Past-modern Sociology and Textual Critique

Abstract

There are things that a sociologist knows, thinks she knows, thinks she doesn’t know, and doesn’t know. And there are nuances within each of these variations on a theme. For example, the sociologist can ‘think she knows’ with more or less certainty, and can be bolstered in her almost conviction by more or less evidence, and that evidence can be considered to be more or less conclusive or indeterminate, more or less likely to be authentic, more or less complete or partial. The degree of certainty about knowledge, or the degree of provisionality and uncertainty, is something that takes shape both in the process of the research or analysis itself and in the writing (or speaking or whatever) of the text — a book, an article, a film — which presents the case study to an audience (often the actual processes are tightly intertwined, so that the researcher-author herself is not sure where one ends and the other begins). As audiences, we usually only have the text to go on, we do not have privileged access to the research process itself; we only have what has been revealed about it to us in the text. As texts are not transparent windows into the reality of the sociological analysis, as they have at least a relative autonomy with idiosyncrasies, conventions and rhetorics of their own, it is important that we learn to distinguish the knowledge claims implied by the rhetorical tropes and narrative structure of the text from the knowledge claims as systematically assessed according to the linguistic conventions and models of sociological research.