the form of "order" achieved through the authority of tradition or "anarchy" arising from unfettered democracy. Neither offered a solution, on which all could agree, to the political confrontations between conservatism and radicalism that threatened capital accumulation. Eventually, from the late nineteenth century, the objective, value-neutral, problem-solving spirit of science was advanced to resolve the stand-off in the English-speaking world and the connection between meaning or values and systematic knowledge was argued rigorously in the Methodenstreit, especially in the Germanies. The result was the institutionalization of a set of disciplines, the social sciences. They resolved in the medium term the crisis of social knowledge formation of the nineteenth century by guaranteeing ordered change in the name of "progress" through scientific control, exercised by "experts" and based on "hard facts". In practice, this added up to the reformist new-liberal incrementalism maximizing accumulation and minimizing class struggle that formed the philosophical and empirical foundations for the twentieth-century "welfare state".
The social sciences came to be situated in-between the authoritative universality of the sciences, the empirical and positivistic sphere of "truth", and the impressionistic particularism of the humanities, the chaotic and subjective realm of "values". Although economics, political science and sociology leaned more toward the sciences while history, Oriental studies and anthropology tended to be more humanistic, even within the disciplines there was no consensus on fundamental issues. Should the ideal composition of their data be quantitative or qualitative? Were statistical or narrative methods more appropriate? Could generalizable knowledge (the "scientific" universality on which they based the legitimacy of their claims) best be achieved by the discovery of universal laws or through the elaboration of exhaustive descriptions?
At crosscurrents with a holistic experience of social relations, the social sciences institutionalized a set of cleavages dividing the study of the human world into isolated domains, separated intellectually in disciplines and institutionally in university departments. Oriental studies and anthropology were concerned with the great civilizations and the "tribes" of the non-modern world respectively; history handled the past of the modern world; the present of the modern world was further divided among economics, political science and sociology which treated the market, the state, and civil society as isolated fields (Gulbenkian Commission 1996 and Wallerstein 1991).
However, from the very moment of the greatest success of this organizational structure immediately after 1945, the scholarly legitimacy of the premises underlying the separation of the disciplines and the practical usefulness of the distinctions among the departments became less and less self-evident, and after 1968 were overtly contested.
As a practical matter, in the United States where disciplinary/departmental divisions came to be most sharply defined, the expansion of the university system after 1945 created a demand for Ph.D.'s in increasing numbers and therefore a demand for the multiplication of dissertation research projects. In order to fulfill expectations of originality, the real work scholars did increasingly stepped over disciplinary boundaries. Evidence of this poaching is to be found in the proliferation and institutionalization of sub-disciplines which has added up to a significant blurring of the frontiers over the past fifty years.
Nonetheless, it was only in the 1960's that work in diverse fields of the social sciences and the humanities, coming together under the rubric "cultural studies", led to conclusions and interpretations tending to delegitimate the universalist premises on which the hierarchy of the relational structure of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities had been built. From the 1950's the inversion the high-low cultural divide had the effect of undermining any sense of a solid ground attributable to "culture", and its "canon". The application of literary methods to the analysis of the "popular" infused the "not-culture" of the working class with new credibility and respect. To thus question the object of criticism placed in doubt not only the academic structures that depended on its integrity, but, implicitly, the structure of society itself.
At the level of theory, by the 1960's literary structuralism was understood by many to offer the possibility of developing a non-reductionist, non-positivist human science concerned with that prototypical social activity, the making of meaning. At the level of practice, developments growing out of studies focusing on marginalized groups, such as women, ethnic and racial "minorities" and colonial and ex-colonial peoples, challenged the fact-values divide by illustrating how essentialist, received categories of difference had functioned to inscribe whole groups into subordinate stations on status hierarchies legitimating differential access to social goods. New disciplinary/departmental groupings were also institutionalized as these groups, formerly excluded from full participation in the academy, were incorporated into the scholarly community.
