It is important not to be beholden to philosophers, social theorists, or indeed to anyone. Fidelity only matters in exegesis, otherwise the outputs of others are there to be used, that is, adapted, revised or applied. Winch tarred the later Wittgenstein with the brush of anthropological relativism, and there is indeed ambiguity in Philosophical Investigations (principally because Wittgenstein’s focus was elsewhere); but I – in a sense, choose to – discern and ‘mine’ different insights, namely, the use of language games, family resemblances etc in picking out what is of value in contemporary notions of weak (not strong) constructionism. Debts to others however should rightfully be acknowledged and paid up in full (for all the dread indifference of the dead).
What matters for the sociologist in me, and I’m repeating myself, is the ‘degree of truth’ (Popper’s concept kicks in again) in our understanding of how things are and, more ambitiously, why they are as they are. Another imperative, and there’s a hint of Popper (Conjectures and Refutations) here too, be bold! Too often we sociologists pull our punches. Worse: we expect data to speak to us, and to do so discretely and respectfully. But positivism, extending (as Habermas long ago insisted) to Popperian falsificationism, can only deliver hints and cues. Hints and cues are, as I’ve too often said, grist to the mill of sociological practice. But … I want sociologists to ‘go for it’. I want them to ‘make a difference’. I appreciate my own limitations; but I want at least to be a catalyst for others better placed. Felt and enacted stigma, the greedy bastards hypothesis, are nothing if they are not catalytic.
I have come across a comment on how I, and Bhaskar before me, have not properly defined or explicated the notion of ‘mechanism’. This maybe because the writer thinks of generative or causal mechanisms as more like (mechanical) pulleys than, say, gravity. I must revisit my thesis that the class/command dynamic is the principal mechanism delivering material and health inequalities in the UK with this criticism in mind. I still think it’s a forceful argument, consonant with empirical research. It’s just that you can’t use the senses to, as it were, catch hold of mechanisms like the class/command dynamic at work. Like gravity, their existence (and they are very real) has to be inferred (often retroductively, but also abductively). I find Bhaskar quite clear on this. Maybe it’s the appropriate subject for a more philosophical paper.
There is more than a hint of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus in this extract from Makine’s brilliant novel Le Testament Francais:
‘The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in this world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words seemed to me essential. The unsayable was essential.’
‘This equation created a kind of intellectual short-circuit in my head. Its conciseness led me that summer to a terrible truth: ‘people speak because they are afraid of silence. They speak mechanically, whether aloud or to themselves. They are intoxicated by this vocal gruel that engulfs every object and every being. They talk about rain and fine weather; they talk about money; they talk about love; about nothing., And even when they are talking about their most exalted love, they use words uttered a hundred times, threadbare phrases. They talk for the sake of talking. They seek to exorcise silence …’
Just as no camera lens can capture what the human eye can, so no words …
Changing tack again, in a recent interview Grayson Perry said: ‘I don’t care how I’ll be remembered after death. For all I know people will put all my work in a skip the next day.’ Do I care? Yes and no. In time humans will annihilate themselves, so no records. In the interim I kind of hope my work will linger awhile (after all, sociology is cumulative).