It Ain't Rocket Science

Disciplinary matrices (or paradigms) are a particular kind of order that may be discerned in some social structures. These social structures can be called scientific communities. We describe the relevant sense of order by describing the elements of the paradigm--symbolic generalisations, models, values and exemplars.

The values of science can be described at two levels, which apply to the internal cohesion of the community working under the paradigm and to its legitimacy in the broader community (society in general) respectively. The first, then, defines the value of good quality (worthwhile or valuable) research by an individual member within the specific community working under the paradigm. This will often involve standards of precision and thoroughness, writing style and, of course, the orthodox identification of "enemy positions", i.e., those "other" disciplines that do not share the relevant values.

The second, meanwhile, defines the value of the paradigm's research to concerns that go beyond the paradigm. This will also involve its share of "othering", though now in terms of broader social movements. More important, however, are ideas about the value of science in general and the value of the paradigm's research to society. Such values, in turn, come in different varieties. Thus, "strategy research" (a branch of management studies) often emphasises its commitment to "the bottom line", i.e., to making a contribution to the profitability of firms. Some economists subscribe to the same line, and others to a broader notion of "economic efficiency" at a national or international level. Still other economists are committed to "social justice", just as many sociologists pursue lines of research devoted to "cultural criticism". There are natural scientists who are devoted to improving the conditions of life on the planet, whether human, animal or vegetable. And there are natural scientists, philosophers and sociologists who are interested in what they call "knowledge for its own sake" or, simply, "truth". Paradigms may form around any combination of such values.

Values are one of the elements that distinguishes paradigms from each other and they are subject to change. They are often very much a part of what connects a paradigm to its broader social context, even as they mark their autonomy from it. Their description is an important part of the delineation of the order constituted by a disciplinary matrix.

In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter. The first Kafka of "Betrachtung" is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

J. L. Borges

"Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations," Kuhn tells us (SSR, X, p. 126). "Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined." As an example, Kuhn offers Galileo's experiments with pendulums. His most controversial contention here, as he himself notes, is that Galileo was able to see a pendulum, where others--the Aristoteleans--simply were not. What they saw was the "constrained fall" of a stone on a string.

This difference can be understood in many ways that we have already looked at. In terms of symbolic generalisations, the Aristolean would describe the phenomenon by reference to "the weight of the stone, the vertical height to which it had been raised, and the time required for it to achieve rest," (p. 123) while Galileo "measured only weight, radius, angular displacement, and time per swing." In terms of models, Aristotle noted a "change of state rather than a process" and took the stone to be "impelled by its nature to reach its final resting point," i.e., the ground, (p. 122) while Galileo saw "the [pendulum's] motion as symmetrical and enduring; and . . . circular," its impetus deriving not from its tendency toward something, but rather from its distance from it," namely, the fixed point (p. 123-25). Finally, in terms of disciplinary values, Artistoteleans were likely to discuss these issues rather than observe actual pendulums. That is, Galileo valued empirical experiments, while Aristoteleans valued logical argument.

Our focus here is on exemplars. Kuhn emphasises that the paradigm that allowed Galileo's "individual genius" to see a pendulum where Aristotelean science could see only a constrained fall was not of his own making but was part of his scholastic heritage. Thus, Buridan's description of vibrating strings (p. 120) and especially Oresme's description of a swinging stone (which, Kuhn notes, "now appears as the first discussion of pendulums") are precursors of the paradigm shift marked by Galileo's studies. The "view of things" that Galileo had, was part of "the scholastic impetus paradigm for motion", a paradigm whose importance is of course very clear to us today.

The Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges once pointed out that works of literature have a tendency to create their own precursors. Thus, with the work of Kafka, certain connections between hitherto unrelated authors begin to emerge. A tradition is formed that seemed to herald the work of Kafka, but from which we could not have predicted in any detail the character of Kafka's work. The same can be said of landmarks in the history of science. A great many developments within the scholastic tradition become apparent as a drive toward the discoveries of Galileo, allowing us to see pendulums where, in the past, Aristoteleans had been able to see only stones swinging on the end of strings.

In keeping with the spirit of Borges, it may be useful to point out that it is not the person of, say, Sir Isaac Newton, but some of his work that has come to be "paradigmatic" (in the sense of "exemplary") of modern science. Newton also dabbled in alchemy, though neither he nor his colleagues would have called it "dabbling" (they took it very seriously). His studies of planetary motion have served as examples for countless studies since then; his studies of how to turn lead into gold are examplary of quite another set of pursuits. Note also that examplars may be found from a time before a paradigm is fully formed, as the scholastic exemplars for Galileo's work shows.

While exemplars generally have an origin, or at least a set of early applications that have defined their content, it is important to keep in mind also that Kuhn means the actual operations that define the experiment or study, not the historical event of its early attempts. Thus, the pendulum along with a specific kind of analysis (one which in fact defines it as a pendulum) is an examplar of mechanics even today. It is the therefore not just the sort of thing you read about in history books, but the sort of thing you can have hands-on experience with.

Kuhn himself emphasises the importance of exemplars and devotes a good deal of space to them in his postscript (pp. 186-204). There is good reason to heed his emphasis here. One of the most useful ways of getting clear about the formative processes behind a field of research, including your own, is to make explicit what counts as "good work". It is one thing to explicate abstract criteria or norms (i.e., values) of good research; it is another to identify examples of work that meets them. It is also much easier to learn from concrete examples of quality research than to imagine a correspondence between ones own work and a set of formal rules. Good researchers should be aware of their precursors: they should be able to point out what the major successes in their field are.

