It is, I suppose, a matter of our legacy of seeking our legitimacy through another form of pretence: that of pretending to the throne of science. But sociology, as many have argued in various ways, has long felt some tension over whether to conceive itself as a science or a humanity, or, what I think right, as both—as what Mikhail Bakhtin liked to call a “human science.” The disciplinary mood seems now to be shifting toward this more human understanding of the social, though. The rise of the Sociology of Culture as a flourishing subsection of the American Sociological Association itself indicates an engagement with this traditionally humanistic realm, however much we may yet seek to assemble the cultural shards we inspect in the glass cases of science.
Some exceptions include Bell and Gardiner (1998), Gardiner (2000), Nielsen (2002), and Steinberg (1999).
Gardiner (2000), 53.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), 287.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), 279. The phrase “territory shared” is actually from Volosinov (1973), 86, a close colleague of Mikhail Bakhtin, once thought to have been a pseudonym for Mikhail Bakhtin.
But as the three problems make clear, total explanation isn’t working. My case is that dialogics is a conversation that sociology would do well to enter for a way out.
There is increasing interest in dialogue as a focus of research within the social sciences, associated with the “civic” turn embodied in studies of participatory and deliberative democracy, social capital, and participatory research. Most of this work has hinged on questions of dialogue as a concrete social practice, which is certainly a worthy topic in its own right. But there has been less consideration of dialogics—that is, using the concrete practice of dialogue as a source of epistemological and theoretical insight. Dialogics has an enthusiastic and increasingly widespread following in the humanities, based on the work of Paulo Freire, Martin Buber, Donna Haraway, and especially Mikhail Bakhtin. Yet there has been little written about what dialogics might hold for the epistemology and theory of the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular.
Locating sociology within dialogics would lead to an interactive and non-deterministic epistemology of social life as an ongoing process, situated in the practice and metaphor of conversation. For dialogics is, as Michael Gardiner has described, “a practical rationality, rooted in the concrete deed, and not detachable from specific situations and projected as some sort of speciously and decontextualized ‘Truth.’” Dialogics is not static and apart, a theory of tweezers and pinning. Nor is the social actor static and apart. “To be means to communicate,” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s widely quoted phrase. But this is not communication in the narrow way we commonly understand the word today, in which I merely tell you what I am thinking. Rather, dialogics emphasizes the way all the participants in a dialogue call forth words from each other—the way the word is “territory shared” and “is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it,” as Bahktin liked to put it. When participants in a dialogue communicate, they say things that neither could have absolutely predicted ahead of time, for they proceed in the conversation through a continual taking into account of the other, and the messiness and contradiction the other represents, constantly reframing and reshaping their words and deeds accordingly. Herein lies surprise, social agency, the reshaping of categories and structures and their constraining histories, and the live and unfinished quality of the world that Mikhail Bakhtin called “unfinalizability.”
dialogics, sustainable agriculture, michael bell, mikhail bakhtin, social theory