At the opposite end of the disciplinary continuum, "complexity studies" were a direct outgrowth of developments in mathematics and the natural sciences and as such take a position of particular importance completing, as they do, the disciplinary range of challenges to the long-term structures of knowledge. Although relativity and quantum mechanics had already undermined the presumptions of classical science at the level of the very large and the very small, it is again only since the 1960's that Newtonian dynamics has been challenged in the macro, humanly perceivable, non-relativistic, non-quantum domain. The present rethinking marks a transition away from the Newtonian world view emphasizing the equilibrium and stability inherent in time-reversible natural laws to a reconceptualization of the natural world to more closely resemble our perception of the social world as a world of instability, complexity and self-organization, a world whose deterministic yet unpredictable development cannot be reversed. It too exhibits an arrow-of-time (e.g., Prigogine 1997).
Thus, on the one hand, there is evidence of a collapse of the frontier between the humanities and the social sciences. The uniquely modern concepts of original object and sovereign creator have come under serious attack from the humanities and in the social sciences, the self-interested but responsible individual, the liberal--white, male--subject no longer appears so autonomous in a constantly negotiated web of shifting allegiances and hidden determinants.
On the other hand, the concurrent emphasis in complexity studies on contingency, context-dependency, and multiple, overlapping temporal and spatial frameworks is moving the sciences in the direction of the historical social sciences. Both now express concern for spatial-temporal wholes constituted at once of relational structures and phenomenological time. The identification and study of the feedback mechanisms of complex systems, including historical social systems, denies the possibility of an "objectivity" defined as a form of externalism. Unfortunately, the new models being made available to social scientists for application to the human world are all too often simply pressed down on social reality. What needs to be stressed is rather that the ontological, as well as epistemological, underpinnings of the claims to legitimacy of knowledge constructed on "scientific", "social scientific" or "humanistic" models is undergoing a transformation.
In the long term, the trends evidenced in the evolution of the structures of knowledge have been returned to relative equilibrium as normal fluctuations were damped in the cyclical shifts of the seventeenth century and the late nineteenth century. Today, these trends seem to have reached a "far-from-equilibrium" point-of-no-return. Indeed, it may be argued that the entire complex of processes reproducing the long-term structures of the modern world, including the structures of knowledge, is approaching a set of asymptotic limits signaling a transformation of the system as a whole (Lee 2000a; Hopkins, Wallerstein et al. 1996).
Systemic transformation, however, does not take place overnight. In the language of the new sciences of complexity, it takes the form of a bifurcation arising out of a period of transition characterized by chaotic fluctuations as the parameters of system stability surpass their limits. By definition, such a period is one of great disorder. But as a consequence, that medium term future, the next half-century perhaps, also presents great possibilities. Indeed, unstable systems pose fewer constraints and very small fluctuations may be massively amplified to determine the direction any transformation might take.
For now, the future intellectual and institutional organization of knowledge production is "uncertain". It remains to be constructed. In this context three things can be noted. First, not only will it be exciting for those committed to the process, but given that change is in the offing, direct involvement becomes a moral imperative. Second, since interests, that is, values, are entailed, the process is likely to be a site of real struggle. Third, the outcome of the process will have profound impact in the form of a fundamental transformation of the structure of social relations. Nonetheless, as the recognition that all knowledge has a social aspect gains ground and the possibilities of "containing" the study of human reality within existing disciplinary arrangements becomes increasingly dubious, it remains unclear exactly "what is to be done".
What should "we", those of "us" whose primary activities center on the university community, be thinking of in terms of immediate action? The combination of freedom and reason C. Wright Mills conceptualized as persuasion, tends today to take the form of a pluralism blind to relations of power and privilege and no longer seems to adequately express the ethical obligation on the part of the individual social scientist to actively participate in the struggle to invent the new world we are facing (Lee 1998). The Gulbenkian Commission suggested thematic work in a supra-mural environment, time-limited research cutting across traditional lines within the university, mandatory joint appointment of professors, and joint work for graduate students. None of these, or similar suggestions many of us have heard, are easily accomplished for reasons I do not have to spell out.
