Comment on Boyer’s multiattentional method

Abstract

Spurred by Rabinow's (1999:181) aspiration making something happen in a field of but wary of pronouncements that smack of rejecting as a norm of intellectual practice, Boyer asks us to reflect on how we should best understand as intellectual practice. He sets the stage through a stimulating look at the development of social in the European tradition across several centuries, aimed at revealing the roots of contemporary expressions of concern, including Rabinow's, regarding the exhaustion, crisis, or failure of despite epistemic abundance. In light of this discussion, he queries: Is it sufficient to say that is a of framing data, of determining causality, or of producing a meta-reading? After referring to Bourdieu's depiction of the proscriptive, authoritarian capacities of the 'theory effect' (1991:106), Boyer goes on to mention his own work on theory as language, specifically as an exclusionary register of professional communication and as a medium of value-circulation through practices of citation. However, rather than continue to list the purposes or functions of theory, Boyer proposes a new way of thinking about social in terms of specialized analytical attentions and new ethics of theoretical complementarity grounded in the explicit cultivation and valuation of what he calls the multiattentional method of analytic engagement. In another piece, Boyer (2008:39) defines intellectuals as knowledge special? ists...especially... those who operate as members of professional networks in organizational or institutional contexts. I found it useful in writing this commentary to slightly reframe the orientation of understanding social as intellectual practice to one of understanding social theorizing as the practice of intellectuals. Further, despite, or perhaps because of, the discussion concerning para-ethnography in relation to the de facto and self-conscious critical faculty that operates in any expert domain (Holmes and Marcus 2005:237) and the