On the Science of Uncertainty: The Biographical Method in Social Research

On the Science of Uncertainty

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

On the Science of Uncertainty The Biographical Method in Social Research Franco Ferrarotti

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder

New York Oxford

LEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com PO Box 317 Oxford OX2 9RU, UK Copyright 0 2003 by Lexington Books

All rights reserued. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Ferrarotti, Franco. On the science of uncertainty : the biographical method in social research / Franco Ferrarotti. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-7391-0510-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Sociology-Biographical methods. I. Title. HM51LF47 2002 303’.07’24c21 2002012391 Printed in the United States of America

eTM The paper used this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciencesin

Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO 239.48-1992.

Contents

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction 1 A Sociological Methodology as the Technique of Listening

1

2 The Quality of the Everyday and the Practice of Life

11

3 Biography as Interaction

23

4 The Social Nature of the Individual

35

5 The Symmetrical Limits of Naturalistic Objectivism and Psychologism

43

6 The Specificity of the Biographical Method: From Naturalistic Social Research to "Joint" Research

53

Index

73

About the Author

77

V

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

Preface

ritten during the 1980s, these essays reflect the growing awareness of the limitations of survey research and of the purely quantitative tools of social science. They also anticipate the present-day fashion for the biographic method and for qualitative analysis. Equally distant from crude positivism and an untestable idealist approach, these essays try to recapture the human substance of social science through a direct personal involvement of the researcher in the actual research process through an initial interactionbetween the investigator and the ”object” of investigation and, at the same time, through a definite historical contextualization. The contemporary relevance of the approach suggested here can be seen in the fact that many social issues todayfrom drug addiction to political terrorism-defy explanations offered by statistical approaches. Rather, they seem to require, in their complexity, methods that are both historical and interpretive. Franco Ferrarotti University of Rome ”La Sapienza” Italy vii

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

Introduction

F

or nearly 200 years, sociologists have suffered from a serious inferiority complex whenever they compared themselves with natural scientists. Their ideal was, and to an extent still is, the precision of the so-called exact sciences. At the present time, there is a growing awareness that scientific knowledge does not have to coincide with precise measurement. The "exact" sciences, from physics to biology, are becoming increasingly conscious of the problematic nature of their object of study and of their procedures. We know now, finally, that sociologists, far from lagging behind, were pioneers. Crucial social problems, especially in technically advanced societies, can be tackled only through a qualitative approach in which understanding does not mean mathematic measuring. This approach rests essentially on autobiographical materials and needs a rediscovery of the value of the individual. Drug addiction, terrorism or organized violence, the new faces of poverty in the urban environment: these are only a few of the issues for which the qualitative approach seems necessary. This approach implies the relative autonomy of the individual that is a recent and fragile value even in Europe, and in North America where it appears to be a permanent acquisition. In other works, I deal extensively with the question of the individual as a relatively free, teleological agent. Here I limit ix

X

Introduction

myself to recall the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who sees the birth and development of the individual (uomo singolure) in the political and social fragmentation that was characteristic of Renaissance Italy: ”The Italians of the fourteenth century knew little of false modesty or of hypocrisy in any shape; not one of them was afraid of singularity, of being and seeming unlike his neighbors.”’ In classical Graeco-Roman antiquity the scene was quite different: the individual could reach full maturity and be considered a vir only in the p6lis and in the res publicu. For this reason, perhaps the only instance of biography was the encomion, that is, the funeral oration to be pronounced pruesente cuduvere, offering to the living citizenry an example of civic virtue. Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos certainly wrote biographies of illustrious men, but their intent was basically pedagogic, presenting examples of lives to be imitated. Even the most impressive biographical work of late antiquity, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, is still moved by an edlfylng intent. More than a soliloquy, it stands as a dramatic dialogue of the Self with himselftrue confession-but with God as a silent listener and supreme judge. Perhaps only with Benvenuto Cellini and Michel de Montaigne do we have biographical accounts that are supposed to have value in themselves. As has been aptly observed, “Montaigne knew that he was probing for something new; he wus u conscious pioneer. . . . He had no need to invent topics . . . thus watching himself for years in his writings, he saw himself ‘in passage’. . . . Montaigne was concerned not with heaven but with man’s natural life.Ir2 The qualitative approach is slowly gaining ground not only because major issues cannot be studied by the mere application of the usual quantitative research techniques (for example, it would be rather difficult to extract a representative sample of drug addicts or militant terrorists, not to mention secret criminal organizations such as the Mafia), but also because some important methodological rules have been achieved; finally, even in the United States, history and historical consciousness have come to play a significant part in the research process. From the 1950s on, a new orientation hinging on a critical review of the relation between ”facts” and ”values” was underway. I recall its main points as they appeared to me at the time:

Introduction

xi

1. The purely logical distinctionbetween fact and value is not sufficient. The insistence and tone, at times dramatic, with which this distinction has been invoked corresponded to contingent circumstances (among others, the need to give sociology a definite academic status). 2. "Facts" as such have no meaning. They acquire meaning and importance insofar as they test a hypothetical "law," a specific

working hypothesis or insofar as they present themselves as materials of a theory and so are incorporated and subsumed into the theory. 3. "Facts" thus have a meaning and play an essential part in social science research insofar as, and if, they are put in relation to a problem clearly defined in its basic terms.