When describing a disciplinary matrix in terms of its exemplars, the following information should be provided wherever possible. First, the name of the scientist who first carried out the exemplary study. Second, the date of the experiment. Third, the place it was first published, and the places the example may be found today (such as in textbooks). Fourth, a description of the experiment that emphasises the parts of the study that have contributed to forming the "immediate experience" of the paradigm. Paradigms will of course contain many exemplars of good research, so part of the task here is to identify those which are particularily influential.

In all cases, keep in mind that exemplar is always an instance of a successful pairing of problems that are recognized by the field and solutions that are valued by it. Identifying an examplar means identifying work that has been valuable to the formation of the researcher's competences and remains a benchmark in a significant way. This is why a field's progress "creates its own precursors", as Borges puts it. Progress may sometimes make previous exemplars less significant, and may indicate new examplars of what can be an older vintage.

"Metaphysics grounds an age," writes Martin Heidegger in his famous essay, "The Age of the World Picture". The metaphysics of the modern age is revealed, he continues, in its "essential phenomena": science, technology, art, culture and religion. Like us, Heidegger focuses his attention on the first of these. And like us, Heidegger is very interested in the materiality and historicity of science. "Within the complex machinery that is necessary to physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies hidden the whole of physics up to now." Science, he tells us, is fundamentally characterised by its "ongoing activity", or Betrieb in German, which has also been translated as "hustle". We might conceive of science as "hustle and bustle", evoking its fragile, pulsating history, as Foucault does. But science does not lose itself in "random investigations" that "simply amass results" precisely because the hustle and bustle of modern research is disciplined by the "complex machinery" of its procedures.

This is why we can usefully read Chapter III of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions alongside Kuhn's comments in the postscript on "models" or "metaphysical paradigms". For in Chapter III, Kuhn is trying to show how science is normalized by the procedures it uses to "gather facts". The "nature of normal science" is its "metaphysics", its "ground". It is on this ground that the various abstract models that illustrate scientific theories stand out as figures, as meaningful diagrams of basic mechanisms at work in particular object spheres. "Again and again," says Kuhn, "complex special apparatus has been designed to [increase the precision of science], and the invention, construction, and deployment of that apparatus have demanded first-rate talent, much time, and considerable financial backing." With that precision, and at that expense, changes have been brought about in the models according to which the phenomena have been understood. Consider here the ways in which increased precision in the measurement of the position of planets brought us from a metaphysics of winged chariots (mythology), to shining balls mounted on spheres of crystal (Aristotle and Ptolemy), to orbits governed by the force of attraction (Newton) to the current orthodoxy of planets moving through curved space (Einstein). Indeed, the wheel has been a standing model in understanding the manifold of experience since antiquity, forming our understanding of "cycles" in all their variety.

The task here is to describe the role of scientific training (discipline) and equipment (apparatus) in avoiding what Kuhn later calls "a bloomin', buzzin' confusion," quoting William James in Chapter X. An orderly approach to experience is expressed in a "world view" (which can be usefully compared to Heidegger's "world picture"). And in Chapter X, Kuhn indeed understands changes of paradigm as reconfigurations of world-views, noting that these are correlated with changes in the "operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory". Such procedures produce "data", which is Latin for, "what is given", but which are more accurately understood as what has been "collected with great difficulty".

When describing the underlying models of scientific inquiry, keep in mind that these are, in a sense, sublimated expressions of "ways of looking at the world" (theories, Bourdieu reminds us, are "programmes of perception"), and that what is seen when we look at the world in this way are, only in this sense (of having been "sublimated"), brute facts. Metaphysical models are (extraordinarily) simple expressions of the complex perceptual dispositions that form the (ordinary) ongoing activity in which science is always already implicated. Models make science look easy, which is altogether part of their charm.

In the closing paragraphs of Chapter II of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR, II), Kuhn notes the importance of "esoteric" modes of publication, or what he also calls research "communiqués", for the emergence of normal science or research carried out within what he comes to call a "disciplinary matrix". These are very efficient ways of communicating research results to peers, but largely incomprehensible to lay people. The problem for the lay person, of course, arises from the high degree to which the research can (and does) take the meaning of central terms for granted. In the second section of the post-script (SSR, PS, 2), Kuhn identifies this capacity to be precise with the presence of "symbolic generalisations" in the language used by a research community. It is with the use of these generalisations, that the "communiqués" are produced, allowing scientists to pass from having to write lengthy treatises that derive all results from fundamentals, to writing short papers that present the result of specialized investigations to people who already know how to make sense of them, i.e., can determine their significance both in the sense of brute 'meaning' and in the sense of the relative 'importance' of the results. In so far as it is unclear what a result means to the research of one's peers, it may be "anomalous" and be an advance indication of crisis and revolution. Only history will tell, however, so at the time it will simply not register, i.e., future contenders for paradigmatic status are ignored in the present on par with past contenders.