Another suggestion has been made by Gerald Graff (1992; Cain 1994) who proposes "teaching the conflicts". If that were to mean simply presenting opposing points of view in a marketplace of ideas limited to a single classroom, it would not get us very far. Exploding the individual, self-contained classroom as the standard unit of "instruction" by staging debates at the center of the curriculum, on the other hand, might well create intellectual communities with the tendency to frustrate a di Lampedusan solution of changing everything in order that nothing change. Direct advocacy of alternative models of social reality presented by dedicated proponents and the logical consequences that follow from those alternative conceptual schemes at their limits favors the disclosure of the articulation of symbolic codes and material practices and thus the exposure of the historical construction of relations of authority and legitimacy. Direct advocacy fosters the recovery of the link between values and difference and thereby undermines the separation of personal morality from professional neutrality.
The Santa Fe Institute is a prime example of a supra-mural environment devoted to "creating a new kind of scientific research community, pursuing emerging science" and catalyzing "new collaborative, multidisciplinary projects that break down barriers between the traditional disciplines", according to their website (www.santafe.edu). Just as ad-hoc, cross-disciplinary teams formed to address specific problems within a limited time-frame are no long rare in academia, joint appointments of professors, too, are no longer exceptional, especially between strong departments and weak or emerging programs. However, if the practice were to become mandatory, and as a logical corollary, extended to graduate work--that is, with all professors and students expected to successfully respond to two sets of disciplinary criteria--it would immediately subvert existing disciplinary and departmental organization. Finally, experiments are actually underway on a few campuses of constructing curricula around debates; this too could be expected to delegitimate traditional academic arrangements.
It should be noted that all of these initiatives offer the possibility of being formulated in fundable ways and could be designed to satisfy objectives dear to the hearts of administrators, such as "accountability", while at the same time stimulating the production of imaginative responses, in the form of explorations of serious historical alternatives, to the structural limits of endless accumulation. It should be of no small consideration that innovations leading to a more substantively rational historical system are more likely to be institutionalized if they possess the advantage of initially grounding their validity in existing structures of authority. From this perspective, that is, of an emancipatory project, the professor/student relation also begins to appear increasingly problematic. Already a new, collaborative subject, in recognition of the ultimate social construction of knowledge and in tune with the lives of real men and women caught up in the making of a new world, is emerging.
In conclusion, contemporary systemic conditions hold out the promise of greater latitude and potential effectiveness of local action, now directly impacting the structures of accumulation. This includes the immediate world of the social scientist. Analysts, no longer obliged to repudiate the self in the construction of systematic knowledge, may make the shift from verifying social theories to evaluating the consequences of interpretative accounts to bring us closer to the goal of constructing a historical social science capable of achieving a more useful vision of the long-term, large-scale evolution of social relations and imagining alternative organizational possibilities in a changing world.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. 1972. "Myth Today." In Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 109-59.
Cain, William E., ed. 1994. Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars. New York: Garland.
Graff, Gerald. 1992. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton.
Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hopkins, Terence K., Immanuel Wallerstein et al. 1996. The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System 1945-2025. London: Zed Books.
Lee, Richard. 1998. Complexity Studies and the Human Sciences: Pressures, Initiatives and Consequences of Overcoming the Two Cultures. México, D.F.: UNAM/CIIECH.
---. 2000a. "After History? The Last Frontier of Historical Capitalism." Protosoziologie, Special Issue, "On a Sociology of Borderlines--Social Process in Time of Globalization."
---. 2000b. "The 'Cultural Aspect' of the Modern World-System: Social Movements and the Structures of Knowledge." In Inequality and Social Movements. Edited by Nancy Forsythe and Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz. Westport: Greenwood.
Poovey, Mary. 1998. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Prigogine, Ilya. 1997. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: Free Press.
Sweezy, Paul et al. 1976. The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. London: Verso.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms. Cambridge: Polity Press.
1. Presentation delivered at the Centre for Developing-Area Studies Workshop: "Social Sciences and Interdisciplinarity: Latin American and Canadian Experiences", McGill University, Montréal, Canada, 23-26 September 1999.