At least in its crudest formulation there is no doubt that the positivist model was already transcended. But it would be an illusion to believe that this "transcendence," along with the widening of the perspective of the "scientific culture" could be painlessly obtained in all its consequenceor even obtained homeopathically. It is also illusory to take it for granted by predisposing the opportune prolongations (to use Bergson's term)-to the point of including value and qualitative elements in the framework of traditional scientific argument, without questioning the structure as a whole. Making the concept of science problematic in the terms assigned to it by positivism probes deeper, and has other, more far-reaching, consequences. One must acknowledge that epistemology is partial and inadequate, not only in Comte but also in the neopositivists, in that it eliminates the historical dimension of social phenomena. The concept of science comes out inevitably impoverished and reduced. Among the neopositivists, perhaps only a scholar with an encyclopedic culture, such as Otto Neurath, could understand economics and sociology as empirical sciences in the full sense, despite their historical nature. In fact, it seems clear that a science is what it has been, and thus it is impossible to fully understand a science without grasping what it has subsequently become, its development and transformations: in a word, its history. There is, however, a more significant aspect to consider. It lies beyond the internal workings of a given discipline, and involves the very meaning of science as a human enterprise.

xii

Introduction

History is necessary to science to guarantee its awareness of the problem. It has been rightly observed that the history of a specific field of knowledge consists of different lines of development, which intersect and separate, and which must be laid bare as a ”continuous line” of mutual interconnection. The historian’s task, and that of the philosopher of science, is similar to that of giving a written summary of an animated discussion in the course of which several people have spoken at the same time in a chaotic manner, and yet one in which a common thought is appearing. This is put very well. The critical observation is also wholly acceptable, that philosophers and sociologists without a scientific training but concerned to make sociology and anthropology scientific disciplines in the true sense, tend to view the scientific datum as an unchanging, fixed, nonproblematic one. I have tried to clarify this in other works. However, we are still on the fringes of the question. We are still stuck in a science without historical consciousness, and which even sees in historical variability disturbing aspects, since it considers itself a pure process of abstraction, determining and timeless. It is not surprising that this science, as a procedure of pure abstraction, should ultimately end up, at best, as very precise in its measurement, and at the same time meaningless. Indeed it cannot, conceptually or instrumentally, be located and thereby justified on the basis of an observation of a historically mature problem. That is, it cannot connect itself with a social demand. It is deaf to society’s needs, and thus unable to attempt, or not interested in, a reply. The lack of historical consciousness emphasizes scientific formalism, its ”sacred method.” Science presents itself as an end in itself. Both as pure and as applied science, whatever the value of these well-known but vague formulas, it becomes a perfection without a goal. Nietzsche’s mot thus seem justified: ”What distinguishes the nineteenth century is not the victory of science but the triumph of scientific method over ~cience.”~ A problematic convergence between scientists and philosophers of science needs to be understood. Undoubtedly there are striking affinities and incontestable relationships between the propositions of Ludwig Fleck and those in Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen ZUY Psychologie der Forschung (1905) by Ernest

Introduction

xiii

Mach; in the later Wittgenstein and in the Logik der Forschung by Karl Popper (1934). Nor should it be forgotten that in that period, Karl Mannheim published Das Probleme einer Soziologie des Wissens (1925), and Max Scheler Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaff (1926). Fleck refers explicitly to Mach as a firm reference point, to Wundt’s Logik, Levy-Brhul’s La mentaliti primitive (1921), Grundrisse der Soziologie by Gumplowicz (1885), Die soziale Bedingtheit des Denkens und der Denkformen by Jerusalem, which has a preface by Scheler (1924), Georg Simmel’s Soziologie (1908), Gustave Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules (1895), and Hans Kelsen’s essay, published in Imago (1922), ”Der Begriff des Staates und die Sozialpsychologie.” It is reasonable to ask why such convergent problematicity did not achieve a unitary expression over time, authoritative and coherent. This should have avoided the formation and diffusion of the illusion that problematizing science and its ”laws” was an unexpected, very recent result, suddenly emerging from the old, dogmatic scientific discourse. The fact is that the problematic awareness, historically tied to the variation of problems and scientific schools, did not manage to present itself as the opportunity and reason for a radical redirection of research. It was destined to remain a kind of ”inner rumbling,” incapable of the strong, autonomous expression of new directions for research and new presumptions. The problematization that had been gathering strength since Mach’s era remained an internal variant within a common world of thought, which considered itself intact and whole in regard to the logc of scientific research in the strictest sense. There were diverse styles of thought, to some extent also unforeseen, but more as aesthetic variants than opportunities for radical rethinking. For this, sigruficantsocial undercurrents were and are necessary. The internal developments of scientific thought were, and are, not enough. Then, two seemingly inexplicable phenomena took shape. First, one sees a great precision and refinement in the use of research techniques in the field of social research, but at the same time a total ignorance of the problem, or indeed even a blase‘ indifferenceto the subjects of research. Paradoxically, the latter was very exact and ”scientific,” but it was unclear about what and why.

xiv

Introduction

Secondly, one sees in much research very slight predictive capacity. The new and unforeseen seem literally to tumble upon social scientists who seem regularly surprised by them. One might say their ahistoricity is so complete and impenetrable that everything that happens occurs unbeknownst to them, as if they were living in another world. The ”imperialism of logic,” to use Michel Maffesoli’s expression, to which I would add the phrase “of imperialist logic” has its price. For the social sciences, the latter is decidedly too high. Fetishizing science involves sterilizing it. It also loses its social function, and thus falls into being an ambitious but also sterile exercise. It then becomes true that “contempt for others and the dullest schematism often hide behind a false complexity of expre~sion.”~ How far we are from the notion of science that appears with so much provocative clarity with Husserl! It has been remarked that in Husserl’s perspective ”science is conceived, over and above the exactness of its own methodical organization, as the most effective translation of the effort of the community of human subjects for progressively widening their own possibilities of intervening in the world, both natural and human. That is, science appears in its original function, its genuine meaning, as an instrument increasingly technically perfectable. This, by increasing the planning ability of the human subject makes him equally aware of his own primary, inescapable responsibility in the organization of his behavior in the surrounding world, his own social Urnwelt,cultural and hi~torical.”~ Not only this, but beyond the supposed unequivocalness of reason, the sociologist must lend an ear to reasoning, which appears in the gestures, facial expressions, and speech inflections-all the underswell which is the ”soft” model of experience, the substance that does not manage to survive, and by definition to enter into the Cartesian logic of writing. There is in the everyday, which the sociologist must explore, a polysemic aspect; indeed, the everyday is her special field of analysis, which inevitably escapes the schematism of the ” h a r d scientist. In this perspective and in this sense the current crisis of sociology, of its self-image and method, is salutary. There are many dimensions of this crisis, and each should be carefully mapped in its terms, origin, and basic significance.6 But a preliminary point should be clearly stated, one which is