The presence of terms that clearly indicate their subject matter to initiated peers, then, is called the "symbolic generalisation" of research within a "disciplinary matrix". Part of describing such a matrix (also called a paradigm, for short) is identifying highly generalised symbols available to the researchers when communicating with each other, and unavailable (at least as a presumption) when communicating with non-peers. (They may run into someone that happens to know what they are talking about, but they can't count on it outside the paradigm.) The sense that is made of the symbols is conditioned by the paradigm, so this will also enter into our epistemological descriptions. Thus, in describing a body of knowledge (a scientific discipline) as a "paradigm", the task of describing its symbolic generalisations consists in two sub-tasks: (a) to identify the symbols that generalize the field and (b) to describe their use, i.e., to determine their meaning. So, while Kuhn warns us at the start of Chapter III, not to let the word "paradigm" mislead us into the thinking of research in general by analogy with grammar (SSR, III), the description of symbolic generalisation is very much a matter of delineating the grammar of a particular discipline's research communication. Paradigmatic results may not often be replicated, but their grammatical structure is.

One very important aspect of this element of epistemological description is the difference between "definitional" and "legislative" applications. Where the same symbols recur among different groups of scientists, different paradigms will sometimes be evident, in part, because the same expressions are used primarily definitionally in one and legislatively in another. So it is important to know the difference, and to identify it as part of the description of a paradigm.

Sometimes a generalization like "f = ma" will be used to define a term (like "f", "force") and therefore stipulate the sorts of operations it would take to render them, e.g., empirically observable. In order to determine the force of a rocket in flight, for example, we must determine its accelaration (by observation of its motion) and its mass (by, hopefully, having weighed it before lift-off). The product of these values, then, just "is" the force of the rocket at a given point: "mass times accelaration" is (part of) what force means. Thus, the "force" of an "impact" understood in terms of (Newtonian) mechanics is evident in the acceleration that the impact causes the thing impacted to undergo.

But at other points in the history of mechanics (or in other uses of the language of mechanics) the same expression, "f = ma", may be a statement of law, i.e., it might impart the knowledge that force is always equal to the mass of a projectile times its acceleration. This knowledge can be very useful when attempting to accelerate or decelerate things like rockets. Kuhn calls such an application of a generalisation its "legislative" use.

The next four posts will cover what Kuhn calls the four "components" of a disciplinary matrix. These are symbolic generalisation, models, values and exemplars. None of these are alone sufficient to characterize a disciplinary matrix (or "paradigm" for short) but, taken together, describing these components is a way of delineating the order of experience that constitutes the sense that scientists make of what would otherwise be the "bloomin', buzzin' confusion" of their activities. Kuhn does not offer any clear sense of how these components interrelate, and he points out that the importance of each component will vary from paradigm to paradigm. Some research will be organized mainly around values while others will be organized mainly around symbolic generalisations. But if the science is "normal", i.e., if the research is conducted "under a paradigm", it ought to be possible to describe it in terms of these components.

An important question then goes to how one designs one's descriptions to relate components to each other. One way this may be done is to group the components two-by-two. Thus symbolic generalisations and models go to together somewhat like exemplars and values. Symbolic generalizations are the precise expressions of a particular paradigm's metaphysical models; it is here the language reaches a sufficient level of precision to afford "puzzles" for scientists to solve, rather than grand, sweeping gestures to admire. Similarily, exemplars make the underlying values of a paradigm more precise, since these are the instances that the researchers working under the paradigm deem to be "valuable". Here again, instead of expressing vague sentiments that specialists and non-specialists alike can agree with (everything from the value of human life to the value of careful observation), exemplars reveal more exactly what is meant by these sentiments in practice.

While it is not a hard and fast rule, it may be useful to think of symbolic generalisations and exemplars as means by which paradigms organize themselves at the core of the research process, while values and models are the stuff of which their outer boundaries are composed.

This also suggests another way to organize these components when describing a paradigm, this time involving more directly the historical approach Kuhn espouses. Since paradigms are historical contingencies that instantiate periods of "normal science" punctuated by "scientific revolutions" a paradigm, though always "normal" by definition, may be situated somewhere along the line of development from the revolution that established it to the revolution that will finally replace it. This, indeed, is one way Kuhn's work has been appropriated by scientists themselves in calling for "paradigm shifts" within their own fields. While these appropriations are rarely as orthodox as the approach we have been suggesting here, we can imagine how this would look. The idea would be to show that research within the paradigm has ceased to work at the core (i.e., around generalisations and examplars) and has begun to take an interest in such "philosophical" matters as its moral fibre (values) and its metaphysics (models). Settling issues here on the periphery might then lead to predictable and prescribable changes in the symbolic generalisations employed within the paradigm's core practices, correlating with an emphasis on new examples of proper research.

While the incommensurability thesis precludes making sense of such predictions and prescriptions (based on careful descriptions of the components of the disciplinary matrix) within the paradigm itself, the more philosophically inclined among the field's (often young) revolutionary vanguard will, perhaps, achieve a moment of disciplinary reflexivity (the scientific equivalent of "class consciousness"), allowing the revolution to proceed a bit more smoothly. Alternately, this knowledge can be applied by the old guard within a field in order to delay or even avoid a revolution. Finally, let us allow the possibility that Kuhn was wrong about the inherently revolutionary nature of scientific change and that, say, Popper's conception of "permanent revolution" could be conducted within paradigms under something like continuous reform. This reform process, then, could be guided by the awareness of the conditions of scientific work that Kuhn's conception of paradigms provides both scientists and their constituents.

