The Sociology and Paradoxes of Deconstruction: A Reply to Agger

Abstract

he most distressing fact about Agger's (1994) critique of our paper (Fuchs and Ward 1994) is that he has nothing at all to say about the substance of our argument. We explain why different scientific organizations have different cognitive styles and why skepticism and relativism are more likely in some fields than in others. In brief, we argue that the sort of radical DECONSTRUCTION practiced by workers in postmodern cultural studies, literary theorists, and French poststructuralists indicates a crisis in social solidarity, organizational cohesion, and professional communication. This crisis triggers intellectual symptoms not unlike those accompanying the rare revolutionary upheavals described by Kuhn (1970), such as skepticism, antifoundationalism, and a good dose of cultural relativism. In highly decentralized fields with weak resources for producing facts, such a crisis can become permanent. This is typical in textual and humanistic fields, which are currently fragmented into fairly self-contained schools and incompatible ideological perspectives and have not established strong professional monopolies over their areas of expertise. When many schools and approaches coexist in this way, they can DECONSTRUCT each other's constructions as being selective and biased. They observe how others observe and so see and question from without what cannot be seen and questioned from within. Such fragmented fields and specialties are receptive to external political agendas and ideologies. Their organizational and material structure is conducive to a cognitive style that mixes disciplinary history and systematics, prefers commentary over theory and criticism over explanation, reads and rereads classics, and then questions all this and itself as not really scientific and representational. Compare this to closely coupled fields that have strong resources and professional networks for producing facts and objective knowledge. These are the fields that manage to blackbox many of their assumptions and presuppositions in algorithms, technical apparatus, and experimental habits. The premises for work in such fields or specialties are comparatively more routinized and institutionally entrenched than in decentralized fields. The workers are more likely to believe in facts, method, representation, and progress, and their working philosophy is some form of pragmatic realism. By themselves, workers in strong and prestigious scientific organizations do not normally become radical DECONSTRUCTIONISTS. They must be told that their knowledge is, indeed, a social and textual construct. For they have much work to do, must do it faster than others, get money and then more money for all this, and so have little time or reason to undermine the epistemic and social authority of their own practices as merely contingent and culturally relative. The blind spots of such organizations (i.e., the hows of their modes of perceiving and constructing their worlds) are protected and rendered more or less invisible. As opposed to conversational fields, factual fields do not view their basic constructions as constructions, but as the way reality is, or at least, as approaching Truth. This does not mean that what we find here are cozy mechanical Gemeinschaften. On the contrary, there is much stratification and intense competition. However, organizational and methodological strongholds temper mutual criticism. In such fields, radical DECONSTRUCTION is replaced by moderate deconstruction. Then, a set of strategies is available to economize on the costs of deconstruction. These strategies are similar in law and science, which can be partly explained by some common social and cognitive origins of science and law in seventeenth-century England. Agger is silent about this core of our argument. Instead, he questions our interpretation of Derrida. This side-stepping of substance is actually typical in weak and conversational fields, and so, ironically, Agger illustrates one of our main points: Instead of arguing the substantive and empirical merits of arguments,