Introduction

xv

usually silenced by the complaints, internal and external, that seem of necessity to accompany every discussion of sociology as a scientific study. Sociology is the product of a great historical crisis, the break both intellectual and practical-political and economic which saw the slow, difficult birth of the modern world on the ruins of the old feudal order. Crises are far from novelties in sociology. They are its natural environment, the original pattern and constant stimulus, so much so that sociology, rather than "science of society" as the textbooks call it, should perhaps be called the "science of social crises." It is thus a science essentially in perpetual tension, which should certainly not present itself as that of social interconnection, careful to explore and interpret connections between various aspects of social life (from the economic and demographic to the religious and cultural),which should be delegated to specialist social sciences, since in this case the very autonomy of sociological judgment would be put in jeopardy. In order to grasp this essential point, I must refer back to what I have said before. Theory and society do not confront each other, as an ingenuous description of research might suggest. They are not external to each other. Theory is in society and its perennial question. It follows and precedes it at the same time, comments on it and foretells its important developments like a disturbing, moving and ineradicable shadow. The primacy of sociology among the sciences, already seriously compromised by the supposed triumphs of the "exact" sciences against the meager results of sociological research, finds a way for a paradoxical return match and confirmation of the state of crisis in the orientation of modern s c i e n c e accused of genocide and offenses against nature. They are victims of their aimless perfection, too long unmindful of being first of all human enterprises, linked to and justified by historically determined and experienced human needs. This is not scandalous, as has been made out. Let there be no invocation of pure knowledge betrayed. What I am saying should not be seen as a crude attempt to historicize the theoretical. It simply means taking one's distance from the danger of abstract reasoning on set themes to the point of unreasoningnew version of the old sophists' vice which lies behind the monstrous egocentrism of the pure intellectual, which is really

mi

Introduction

autistic in the true sense rather than solipsistic. It also means recognizing that one cannot escape history and that the vaunted timelessness of absolute scientific certainty is only the sure proof of insurmountable ignorance and presumption. The crisis of sociology, its constantly being a science in tension, lies at the basis of its primacy. It further recalls its essential nature and mode of proceeding. Sociology, it is said, is the science of society. But there is a refusal to accept its ”object” as a dogmatic, frozen, fixed proposition. It is accepted only as an ”object in motion,” one which denies itself as object at the moment it is posed as such. What a lesson in modesty for those who write and speak of science without practicing it, who pre-sume to describe and even prescribe its essential characteristiefrom outside! They strive to establish its basic conditions and from the height of their innocence, or unawareness, have no doubts of being able to decree its criteria of ”truth” and ”falsity.” A science today is certainly not definable on the basis of a purely deductive calculation, with the aid of reasoning so concerned with its own intellectual purity that it does not see it becoming intellectualistic and arbitrary. At one time the autonomy of a science was held to depend-very scholastically-on the clearness and exclusiveness, in jurisdictional terms as it were, over a gven object, seen statically as a precise territory, like a game reserve. Today, the identity and autonomy of a science have an operational character. It is the viewpoint peculiar to a specific science which grounds its specificity and autonomy. Current scientific research is multidisciplinary, indeed in some ways already postdisciplinary. The object of research is simultaneously attacked by several sciences which bring their methodological and material resources to bear on it. Rather than speaking of “objects” we should speak of problematic environments, typical of a given science even if they are common to many. I have said already that the typical, problematic environment of sociology is society: its processes of aggregation, structuration, change, and conflict. But the concept of ”society” is really philosophical in the full sense, neither reducible nor usable as a purely definitional index: a) in the full descriptive sense; b) the classificatory one; c) the sociographic one; and d) the taxonomic one. Any other use or

Introduction

xvii

meaning, whether justified by plausible heuristic requirements or not, condemns this concept to a static meaning that betrays and distorts its profound, essential tension. The importance of the concept is provided by its being presented as the founding object of sociology as nonresidual science of the social, and thus by the known characteristics which define sociological concepts-historicity, evolutionary capacity, dialectical nature, globality, and comparability. But before asking further about the concept of society, its essential contents, and the practical use that sociological research can and cannot make of them, we must tackle the problem of its foundation. This question of the foundation, or grounding principle or reason-what Plato indicated as the question of arche‘ and Hegel as the problem of beginning or Urbegrzfj’is the preliminary, compromising problem as regards any critical observation. This must necessarily imply the reflection of thought on itself. A first definition of society might be that society is said to be the totality of human beings determined by the need to satisfy common needs. The first point to clanfy is that the characteristic of “totality”in the sense of togetherness should not be confused with or understood as simple spatial contiguity or physical proximity. Nor should it be conceived of as ”the l u c k or chance of casual togetherness. The reality and experience of a meaningful contextuality of human beings, abstractly conceivable as separate units but really bound together by a commonality of needs to satisfy and thus by a ”functional correlation”, seem constitutive of the concept of society. This idea of ”correlation” or ”contextuality”or ”reciprocity” between individuals is not foreign to the authors of Graeco-Roman classical antiquity. In the Politics, Aristotle speaks of a koinonia which English translators render inadequately as ”partnership”, whereas we are dealing with a real ”commonality,” in that outside the context of the social there is no guarantee of salvation, or even survival, for human beings. The limit of Aristotle’s thought in this regard is a historical one. When he speaks of society or polis, he means both state and society, the political community which, in his eyes, is indeed constituted not by all human beings but only and exclusively by ”free citizens.” These can exercise their freedom and show their ”virtue” insofar as they support and are maintained by a