In the postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn makes an important remark that allows his concept of a "disciplinary matrix" to be used to foster reflexivity within a discipline. He points out that the phenonoma he investigates (the sciences) by historical means are nothing other than what "scientists themselves" (i.e., scientists when they are working within their paradigm: when they are being themselves as scientists), would simply call "theories". He blames philosophy for limiting the sense of this word, and "would be glad if the term can ultimately be recaptured" for his purposes (SSR, PS[2]).

These purposes require a recognition that "theorising" amounts to struggling with a "constellation of group commitments", i.e., elements to which the given scientific community is committed in its "normal" practices, and is therefore not a purely abstract activity.

The relevant elements are precisely those that we have been learning how to describe. Since Kuhn is keen to distinguish between "communities" (community structures) and "paradigms" (disciplinary matrices) analytically, however, it is important to keep in mind that a struggle with the community is not necessarily an instance of theorising. We know someone is theorising when they are engaging with very specific elements, and we characterise the specifically "theoretical" struggle by describing engagements with them.

Paradigms are abstractions of scientific practice, and while they are contingent on historical forces, they mark a "here and now" of this practice that we are able to describe independently of the history that formed it. Describing a disciplinary matrix allows us to see more clearly how the things of immediate experience "look" to researchers working in a particular field (theories, said Pierre Bourdieu, are programmes of perception). But they do not yet explain how things came to look that way, i.e., the history of a way of seeing things.

This way of putting it may seem a bit at odds with Kuhn's historical approach (and suggests his nascent sociological orientation) so it should be added that Kuhn would encourage us to learn the history as well. The reason to stress the "abstract" and "ahistorical" nature of paradigms is that it answers the important question, "A history of what?" when looking at the sciences. We are not interested in the complete social and political history of particular communities that call themselves scientific. We are interested in the history of precisely those aspects of practice in these communities that may be considered "knowledge bearing", i.e., those aspects that shape, form or "gestalt" experience in ways that allow us to make sense of it. The specific sense we are able to make of what goes on is contingent on the current paradigm. And it is that contingency we are trying to understand.

The orthodox description of a disciplinary matrix, then, brings us into the "presence" of research, i.e., allows us to understand how objects can emerge in experience in their "immediate reality". This immediacy, or rather this sense of immediacy is always itself a mediated affair, and the components of the disciplinary matrix are crucial characteristics of this medium. Since it is always impossible to appropriate a complete understanding of one's own history while one is involved in it, disciplinary reflexivity depends more on detaching the historically contigent paradigm from its historical contingencies than on connecting it to them. The descriptive task that will now be outlined is an exercise in producing a suitable occasion to reflect upon how one knows what one knows. It does not yet call any of that knowledge into doubt.

Not all talk is equally interesting. Certain "themes" (or theories) occupy the attention of discourse at various times; they come up, or are taken up, and its objects, modes and concepts are given the opportunity to develop. But in order to do this, the themes themselves must find support somewhere and this support will have effects that can be registered within discourse. This interiority is worth emphasising because in analysing discourse we are analysing always the surface of what is being said; to be "inside" a discourse is always to be "outside" things, people and languages. While we may suspect that somewhere "out there" (beyond discourse) there are real things "as such", real people being "themselves" and a deeper meaning to it all, in analysing what we know of these entities all we have to work with (i.e., pay attention to) is our talk about them. Here, as elsewhere, our concern is with what turns up in discourse.

We have already noted the sense in which the conceptual machinery of a discourse is part of its rhetoric, i.e., how it conditions the way arguments (determinate arrangements of statements) are formed and presented, and which of them will be persuasive. Strategies are also constituted by rhetorical sensibilities, but this time at the broader level of what is worth talking about in the first place. Foucault accordingly wants us to understand

(1) that discourses are formed by the processes that render objects, modes and concepts first incompatible, then equivalent, and finally ordered into a system, all of which together opens a field of options for discourse. These options provide discourses with its "points of diffraction", i.e., pivot points, obstructions, solidities, stabilities, around which the trajectories of various statements are bent.

(2) Next, Foucault points out that there are processes that ensure that not all of these options are realized. Not every possible trajectory will see a statement travelling along it. There is a certain "economy" to discourse that ensures that not everything is tried, often this has to do with the fact that discourses offer alternatives to each other, so that different research programmes vie for the same resources. (Today, we can add, this competition is played out within funding agencies of various kinds.)

(3) Finally, Foucault draws attention to those "non-discursive practices" that make use of the results of a particular discourse and therefore grant it a kind of authority. He uses the relationship of grammar to pedagogy as an example. "Non-discursive" should be understood in the sense of practices that are not particular to discourse being studied, for they will of course involve discourse in their own right. It is at this level also, that Foucault locates the role of desire in discourse.

Foucault, as always, cautions us not to think of these strategies as unambiguous or univocal or, as it were, total(itarian). Strategies derive their force from their variety, and there is no (discernable) overarching tendency in the progress of theoretical choices in discourse. We should therefore neither think of strategies in terms of some "fundamental project" (like Western civilization) nor in terms of the "secondary play of opinions" (which will be evident in the popular or journalistic writing on a particular field in its own time).

