| The dissertation is based on an investigation of the discursive or textual (theoretical/historical/institutional) constitution of the empiricist research practice as definitive of the discipline of sociology, specifically as observed in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon, and provides a deconstructive critique of empiricist methodology in the social sciences--its empiricism taken as exemplary of what Jacques Derrida has called "the metaphysics of self-presence.".;The study is the product of a reflective research on the education and training that we undergo in becoming sociologists and the methods of sociology that we learn. While for most sociologists the object of study is in some sense "out there" and the methodological conception which supports this understanding is taken for granted, I have turned my attention to the sociological writing-into-being or representation of a world which then "gives" the sociologists their "object(s)" to study.;I argue that the teleological origin of empiricism which represents it as the triumphant outcome of a progress in rationality and cognition by reference to a world inscribed by itself, is constructed, maintained, imposed and enforced in the normalizing judgement of a disciplinary government--a practice that goes on at every level from examinations used in training and teaching to evaluations of manuscripts submitted for publication. The truth of empiricism, in other words, is not an otherworldly rational one but the result of a historically, culturally, and institutionally contingent hegemonic articulation. Hence, (re)presenting one's position as grounded in "empirical" reality beyond the discursive reflects no more than a desire to close off one's position to theoretical, political, evaluative, etc., criticism. Such immunity is always-already institutional and political--as most students of the academic world, the capitalist work place, patriarchal relations, racist relations, neo-colonialist relations, etc. can point out. In this light, this study can be read as exposing empiricist sociology to such an evaluation--the kind of evaluation that in the halls of everyday, naturalized institution of empiricist sociology is not allowed as a legitimate sociological practice and is accused of being too theoretical, too political, too ideological, too philosophical, and the like. If a sociology which claims immunity to theory, politics, ideology, etc. (by reference to its grounding in "the empirical") turns out to rely on theory, politics, ideology, rhetoric, etc. for the constitution and further maintenance of its alleged "empirical" object of study, as I maintain it does, then it surely needs to answer to theoretical, political, ideological, rhetorical, etc. evaluation. In other words, once "the empirical" as ontological ground and guarantee has been displaced and shown to be a way of discursively grounding one's argument, this ontological and epistemological undecidability opens up the field of decidability by calling for decision in the order of ethico-political responsibility. |