xviii

Introduction

slave economy. For Aristotle the slave is an ”animated machine,” whose utility ”differs little from that of animals,” especially “domestic animals.” Moreover, the Greeks had a term to define slaves which was neuter: andrhpodon, “man’s foot.” An important point to remember here, since it was to recur in social thought in later centuries and is reemerging in current sociology, is that Aristotle identifies state and society: that is, formally codified or customary institutions, and the social. In other words, he identifies normative constructs, binding as regards, unpredictable movements which are not yet frozen into established forms of the social, or the living, everyday social base of society viewed as pressure from beneath, extrainstitutional and not yet cooled into stable forms: fluid society in the making. The real polarity is established and thus runs between the institutional and the social. Not understanding this point, sociological observation has wandered uselessly around itself for two centuries, choosing for its subject an erroneous problem. This problem lies in a counterposing-at times dramatic, pathetic, or romantically stimulating according to the orientations and preferences of the various a u t h o r d e t w e e n individual and society. This is a mistaken problem, or even empty or gratuitous, because it is unsolvable, and thus cannot be posed: for there are no individuals without society, nor society without individuals. The real problem lies not so much in counterposing the two terms, a mechanical counterposition which involves an absolute impasse, but rather in clarifying, describing, defining, interpreting, and possibly explaining the modes and quality of their relation. It is thus not a matter of seeing the socius as against the singulus, but rather discovering the sociality of the individual, and at the same time defining and interpreting what is not socially or, more precisely, institutionally, resolvable in the aspirations and needs of human individuals. At this point it is clear that the current crisis of sociological research is not necessarily a negative feature if it can help us understand sociology as a science in tension, and grasp in its crisis of orientation and threatened autonomy the premise for a basic renewal. In fact, the sociologist’s current self-limitation, praiseworthy in many respects, when it is resolved into the position of a “specialist in connection” and organization of data

Introduction

xix

regarding the various aspects of social life as gathered by specialist social sciences, not only runs the risk of restricting sociology to working on secondary data. It has two other dangers: first; it sees in the datum a final source of legitimacy the datum as such does not possess (cf. the relation between pragmatic and problematic data); and second, one is delivered, bound hand and foot, to the market. Indeed, the commissioning agents are those who decide what aspects of social life should be studied, what problems are ready or crucial to the point of warranting a study and what ”connections” one should, or just finds it convenient, to give precedence. Then sociology’s autonomy decreases in the precise sense that it loses control of its own research subjects: not according to mere external chance, but on the basis of the theoretical necessity internal to sociological reasoning. It is hard to imagine Durkheim or Weber asking the market of foundations that finance research with an eye to the current political or economic climate for permission to study the metaindividual social patterns of suicide or the relation between the experienced Protestant ethic and the spirit or calling of the entrepreneur. On the other hand, the loss of autonomy by sociology is not only measured in terms of the reduction of the options open to individual scholars. Its loss of autonomy, as in any other scientific discipline, inevitably leads to a loss of problematic awareness and thence of critical sense. The meaning of the problem, autonomously defined, decreases. One accepts as the problem what is presented by those who commission research. It is hardly necessary to add that the deadlines for providing the results are also accepted, along with the ingenuous quantification, interpreted as the sure sign of the scientificity of the study while often this simply meets the desire for crude simplification which underlies the expectations of the effective researchers, concerned to obtain prescriptive recipes rather than theoretical insights. In sociological research, quantification is a kind of shortcut that, however, has a remarkable development behind it, from Adolphe Quetelet in the nineteenth century to today. The intention is plain. How to apply the instruments of mathematics to the study of social phenomena, and generally to analysis of human facts. The price of the operation is quite high. It has

xx

Introduction

been observed, ”Towards the end of the nineteenth century, quantification took on its modern function in the area of sociology: of translating ideas into empirical operations and of seeking among the variables thereby generated some recurring relations. A whole series of historical studies of specific techniques will be required to clarlfy this general tenden~y.”~ For some aspects, which are not negligible, this operation of translation of human facts into variables capable of being treated with mathematical instruments recalls in its general development the simplified idea current for a long time among economists-that of homo economicus. This is the notion of human nature that is disembodied and impoverished to the point of imagining that human beings are always moved in their decisions by the hedonistic principle, seen rationally-that of obtaining the greatest return with the least effort. The worried reactions of spiritualists and idealists, who saw in the attempt to mathematize or use quantitative methods on attitudes and human facts in general (something unheard of, almost a sacrilege, as violation of the mystery of individual freedom), can perhaps for the moment be left aside. Too often, behind the alarm of unregenerate spiritualists are hidden very prosaic, weighty material interests. The defense of individual liberty, said to be threatened by the new techniques of measurement, is in many cases shown to be a false goal, if not a crude alibi. More interesting are the criticisms from within sociology itself, the North American variety most open to quantitative methods. Pitirim A. Sorokin and C. Wright Mills have perhaps confronted the new techniques most decisively. Sorokin even refused to make use of distinctions between scholars using quantitative methods with the clear awareness of their limitations and those scholars who saw the adoption of these techniques as the absolute methodological solution. Especially for the latter, Sorokin used the adjective ”quantophrenic”g,that is, he did not hesitate to define them as afflicted with a pathological tendency, that of seeing and reducing every phenomenon to a numerical one. I have already noted elsewhere that in this sense Sorokin’s is a critique overall, in that it attacks not only operational techniques but also the philosophical premises of Lazarsfeld’s method~logy.~

Introduction

xxi

The attack on the ”high priest of the rite of quantification” is so radical that it raises the suspicion that it is a preconceived factionalism. Yet it is hard not to give it some degree of attention. Perhaps mindful of the lesson of the Vienna Circle, or at least of some of its famous members, Lazarsfeld does not seem to concern himself with the metaphysical assumptions of his own research. However, one doubts that his theory of implicit knowledge advances much beyond a crude gnoseological objectivism, if not a thoughtless ingenuous realism. However, in Lazarsfeld’s work there is no shortage of statements which display his remarkable methodological awareness. For example, No science deals with the objects it studies in their full concreteness. It selects some of their properties and tries to establish relationships between them. The discovery of these laws is the final aim of any scientific research. But in the social sciences the choice of important properties is already in itself a problem of prime importance. There has not yet been developed any terminology standardized for this goal. Properties are sometimes called aspects or attributes, and often the word variable is borrowed from mathematics as the most general category. The attribution of properties is interchangeably called description, classification or measurement.10