Indeed, many of the conflicts about science in society oscilate helplessly between these two poles. Thus, today, for example, the discursive formation about GMOs (genetically modified organisms) is sometimes related to the fundamental benevolence or fundamental malevolence of Western culture (it will be saviour of mankind or will bring its downfall) and is sometimes to the particular interests of major biotech companies and their economic "interests". Somewhere between these two poles, we will find Foucault's strategies. And as we shall see, there is a good deal of research going on today that tries to track them.

We ordinarily construe a concept as that which we need to "have" in order to entertain a particular set of thoughts. That is, concepts are what make thinking possible in general, and specific concepts are what make specific thoughts thinkable. If the linguistic turn in philosophy taught us that thoughts are best approached where they are expressed, i.e., where they take a form that can be perceived by the senses, i.e., in sentences (cf., for example, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, proposition 3.1.), then Foucault's "discursive turn" teaches us to look for concepts where they can be construed empirically, namely, in the relations between statements. As in the case of objects and enunciative modalities, the essential analytical move lies in the commitment to describe concepts as aspects of statements. In concluding his chapter on concepts (II, 5), he emphasizes that concepts should be understood neither against "the horizon of ideality" (where an enunciative modality would also be misunderstood as a transcendental subject) nor in terms of the "the empirical progress of ideas" (which would make a psychological subjectivity of it).

One thing that might help sort the conceptual aspects of statements from their objective and stylistic (modal) aspects, is to note that objects and modalities can be ascribed to individual statements, while concepts (like strategies as we will see) are better understood in terms of their arrangement. It is, of course, necessary in all cases to study a great many statements in order to determine the rules of their formation, but while individual statements are able on their own to break the rules that constitute objects and modalities, only whole arrangements of statements are able to break the rules we will call concepts.

Foucault draws attention to the way statements seem to be ordered by (a) forms of succession, (b) forms of coexistence and (c) procedures of intervention. He then notes that we can describe a discourse in terms of the concepts that operate in it by describing "the way in which these different elements are related to one another". This means that whenever we describe the way statements are arranged in a particular sequence (what kinds of statements does it seem necessary to make before some other kind of statement is made), or the way some statements can be presented along with other statements of a particular kind and not others, and, lastly, the ways statements are able to be transformed into other statements, we are describing aspects of the conceptual apparatus of a discourse. But in order to locate a specific concept, it is often necessary to show how it conditions the arrangement of statements according to combinations of these aspects.

Here are three exercises that might help you identify and describe the concepts at work in a particular discourse. First, take a series of statements and construct their negations. That is, construct statements that contradict each other. In order for two statements to contradict each other they must have something in common; much of that commonality is conceptual. (This is a very simple "type of dependence" among statements.) Second, take these same statements and make them first less and then more precise. Here you will be identifying the criteria (of "approximation" as Foucault puts) that statements are measured against by those who use them, and these criteria (which govern how we must write down what we see) are conceptual. Lastly, take essentially quantitative judgments and translate them into qualitative ones, or vice versa. How many is "a lot"? How many elements and relations does it take to make something "complex"? What makes a situation "volatile"? Note that this exercise will produce new statements (you are experimenting with what Foucault calls "procedures of intervention") that you may then subject to the other two exercises.

Concepts are normally also associated with logic and argument, and it is important to realize that these notions are to "language" (in a very abstract sense) what rhetoric is to discourse (which is language in a more concrete sense). This is why Foucault is careful to note that the sorts of "conceptual" exercises that practioners of particular scientific disciplines normally think of as very formal and rigorous "ways of thinking" are in fact (i.e., are as facts of disourse) part of the way language is used for a variety of effects that are clearly rhetorical in nature. That is, they are means of persuasion that emerge from what is finally a "pre-conceptual" level.

This pre-conceptual level can then be related to the fourth and final element of a discursive formation, namely, its strategies.

I noticed how people played at being executives while actually holding executive positions. Did I do this myself? You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There's a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it's not that you're pretending to be someone else. You're pretending to be exactly who you are. That's the curious thing.

Don DeLillo, Underworld, Part 1, Chapter 4

In ordinary life, people are as present as things. The second task of archaeological description is to delineate the presence of people in discourse, with the important caveat that, as in the case of things, the whole idea is to "dispense" with them.

I showed earlier that it was neither by 'words' nor by 'things' that the regulation of the objects proper to a discursive formation should be defined; similarly, it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined.(II, 4)

Objectivity is to things what subjectivity is to people: in one sense, the subjective existence of people is undeniable, but this subjectivity must not be allowed to explain the formation of a particular discourse. On the contrary, the subjectivity of a discourse is what must be explained by its archaeology, by the "instrinsic description of [its] monument[s]" (I).

So instead of talking about the "subject" of a discourse, Foucault addresses its "enunciative modality". The first clue to understanding what this implies is provided by Foucault's tentative, explorative hypothesis that a discourse, like that of medical science, seems to be characterized by "a certain style, a certain constant manner of statement." (II, 2) Indeed, in order to understand what Foucault means by "enunciative modality" note how it is sometimes exchanged with "types of statement" (II, 1), "manner of statement" (here at II, 2), and "positions of subjectivity" (IV, 3). This is the sense in which a discursive formation is not just a set of things that are suitably arranged to be talked about, refered to, singled out, compared, and so forth, but also a manner of speaking or way of talking about these things, a style. Discourse seems to have a "voice", and it is this voice that the speakers of a discourse (doctors, phycisists, managers, "rocket scientists") that its speakers seek to master.

