And why a qualitative Sociology?

 'Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.' - A Parable by Kafka

'Modern thought is advancing towards that region where man's Other must become the same as himself' - A preface to transgression, Foucault

The yearning for reason as an instantaneous gratification of the intellect is far more bizarre than the methodical deconstruction of it. Without making much ado about the term 'deconstruction' one might say that it essentially belongs to an obscure form of thought, that follows in the face of the German tradition of thinking peopled at least by seven or eight French philosophers of silence, a Polish and Irish novelist and an Indian Sociologist and an Indian translator. Of course an extraordinarily sparse geneaology can draw this thought backwards into anti-christian christian mysticism which in terms of the representation of its members was far more diverse. 

Here I do not by deconstruction mean a specifically designated series of techniques attributed to Derrida to disperse the unity of meaning, the idea of the possiblity of systemic, dialectical or binarized thought, although this is certainly a part of it. Instead what is consistent in this tradition is the effort to look at reason from the outside in. It is with this in mind that one can positively assert that the entire series of Foucauldian 'histories' barring a few pages are a kind of theoritical play around the exigencies of public institutions,  under which lies the occasionally unconcealed the murmur of that thought itself, the only thought Foucault recognized as such. It is curious that most readings of Foucault have only taken seriously his 'histories', limiting a whole series of his texts to some sort of descriptive excess, again curiously without the ability to actually consider or theorize excess. This sense of description as excess however will be the central motif of this essay. 

Consider the sub-continental 'subaltern' school which largely takes up a few Foucauldian tropes as method: the theorization of discursive objects found at the bounds of interlocking systems, and a series of personae or possible subject positions produced and curated at the bounds of various discursive encounters. The notion of the limit (or boundary) itself being produced by the transgression that names it, brings it into and then frees it from discourse, has been enitrely neglected either, leave alone Foucault's thinking on thought itself as produced outside thought, in the effervecsent rise of a 'self'.  Instead while maintaing that Foucault castigates the 'subject' (without making any distinction between self and subject), the 'subaltern' discourse barring of course Spivak's piece, is largely concerned with expanding discourse, without a thought to how the expansion of discourse itself reproduces the conditions of production of discourse. This is a never failing pit into which the largest part of this tradition falls, and it is thus not surpsing that it is a an Indian, Post-Nietzschean Sociologist, Rabindra Ray, that severes this tradition from its own source of thinking, which following his line of thought, is precisely what constitutes the limits of an Indian Sociology, or even an Indian way of thinking that is distinct from the Occidental production of  'India' as exoticized, in the traditional anthropological sense, as culture. Although it is necessary here to point out that Ray is hardly friendly to the so called 'post-moderns' and sees himself as a thinker of Modernity, even if of its constitutive limits. The same can be said for the obscure collectivity of thinkers one has pointed to, including the ahistorical Foucault who produces, much like Weber, a historical rationality distinct from a modern or pre-modern rationality.

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What is really 'consistent' in Foucault is that his thought produces an anti-systemic aphorism rather than the construction of a coherent system(s).  He conjures a historical 'critique' of reason, that deconstructs the intellect having constructed it, except in Foucault the two moves (canonical and transgressive) appear together, it is a deconstruction through a historical construction, except the one side has hitherto been castigated. 

This castigation is undoubtedly a product of a kind of 'duck-rabbit' aspect blindness. We might see the same in the statement that underlines the extremely straightfoward painting above, Goya's 'the sleep of reason produces monsters'. Minimally we start with a first inversion, as canoncial as Goya's apparent celebration of reason: that is, the sleep induced by excessive depedance on post-Reformation reasoning, produces the monsters of modernity. In pointintg to this I am merely flagging the most obvious repressed underside of this or any statement. 

We move out of the canonical figure-ground type reasoning to a a slightly more transgressive reading of the same statement: to  kill (or reveal the death of, which as Foucault often points out with 'God' amounts to the same thing) reason is a way to produce a kind of ecstatic, terrestrial dreamscape of liberating monsters. That is they are monsters precisely from the point of view of reason, but from outside of such discourse they could be anything, they are quite precisely, unknown, and in being unknown constitute the possiblity of the thought of freedom and the freedom of thought. 

Or again to take on another transgressive reading of the same statement, Foucault's analysis of the production of the legal-psychiatric category of 'dangerous men' finally makes psychopathy (monmania) comprehensible to us. That is, quite precisely, Foucault in revealing the birth of the modern categories of 'monomania', dangerous individuals and delinquency, in a line of legal reasoning that forms the generative conditions for the production of psychiatric discourse, describes precisely how reason makes comprehensible 'motiveless', seemigly un-premeditated, horribly violent crime. A genealogy of psychopathy (it is not actually a history of course because it does not assume the category and describe its lineage but rather describes how the category itself is produced) leaves as its underside the genesis of a particular form of rationality that extends the project of enlightment, of reason, as the encompassment of thinking as such, to the consideration of the everyday of 'ordinary language' itself as the subject for criminality as serious as mass murder and cannibalism. This intersection of psychiatry and juridical thought of criminality is of course the core of every one of Foucault's histories, making his essay on 'Dangerous Individuals' a kind of synoptic summary of everything one can gain, theoritically from these books. He even has a line about the production of discursive objects at the bounds of two disursive systems, which should have been sufficient to set up the entire train of actual historiography written by produing a 'Foucauldian System', without any awareness of the oxymoronic nature of such an undertaking. 