Lazarsfeld is aware of the terminological confusion slowing the cumulative progress of the social sciences. From this point of view he shares Robert K. Merton’s efforts in the direction of a more rigorous logical-linguistic base and a relatively standardized language, to make research and their results readily comparable. Lazarsfeld insists, ”In fact, the linguistic function of a mathematical model helps organize an excess of material, contributes to identifying deficiencies of data, and further to mediate between procedures that are formally alike but terminologically differentfunction of mathematical models which is often underrated.”ll It would be unjust to Lazarsfeld, a scholar of European and indeed Viennese origins, to view him, as has been done, as quite unaware of the abstracting and mystifying effects of the methodological procedures proposed. Even if it happens that new converts to a new method and a new world of thought forget the limits, at once real and as regards application, of the new methodological formulas, for reasons of understandable

xxii

Introduction

enthusiasm or perhaps an excess of zeal, this does not seem Lazarsfeld’s case. However, he will remain in the history of American sociology the dter ego, the exact opposite, of the incurable theorist (as he called himself) Talcott Parsons, as well as founder and inspiration of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in New York. He said, Those who commit themselves to experimenting with mathematical models involving human conduct tend to concern themselves with gambling situations. The decision problems social scientists have to deal with are different. Why do people commit crimes? Why do they buy automobiles? . . . Social scientists are generally concerned with problems of decision. But when it is a question of building models, the mathematicians are particularly interested in how people gamble. Perhaps we are again facing the danger we were in about forty years ago, at the time of the first behavioralists, like Watson.12

So, one cannot say that Lazarsfeld, passionately embracing the pragmatic tradition of American culture and at least partly abandoning the tradition of European systematic sociology, was wholly unaware of the risks attached to the abstracting processes in applying mathematical research to social phenomena. He must simply have thought it worthwhile, along with his colleagues, to try;at any rate, in a market society like the American that was the road to follow to get the funds needed for field work.13 The result of this position, which starts from the theoretical and becomes practical-political, can be guessed at. The subjects for research, the problems seen as important both for individuals and groups, and society as a whole, are no longer defined and determined by scholars of social phenomena. The market decides. Those who commission research require social scientists to concern themselves with particular problematic situations and subjects as against others, according to their operational requirements and independently of the “internal” needs of sociological systems conceived of as global, coherent constructs of individual scholars. C. Wright Mills’s critique concentrates in depth on this point. He saw in Paul Lazarsfeld the champion of abstracted empiricism as contrasted with the grand theory, empty and purely formal, of Talcott Parsons. The two positions seem opposed. In reality, they coincide in their supreme indifference toward the specific, temporal, experienced problems people must deal with

Introduction

xxiii

today. According to Mills, Lazarsfeld and his disciples, caught up by the concern to measure social phenomena and thus absorbed in the methodological-formal aspects of research, put the great classical tradition of sociological research in parentheses. They ignore or put in the background the basic problems. They are ready to study any subject or problem as long as they can use mathematical models and find some commissioning agency prepared to provide the necessary funds. Mills’s criticisms are harsh and involve formalist, mathematizing methodologists, not only as scholars but as political subjects. They are attacked both as experts and from the personal viewpoint. But the criticisms do not reach the heart of the problem. They still stand in the pragmatist-scientist tradition which defines the horizon and mould of American thought, even in its most innovative, antiestablishment, and radical forms. In this, Mills may be seen as the worthy heir of the social critics and muckraking tradition that has never been wholly extinguished in American culture. In t h s sense, Mills takes up a position beside Veblen, who was certainly superior to him in terms of perspective, multidisciplinary information, and familiarity with European economic and anthropological thought. Perhaps one can say that Mills’s and, in part, Veblen’s membership in the muckrakers’ tradition is a generic one, determined more by a mood, a certain polemical humor in the face of the dominant social orthodoxies in American society, than by a real, continuous process. What clearly divides Mills and Veblen from the original muckrakers can be found in their own positions-not reducible to simple, uncontrollable indignation in the face of social injustice and political corruption, which follows the lines of an instant model of deep disturbance when confronted with a simple journalistic description of the betrayal of the democratic ideal on which the American Republic is supposed to rest. Rather, they rest on a well worked-out and complex theoretical base-certainly more complex and overarching in Veblen’s case than Mills’s. Strange to say, Veblen’s knowledge of Marx was much more refined than Mills’s, even though the latter had devoted a book to Marx and the Marxists.l* Simple cooptation, as it were, of Mills by the muckraker tradition does not seem to me tenable. It was suggested by

XXiV

Introduction

George P. Rawick and, partly at least, by Irving Horowitz. The latter wrote,

. . . certainly, Mills was not a satisfied man-far from it. However, his dissatisfaction was the result of a private as well as social disenchantment. His political radicalism was the consequence of the general radicalization involving that part of the world today called "underdeveloped." His sociological radicalism expressed his disappointment at the abandonment of those large-scale subjects for analysis which marked a large part of the sociology of the 195Os.l5 George P. Rawick is much more explicit in this regard: What we can say about Mills first of all is that he is part of the American muckraker tradition, in company with men like Henry Demerest, Upton Sinclair, and Thorstein Veblen. Deeply bonded to American democratic ideals, which are real and democratic despite the false propagandistic use made of them by the government and groups of American patriots, muckrakers like Mills are deeply disturbed every time they discover that democratic ideals and American reality do not coincide. Mills was driven by this contradiction to reveal that union leaders do not represent the workers but even act for their oppressors (The New Men ofPower). The middle classes do not have power in their hand, as the official ideologues claim, but rather they appear as impotent, frightened people overwhelmed by big bureaucratic institutions (White Collar).Power in American society is not democraticallycontrolled but held by the power elite (The Power Elite). Public and intellectual life in the United States is in decline and must change (The Sociological Imagination).America militarism is leading the world to the brink of the third world war (The Causes of World War Three).Finally, American imperialism has led to the Cuban Revolution, which must be defended (Listen,