To call it a style is to simplify things too much--especially if we think of style as a sort of decorative flair. It is "superficial" to be sure, but only because discourses are not characterized by depth in the first place--everything in discourse is superficial (nothing of importance to philosophy, as Wittgenstein said, is hidden). The trick in describing the order of statements (discursive formations) is to discern the richness of its texture, not the depth of its meaning.

Foucault proposes three stylistic moments to look for, which can be thought of in terms of three questions.

(a) "Who is speaking?"
(b) "Where is he speaking from?"
(c) "Among what is he standing?"

(a) Statements, says Foucault, "cannot come from anyone". Medical discourse requires doctors who are authorized to speak it in order for it to make the sense it does. Doctors are "accorded rights" to speak as doctors just as objects are "accorded status" as objects on the surface of emergence. But to be a doctor implies a host of related functions that are not limited to the making of recognized medical statements. That is, the style of medical discourse is shaped not merely in formal documents of the trade. It depends on the speaking practices of people who engage as, for instance, doctors in social life more generally.

(b) Statements also require "institutional sites" of enunciation, places where their meaning can be heard. Foucault does not merely pay attention to the most obvious medical institutions such as hospitals, private practices and laboratories. He also identifies libraries and 'the documentary field', which coordinate the statements made in the discourse, checks and balances its informational content, and leaves its mark of both caution and confidence in the manner of the statements that are made. Foucault's historical analysis points to a curious development: "the importance of documents [relative to "the book or tradition"] continues to increase". That is, intermediary and flexible forms of text are coming to be of greater and greater practical importance. This point draws attention to the understanding of the media as institution, and hence to the importance of mediation and communication for the enunciative modality. (A weblog, we can speculate, represents its own form of institutional site. Some blogs are of negligible importance while others compete with established media and research institutions.)

(c) Lastly, in order for a subject to take up a position in discourse he must assume an attitude of questioning and listening, of seeing and of observing. He must also be able to teach and to train, to be taught and to be trained. He must cultivate specific modes of perception. It is therefore necessary to describe the myriad of relations in which the discourse is applied. Foucault here means to draw attention to the variation in positions within the same institutional sites and social roles or professions. Discourse depends on historically specific attitudes towards other objects as well as subjects. Grasping these specific relations, which are sometimes technologically mediated, are crucial for the analysis of the enunciative modality.

Much of the work of describing an "enunciative modality" can be confused with the conditions under which a perceptual experience is possible in general, and therefore lead us in search of a transcendental subjectivity to coordinate our scientific observations, or a psychological subject to centre its gestalt. But Foucault warns us not to reduce a discourse's style to some "new technique of observation", perceived from within a pure manifold of sensibility. Rather, Foucault proposes to reverse this emphasis and see any supposedly novel method as a development in a rich and very impure texture that involves the way we describe our experiences, reason about them, attribute causes to their effects, and so forth. The manner of speaking within a discourse is not just contingent on the manner of seeing within the science it communicates, rather these two are inexorably intertwined.

So in order to see in what sense a scientist, when speaking, is pretending to be exactly who he is, you must describe his function in society, the places where that function is especially supported, and the relations in which he is always already implicated when he speaks.

A discursive formation is not . . . an ideal, continuous, smooth text that runs beneath a mulitiplicity of contradictions, and resolves them in the calm unity of coherent thought; nor is it the surface in which, in a thousand different aspects, a contradiction is reflected that is always in retreat, but everywhere dominant. It is rather a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described. -- Michel Foucault (IV, 3)

To speak of discourses is neither to speak of a determined order of controlled thought, nor to invoke a "bloomin', buzzin' confusion"* underneath the apparent, if always partial, order of experience. It is, rather, to commit oneself to a particular kind of investigation, to a conception of knowledge that involves heterogeneous elements that must be desribed. One sort of event, or type of statement, that these elements are capable of occasioning are contradictions, i.e., clashes between the statements that are formed by discourses, and especially clashes that are intrinsic to the formation of those discurses (IV, 3). Notice how Foucault lays out the task of describing these conflicts between "two ways of forming statements". First, he says, they are "characterized by certain objects, certain positions of subjectivity, certain concepts and certain strategic choices." But, he continues, none of these are the primary means by which the contradiction is constituted (and none are therefore sufficient to account for them) what is essential, in the case of intrinsic contradictions, is the fact that "they derive from a single positivity". That is, the four characteristics only describe the phenomenon of contradiction when taken together, when understood in terms of a comprehensive project that occupies a specific expanse of time (III, 5).

The list he provides--"certain objects, certain positions of subjectivity, certain concepts and certain strategic choices"--is useful because it gives us slightly different, but recognizable names, for the "elements" of the division of discursive formations, or their "rules of formation". In II, 2, he defines a "discursive formation" as a describable system of dispersion "between a number of statements", and he breaks this system down into a list of four elements, namely, "objects, types of statements, concepts, and thematic choices". He is here repeating the gesture once again, and again using slightly different terms for especially the second and fourth element. We will turn to these difference in the posts devoted to them. In any case, a discursive formation comprises

objects,
enunciative modalities,
concepts and
strategies.