This takes us back to my previous essay on liminality where I brought up a true crime Netflix show based on true events: 'Minhunter'. In fact what the show digests is precisely the kind of 'discursive liminality' that the modern Foucault obssessive historiography has seemingly mastered. What it neglects is what falls outside of the conditions of possiblity of the exhaustion of possiblity by the show, or any non-experimental cinematic project. How can a flim slip in and out of language as Foucault does, produce extra-discursive textures and peculiar Joycean phraseology ('psychopathological stigmata') for example. Afterall even silent films (Chaplin for example) are well within language. But Buster Keaton's final performance (as with all his performances) excavates a route, or is always already exacavating. 

The paucity of experimental film is also inexplicable and points to a kind of shackle imposed by practical reason on thought; moreover without an investment in a tradition of experimental film it becomes as futile to ask questions like 'is there an indian way of thinking' or 'an indian cinema'; these then become questions about 'natural cultures' rather than politico-economic systems that underwrite the production of hegemony. 

Instead what one finds in Foucault is always an excess to the systemic, an excess that cannot be captured by an art or a cinema produced by a series of regularized cinematographic techniques. 

This excess is not properly a part of the content of the thought of such a thinker, but rather of the style, of the 'latent content' of that particular way of thinking. By style I do not mean form: poetry is not itself because it is a series of lines broken before they can end, but because there is something expressible in poetic language that cannot be reproduced by any other, it is the same case with a language that does not reproduce discourse but rather carries it to the limit where the very act of reproduction is questioned by every word that emanates from it, where speech turns into writing. 

It is within this ouvre that one can locate the non-project of a qualitative Sociology: if a qualitative Sociology exists it is not because it imitates the semblance of a system, if this were the case any number of academic prophets who abandon thought styles to simply produce 'their own discourse', would actually be points of some sort of epistemological production. A qualitative Sociology produces a language that cannot be imitated by any other. It is not a question of a tradition of thought but of an identity in thought. 

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'So long as thought does not relinquish its claim to a place in the traditions of a particular people, its claim to found an anthropology other than as an estimation, an evaluation, a judgement!, remains dubious and will not bear scrutiny. It is in this sense that an identity in thought, rather than a tradition of thought marks a radical departure.'  - Rabindra Ray, Analytical Reason and the Project of a Philosophical Anthropology

I consider the question of whether one uses the term Anthropology or Sociology here moot, since within a Sociology one sees the recurrence of the same series of questions, the questions of the determination of being by thought,  the encompassement of reason by thought, of man and the condition of being human, and the defining excesses of this condition, of the relation of an orient that attempts to construct itself as distinct from the orient of the occident, and the fundamental object: individualized, or distinct collectivities. 

No, the real point of difference (difference not as representative difference but rather as the difference within the same as Ray might have said) is between the terms 'Philosophical Anthropology' present in the title of the essay quoted above and 'qualitative sociology' which marks the title of this short post. 

There are crucial points in common: most significantly the rejection of thought borne by tradition, that is by the possiblity of ontoligcal difference, rather being the subject of a deconstructive epistemology. We might read Ray's invocation of 'identity' precisely as style (here I intend style precisely in Fleck's sense of a 'thought style') or systemic culture (culture read as the production of political ecnomic history from a particular point of departure, say the Independence of a nation, or the construction of communist government in a state that is part of a Socialist Union), that is the impossiblity of culture outside of counter culture. 

Another crucial similarity is the invocation of the freedom of thought, and the very substance of thought's endevaour, whether this freedom is seen in an inverted way through a system of governmental and societal censorship, or simply in the inability to think: '...the freedom of thought may become a historical issue for a generation grown unused to, tired of, afraid of, hostile to thinking.' Most significantly it is an apotropy against the limitation of thought to reason, and of reason to the bounds of a practice or utility: 'an analytical and instrumental reason'. 

A qualitative sociology too is invested in 'thinking for the pleasure of doing so, rather than for its utilitarian adequacy'. 

The difference is singular, in both senses of the word, while the genesis of a philosophical athropology, reached for the summits of thought, via a transgressive epistemology, a qualitative Sociology places the same emphasis on transgressive thought but finds it in the excesses of language, in the knowledge that there is no ordinary language, that there is no language not already inflected by the chaos of unreason, non-reason or anti-reason, by the sheer descriptive profundity of the everyday, by the Bataillean theme of 'little deaths' that mark an entirely profanized sacredness. 

It is for the same reason that I find the term 'Qualitative Sociology' entirely adequate, since it already describes a style of thought, a way of crafting thought, a series of obsessive pathways to and away from a territory of thought. The term ethnography in itself or even a theory of ethnography in this sense are insufficient, since this does not exhaust epistemological possiblity. Nor is the interpretation of the term 'qualitative' to imply a series of interviewing techniques, or degrees of difference between quantiative gathering and qualitative inferrrence, the qualitative is a move away from the systemic into a language, into the endemic excesses of a language.