Between the old generation of muckrakers and that of Veblen and Mills the difference lies in the issue of moralism. The old muckrackers were scandalized. They discovered to their horror that the American democratic credo was daily betrayed and subjugated by big business.17 Veblen and Mills were not scandalized overmuch. Their theoretical outlooks permitted no illusions. The free enterprise system rewards the greediest and least scrupulous, the "captains of business." It is naturalindeed "scientific"- that this should be so. But Mills's understanding of Veblen does not seem to be at a very high level. In his preface to The Theory of the Leisure Class (1953), Mills paradoxically berates Veblen for

Introduction

XXV

his conservatism. ”Today, the intellectuals are conservative and Veblen, if he is not ignored, is reinterpreted in conservative terms. And, from one point of view, somewhat formal, Veblen was a deeply conservative critic of America. He unhesitatingly accepted one of the few completely uncontested, undeniably American principles: efficiency, utility, pragmatic simplicity. If, as I believe, he was a Socratic figure, he was in his own way as American as Socrates was Athenian.”18 It is a curious criticism, which above all does not see that Veblen was far from a cult of efficiency for its own sake, was not a technocrat, though technical processes fascinated him and the instinct for workmanship was one of the canons of his thought. Veblen did not accept efficiency as an absolute value, as even Galbraith does, with his idea of ”technostructure.” For Veblen, appreciation of efficiency was the premise for his frontal attack on the ”dynastic principle.” So, to believe that Veblen was not interested in the ”psychological effect of social facts” means having understood very little and, at all events, shuts oneself off from understanding a basic concept of his argumentcertainly a complex one but not without its own internal, ponderous rigor. This is the ”invidious comparison,” a concept which even authoritative, contemporary sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu (though not citing Veblen) have widely and profitably used.19 Perhaps what distinguishes Veblen from Mills is his deeprooted, basic, bitter pessimism, from which no plan of reform, however expansive, seems able to shake him.Here Mills, the robust Texan, a great consumer of steak and ready to travel the roads of Europe and the USSR on his motorcycle, was the polar opposite of the apparently somnolent Norwegian immigrant, slow in gesture and undemonstrative to the point of seeming slow, who found indirect irony and cool sarcasm, wisely distilled in small doses, more congenial than biblical invective. What does Veblen mean by his ”instinctive tendency to efficiency” I asked, introducing his major works. I went on: That we all become scientific? And will we thereby be happier? That mankind should pass from the realm of necessity with a great leap to that of freedom? Dreams: evolutionist or dialectical, always dreams. For Veblen there are no preconstituted guarantees for an optimistic outcome of social development. As against Marx, Vebelen does not believe he can

xxvi

Introduction

trust any futuristic illusion. Both in Veblen and Marx the conception of man is an active one, it recalls the image of an operating, institutionalanimal, a tireless inventor and builder. However, whereas Marx outlines an overall idyllic picture projected into the future, one of perfect integration so that the aesthetic and economic-utilitarian moments are free, there, from any contradiction in a splendid omni-dimensionality (“hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon”),for Veblen the picture is different, more realistic. There is present an omni-comprehensivediscipline, transideological (Veblen does not say this but it can legitimately be adduced from his books), with effects that emerge wherever the process of mechanization makes its historical appearance.Thus there rules a rational disciplinrational as you wish, but basically grey, linked to the opaque cause-effect sequence,just as the mechanically cumulative continuum to which he reduces the social process is grey and opaque.”

Without a sufficient understanding of the Hegelian dialectic, Mills never managed to master the essence of Marxist thought. At the same time, his knowledge of evolutionism, in its double Darwinian and Spencerian version, was too limited to enable him to appreciate the contradiction, the real ”culture lag” (to use Ogburn’s phrase), between the demands of productive rationality and the equally strong ones of “conspicuous consumption,” historically the essential, grounding characteristic of the leisure classes. Max Weber’s teaching, learned at the University of Wisconsin from Hans Gerth, was directly welded to his youthful pragmatism. It gave rise to a superimpositiorr-rather baroque, in some ways-rather than to a synthesis. Mills’s mental stratification has been sufficiently explained: “We find Mills using European Wissensoziologie by 1940 to transcend empiricism; and the American pragmatic tradition to get over oracular rationalism. That was to be crystallized in the Sociological Imagination and his collection of essays on the Images ofMan. The ’classical tradition’ included an array running from Dewey to Veblen and at the same time from Marx to Mannheim.”21But this intellectual profile was seriously distorted in favor of pragmatism. This is perfectly understandable. For Mills’s first known paper, ’Language, Logic and Culture,” the influence of pragmatism emerges as the dominant one. Peirce, Mead and Dewey are the basic writers. The key concepts of Millsian sociology are all there. The symbol is a ”meaningful event because it produces a similar reaction both in the speaker and in the listener; the process of

Introduction

xxvii

communication is in turn completely operationalized in that it is made up of common modes of response; mind is defined as the ’interplay of the organism with a social situation mediated by symbols.”’ It is clear that Charles Peirce and George Herbert Mead provide the theoretical assumptions here, and the whole, basic, conceptual apparatus which Mills was never to challenge seriously. Possibly Marx and Mannheim had some influence on Mills, but this was a relatively late, external one, in any case never so strong as to make him revise his conceptual assumptions. It was an influence that concerned the contents, subjects, and problems of research, and it lacked the weapons to redirect it. So, contrary to Marx and Mannheim, Mills constantly seeks in his research that social cause that will permit him to discover the truth; that is, the possibility of truly establishing (democratically, in the Jeffersoniantradition), things as they are. He is, however, relatively little interested in establishing the economic and structural reasons which permit ”demystification,” or discovering deceit or error. There is in this theoretical-conceptual apparatus a glaring deficiency. There is no room for history. Mills’s very misunderstanding of Marx arises from a deeper failure to understand, which precedes and at least partly explains it. Mills is totally starved of Hegelian dialectics, which he frankly admitted to not ever understanding. If Lenin was right, that one could not understand Marx without first having fully grasped and mastered the Hegelian dialectic, Mills’s ”Marxism by ear” cannot surprise us any more. Mills clearly distinguished problems of the milieu, which in his view were those of average feeling and thinking, tendentially sociopsychological, without basic permanence. Then there were problems of structure, which were, on the contrary, problems determined by more or less formally codified social asymmetry: by the zero-sum distribution of power between a dominant elite, which has the monopoly of power and which decides, and a subordinate majority, which submits to the decisions of the few. But the developmental forms of problems through time, their fragmentary growth, and the evolution and historical variability of values itself did not manage to open a space commensurate with their importance