We will look at each of these in turn. For now, what is essential is that a discursive formation is not determined by any one of these alone, but by the describable system of dispersion in which they all appear. The task at hand is to learn how carry out such descriptions. And the best way to make this task managable is first to learn how to describe each element separately.



*We will return to this expression of William James' when we look at paradigms.

Michel Foucault takes great pains both to connect his descriptive project (which he calls "archaeology") to the philosophical discipline of epistemology (the study of knowledge) and to distinguish it from it. In naming the "somewhat strange, somewhat distant figures" (The Archaeology of Knowledge, part III, chapter 1) whose shape he wants to trace, he is careful to "[avoid] words that are already overladen with conditions and consequences, and [are] in any case inadequate to the task." Among these words he lists "theory" (II, 2). His descriptions, we are told, "are very different from epistemological or 'architectonic' descriptions, which analyse the internal structure of a theory" (IV, 4). Nonetheless, what he is describing is precisely that ordering of immediate experience that scientists themselves would likely call their theory, and thereby the logic of the practice they would call 'theorising'. In "posit[ing] the existence" of his own "discursive formations" he is acknowledging the reality of theories. He is not saying that theories do not exist and that discourses do. The study of discourse, like the study of paradigms, is the study of scientific theories ("always in the plural" (IV, 4)) and the conditions that make them possible. His archaeology, like epistemology, is a study of knowledge; it is epistemology pursued by other means.

But where do we find knowledge in the world? Where do we go if we want to see it? What should we be looking at? Foucault's answer is that we must observe the dispersion of "statements", and this dispersion he calls "discourse". The specific order of discourse that pertains to a specific field he calls a "discursive formation", which we will outline in greater detail in the five following posts. The task here is to locate these formations, these "strange figures", on a more familiar ground.

Statements are obviously crafted from the materials provided by language, i.e., they are made out of words. But the peculiarity of discourse, which makes it something other than simply "language", is that discourse is structured by what we already know about the world. Discourse manifests our knowledge, and this is why it is a suitable object of interest for the epistemologist. Discourses are historical but are prior to the making of statements: they are "the condition of the possibility" (in a modified but recognizably Kantian sense) of saying something, rather than just speaking. Language determines whether or not you are speaking; discourse determines whether or not it means anything.

Thus, a science proceeds from the "historical a priori" established within a discourse. A science's (or a theory's) manifest duration in time, Foucault calls its "positivity". We will leave the priority and positivity of discourses mostly on the periphery of our inquiries here, and look at their "elements" or "rules of formation" (II, 2). As we will also do in our reading Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we will try to detach these characteristically historically contingent figures from the historical contingencies that formed them. "Archaeology," as Foucault puts it, "seems to treat history only to freeze it" (IV, 5). For our purposes, this allows us to describe the order of the "here and now" that history has arranged for us.

[Part of our ambition with this blog is to return again and again to Project Apollo as a theme to be understood within our own discourses and paradigms. We will publish little sketches of our ongoing research as we go. Here's the first of what we hope to be many installments.]

"Project Apollo: a retrospective analysis" offers an interesting look at the history of the moon landings. Most importantly, it tells us that going to the moon was not understood, even at the time, as primarily scientific and technological problem, but a managerial solution to a political problem.

Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, and worked hard to maintain balance of power and spheres of influence in American/Soviet relations.

James E. Webb, the NASA Administrator at the height of the program between 1961 and 1968, always contended that Apollo was much more a management exercise than anything else, and that the technological challenge, while sophisticated and impressive, was largely within grasp at the time of the 1961 decision.

It may be useful to approach these statements in the light of another statement made by Kennedy in 1962: "What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy."

Positivism and structuralism were the two most dominating intellectual movements of the twentieth century. Their dominance is evident in part in the way they haunted research also after their demise. Thus, even now, we find ourselves describing research in many fields as "post-positivist" or "post-structuralist", which often simply indicate different senses of "post-modern".

The work of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault mark this transission quite clearly. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions completed the Foundations of the Unity of Science series, which had been a major undertaking of the logical posivists. Many argue that it brought that undertaking resolutely to an end. Kuhn, on this view, was the last positivist. Foucault, meanwhile, was often called a structuralist had to actively distance himself from that movement. Many take his work as the most decisive blow against structuralist orthodoxy.

For our purposes we need to find a way to characterize the lasting contribution that these two great movements made and identify those parts of their doctrine that were discarded. The first is relatively easy. Positivists and structuralists agreed that human knowledge was displayed in linguistic artifacts, i.e., epistemology was best carried out as a critique of language.

One way to see the difference between them, however, is to note that positivists were steadfastly "empiricist" in their approach, while structuralists displayed rather "rationalist" biases. This can be seen in their approach to the "truth" and "meaning" of a linguistic artifact. Positivists claimed that what a sentence "means" is that which would be the case if the sentence were true. Structuralists claimed that the meaning of a particular sentence was owed to its relation to the totality of sentences (the whole language). The positivists, we might say, interpreted sentences in their relation to "real parts" (facts) while the structuralists interpreted sentences in their relation to "ideal wholes".

The challenge for both programmes was to account for how theories and observations go together. And much of epistemological insecurity today continues to stem from our inability to account for our observations. This can be called the problem of method.