xxviii

Introduction

in his observations. In Mills, values are "given." In this he is deeply, radically, American. He is the child of a society without history, born in Enlightenment fashion on the basis of a written, perfectionist constitution, the product of discussions by country gentlemen who know Greek and Latin, from Madison to Jefferson and Franklin. For this, everything is given from the beginning. The values are stated in the preamble and are a firmament of fixed stars, not open to historical development, able to cover every possible development and so to take it for granted. Mills's criticism of Lazarsfeld's quantitativism are still internal ones. They belong to the miraculous, timeless "givenness," about which Daniel J. Boorstin has written admirably. Against the formalist quantifiers, they confine themselves to reproving their indifference to content. But the reason is simple. It is because they depend on the market, those who commission them and are prepared to pay for research, and who see in social research, as in oil exploration by geological prospecting, a field for investment. And the investments must pay off. The subjects for research are no longer "dictated," made necessary like set pieces, by the logical structure of specific sociological thought-the demands of Comtean positivist constructionism, Max Weber's sociological system, or Durkheim's or Pareto's or Leopold von Wiese's. These were not only sociologists but thinkers, gvands individus. They were neither specialists nor technicians. They were intellectuals in the sense that they combined with a specific technique, or the specialization of a particular skill, cultural and human concerns of a general type, intrinsically and necessarily. They were men who questioned themselves, lived with their problems, followed their extreme implications, and obeyed only the involuntary character of thought. The voices of the market were far away. They were not interested in it. They lived, frugal and solitary, on little. They were not consuming animals like most people today. In their eyes money counted for very little. As for the sages of old, their independence was linked to their moderation. Social prestige, officially recognized status, titles, and honors left them supremely indifferent. Their problem defined the meaning of their lives. The situation has clearly been inverted. Problems are treated with the casual indifference with which one chooses

Introduction

mix

merchandise from the crowded shelves of a supermarket. They create and follow yielding fashions, which devour themselves with the same voluble velocity with which they are created, capricious and unpredictable. The thinker has accepted his demotion into technical specialist. The market based on the division of labor does not tolerate generalists. It is suspicious of them, emarginates them by surrounding them with distrust, and finally eliminates them by announcing their irrelevance. “What’s your job?” But the word ”job” is untranslatable into the old, humanist languages, which have an insurmountable difficulty in dealing with ”work” impersonally, totally separating one’s working activity from one’s essence, from the fact that it is also, even if only partly or distortedly, one’s expression. The attempt to apply instruments for quantitative measurement to social facts thus has a price. It has to standardize them and make them interchangeable, perfect substitutes. To this end, social facts, which are always specific, experienced human situations/ are reduced to items. That is, they become objects capable of being measured on the basis of a continuum which allows no dialectical leaps between them, nor qualitative breaks. The items are thus ordered and, as it were, smoothed out, in the sense of a basic, standardized homogeneity. For example, the decision of a parliament to approve abortion by a law, an industrialist’s decision to close a plant or ”restructure” it, depriving thousands of workers of the means of subsistence, are essentially equated with the decision of an individual smoker who finds he has to choose his brand of cigarette. In the pages that follow, an attempt is made to recapture what in the mind of classical sociologists was the proper object of their discipline: the living substance of men and women in society, their memories and their life experiences; that is, history in the making. NOTES 1. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans.S. G. C. Middlemore, London: Phaidon Press, 1945, p. 82. 2. Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 17982; my emphasis.

xxx

Introduction

3. F. Nietzsche, Frammenti postumi, version of S. Giametti, Milan: Adelphi, 1990, p. 231(my translation; hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all English translations of cited material are mine). 4. See M. Maffesoli, La ConnaissanceOrdinaire, Paris: Mkridiens, 1985,p. 30. 5. See F. De Natale, "I1 problema fenomenologico della scienza in Husserl da 'Idee 11' alla 'Crisi"', Filosofia, vol. 17, n. 2, April 1976, p. 245. 6. See my essay "Is There a Crisis in Sociology", in T. Bottomore, ed., Crisis and Contention in Sociology, London: Sage, 1975, pp. 13-24. 7. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology", in H. Woolf, ed., Quantification, Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1961; also in Metodologia e Ricerca Sociologica, ed. V. Capecchi, Bologna: I1 Mulino, 1967, p. 108. 8. See P. A. Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences, Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1956. 9. See my Trattato di sociologia, Turin: UTET, 1968, pp. 323-25. 10. See Paul Lazarsfeld, "Evidence and Inference in Social Research, in Daniel Lemer, ed., Evidence and Inference, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959, p. 108. 11. Lazarsfeld, "Evidence and Inference in Social Research, p. 136. 12. Lazarsfeld, "Evidence and Inference in Social Research", p. 136. 13. With special reference to the formation of indices and parameters of quantitative importance, see P. Lazarsfeld and M. Rosenberg, eds., The Language of Social Research, Glencoe: Ill.: Free Press, 1955; H. A. Simon, Models of Man, New York Wiley, 1957. 14. See C. Wright Mills, The Marxists, New York: Dell, 1956. The aim of this book lies in clarifying the conditions for world revolution. According to Mills, these were not correctly forecast by Marx, and Marxism is itself today reduced to the justificatory ideology of an existing political regime and economic system, instead of a revolutionary, internationalist theory. For Veblen's position on Marxism, see my "La sociologia di Thorstein Veblen", in Rivista difilosofia, vol. 41, n. 4, 1950, pp. 402-19. 15. See Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The New Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. xxi. 16. See George P. Rawick, "Note sulla sociologia di C. Wright Mills", La Critica Sociologica, vol. 8, Winter 1968-69,p. 115. 17. A scandal of this kind underlies the massive research coordinated by Gunnar Myrdal, A n American Dilemma, Value in Social Theory; A Selection of Essays on Methodology, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1958. 18. See C. Wright Mills, preface to the Italian edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1977, p. xiv (Einaudi published the first Italian edition in 1949). 19. Mills, preface to the Italian edition, p.xx. 20. See my "Introduzione" to Veblen, Opere, Turin: UTET, 1969, pp. 29-30. 21. See I. L. Horowitz's Introduction to C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism, New York Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 17; my emphasis.