The difference between positivism and structuralism lies in the way they proceed: in the way they connect experience with its articulation in language. For the structuralist, interpretation is a matter of effecting a methodical abstraction, that is, the content of an experience or an utterance is isolated by relating it to that larger whole (the structure) in which it "makes sense". For the positivist, meanwhile, interpretation means finding a specificable part (the fact) that makes the experience or utterance true. This we might call methodical concretization.

Doubts about method lead naturally to scepticism. If we cannot be sure we have correctly abstracted the relevant contents or found the concrete particular to which a sentence refers, we cannot be sure we know anything. And, indeed, Kuhn and Foucualt are sometimes taken to present a "sceptical" or "relativist" epistemological position. For our purposes, however, we want to insist that neither Kuhn nor Foucault said that truth or knowledge are impossible. They merely pointed out that knowing does not depend very much on the relation between linguistic events (statements) and either real parts or ideal wholes. Rather, knowing is always a relation between, what we might call, ideal parts and real wholes. Neither facts nor structures can account for the "truth" or "meaning" of our sentences. To know something is to use the language to make a series of connections in more or less rigorous ways. These ways are formed by "discoursive formations" and "disciplinary matrices".

And it is to them that we will now turn.

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge each provide us with a means for understanding professional, disciplinary, or scientific knowledge. They describe the elementary conditions under which the full variety human knowledge is created and maintained. And they suggest that epistemology need not be construed as a species of esoteric contact with "transcendental conditions", but may, at least sometimes, amount to little more than a way of talking about what we know in order to determine, more or less precisely, how we know. While it is not always easy, it's not rocket science. It is a perfectible craft, i.e., something you can get better and better at the more you practice.

In addition to the two books just mentioned, this blog will be organized around the description of what we know about Project Apollo (especially in the years 1961-1969). To keep things as simple as possible, we begin by identifying a the "doctrine of elements" that sets up a kind of "schematism" for the research experience (the scare quotes indicate an uneasy tension with aspects of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which we may also get into at some point.) So, Thomas Kuhn defines a "disciplinary matrix" or what is colloquially called a "paradigm" as a research environment conditioned by the presence of four elements:

And Foucault likewise describes "discursive formations" or "discourses" in terms of four elements:


There is no one-to-one mapping of these elements, however. And, while paradigms and discourses are certainly similar in many ways, it is important to keep in mind that they are independent ways of approaching human knowledge. One of the things they share is an emphasis on historical conditions, which is one sense in which they eschew transcendental analyses.

It is a relative mastery of these eight elements of epistemological description that this blog hopes to encourage and foster. We will be returning again to the facts mentioned in the prologue, expanding and sharpening this statement in order to identify its "objects" and "generalisations", its "strategies" and "values", etc. What we want to know is how Project Apollo can be construed as a problem of business administration and philosophy, which is our field.

The success of the Apollo space programme, most clearly marked by the landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969, is normally understood as a triumph of science and technology. But putting a man on the moon did not depend on science and technology alone, or at least not in the ordinary senses of these words. While getting to the moon did depend on knowledge about planetary motion and rocket propulsion, it also depended on political and cultural factors. These factors are what will interest us here.

For there is clearly a difference between what makes the moon an object of scientific research and what makes the same moon an object of national policy, a political objective. There are just as clearly connections between these. These differences and connections make for what we want to call "the fractional coherence of the moon". Our ability to conceive of a mission to go there depends on a multiplicity of relations between political subjects and scientific objects that together allow us to understand what it means to "explore space".

Consider John F. Kennedy's speech to Congress on May 25, 1961. (Text available here; video excerpt here.) He famously proposed that the U.S. "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Congress accepted the challenge and the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility, right on schedule, eight years later.

One striking feature of this speech is the enormous amount of emphasis Kennedy puts on political and economic background conditions. The moon landing was proposed as a way "to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny". Before suggesting it specifically, in the ninth and final part of his speech, Kennedy spoke at length about "social and economic progress" both in the U.S. and elsewhere. He also talked about the global military situation and his hopes for disarmament. When he finally put his famous challenge, much of his argument had to do with "the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere" and he underscored that success would depend largely on a bold allocation of resources, i.e., political decisions not scientific discoveries.

That is, the Apollo project seems very clearly, and very explictly, to have emerged as a solution, not to problems of a scientific and technological nature (though solutions would be needed to such problems), but as a solution to political and economic problems. Picking up on this, we want to ask what it would mean to construe the Apollo missions, not from the point of view of physics and engineering, but from the point of view of business administration and philosophy.

Our point of departure is the connection between Kennedy's challenge in Washington, 1961, and Armstrong's famous words on stepping off the ladder of the Eagle in 1969: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." In the 1930s most scientists agreed that a trip to the moon was implausible (but not, of course, physically impossible). As late as January 16, 1956, Time Magazine quoted Astronomer Royal Richard van der Riet Woolley for saying that space travel is "utter bilge", meaning that no one in their right mind would devote the necessary resources to the adventure. Even today, some argue that, from a scientific point of view, the trip was an enormous waste of effort and resources. But this idea is rarely articulated in mainstream media.

So there seems to be a sense in which Kennedy's speech marks a turning point for "the very idea" of going to the moon. Something that had been unimaginable became imaginable. And today, as NASA is keen to point out, President Bush seems to also see the pay-off for space exploration in terms that go beyond science and into the realm of "national spirit". A vague sentiment seems once again to be gaining sufficient coherence to captivate "the minds of men everywhere".