1

A Sociological Methodology as the Technique of Listening

THE ”PERIODIC” NATURE AND THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

I

n the notes collected and published posthumously under the title “Philosophie neuve,” Stendhal suggested recording minute by minute the day of an average man. Then he proposed extending this record every day for a year in a man’s life. Why? In these records, he explained, we should very soon notice some similarities, as well as differences. ”Why should we find such similarities? . . . What might the cause of the differences be? . . . We should find resemblances because the most civilized man imaginable has periodical desires. . . . The more a man is civilized, the more the periodic desires of the year and the day increase.”’ The details of one day in a person’s life are part of one’s entire life history. Stendhal recommends life history to us as a method of meaningful exploration of the human. A great writer is not necessarily a champion at logic, nor an infallible guide. I regard him simply as a diviner. He tells us to dig at a certain point without exactly knowing why, and without bothering much about his ignorance. On being questioned 1

2

Chapter 1

and cross-examined, he dismisses it with a shrug of the shoulders. Nor would he be afraid of being charged with contempt of court. The "periodicity" Stendhal discusses is the descriptive moment of nomothetic standardization in a nutshell, but it is also the instant of happy coincidence between individual biography and the historical moment about which Erik H. Erikson has written.2 Here, an important problem arises. Is life history a moment of mediation between individual and biological species, between primary group and history, or is life history an aorisfic contraction of the social in the individual, of the nomothetic in the descriptive? I have already remarked elsewhere that life history takes sociology back to an argument which in certain respects is naturali~tic.~ Autobiographies cause meaningful, tendential demands to break through from the raw lava of undifferentiated behavior. Harold D. Lasswell grasped this important critical point very well: he said that life history is a natural history, and a natural history is concerned with facts which are "developrnenfally meaningf~l."~ At the time I was writing Max Weber and the Destiny of Reason, I was convinced that the problem would be resolved by determining a nonrandom periodization of life history, examined in such a way as to see its main phases of development and identify the characteristic frameworks of behavior. In relation to Stendhal, I was rather backward, but I was aware that the methods which sociologists and anthropologists currently use to collect life histories were senseless. I felt that they could at most hope to imitate literature by offering franches de vie, whose suggestiveness could make up for their scanty heuristic validity, and a scientific contribution that was practically nil. I persisted, correctly in fact, in stressing the importance of the economic, social, and cultural context in which the autobiographies were to be inserted. I reminded people of the preliminary need-again, correctly, but might this not also be an alibi, given that we were dealing with a dividingline/idea, a Grenz-Begvzf-for a theory of personality capable of providing the essential points of reference for describing

A Sociological Methodology

3

and understanding in a really hermeneutic sense, the complex, highly intricate complex of relations running between the biography of an individual and the basic characteristics of his personality (assuming it is possible to distinguish between chance and necessity) and his original family group. In addition to the family, we add the other primary groups to which one can be tied more or less lastingly, and finally the global framework of the wider society, with its normative world and institutional structures. At that time, I was much concerned with the structural aspects of the social. I was afraid that by neglecting these, society itself might be reduced to a metaphor, and its contradictions vanish into the basically arbitrary mists of a psychologizing relationism.

TIME AND CONCEPTUAL SCHEME What I did not then see was the particular, defining aspect of life history. This is time, duration, as an existential category, the precondition of evolution. It seemed to me that the whole meaning of sociology as a human understanding-and indeed, I think so today-might be concentrated into the attempt to live society instead of being passively lived by it. In fact, I did not fully understand critically, reflexively, that in the conditions of technically advanced and organized industrial society we are literally "fore-lived," or foreseen and discounted by the productive social mechanism, wholly subsumed into the formal rational scheme of productionexchange-consumption-production. Life history restores the flesh and human meaning to the atemporal conceptual schema. The essence of a privileged material which life history has for social analysis basically derives from the fact that we are dealing with a temporal sequence, a development through time. Its drama, and its characteristic urgency, is directly proportional to the sense of poverty characteristic of the human being-shortage of time. As has already been observed, "In life, time determines every situation. A man is attracted to another being: he loves him, but is not loved in

4

Chapter 1

return. This feeling is either late or early. That’s the whole of it. Love exists, but f o r someone, here and now, circumscribed. The history of the emotions is the history of adverbs of time. Beyond temporal determinants there is the doctrine of concepts, not life-words without meaning because meaning is a function of ternp~rality.”~ In addition: there is necessity in life, the scansion of certain dates and rhythms in every biography which does not permit postponements nor allows or enforces compromises. One must decide. This necessity cannot be avoided; it enters as a constituent of the structure of existence, and is responsible for the dramatic dimension which marks even the most mediocre, the most (apparently) colorless life history.6 By its very nature, this same reflection is a withdrawal, a glance backwards and within. It is a narrative perspective from the point of view of reminiscence-a glance at a glance. For this reason, reflection concerns not only time but the possibility-will to use it-that is, to lose it. In daily life, reflection implies the rebuttal of the commonplace: I can’t think now; I’m in a hurry; I’ve no time. In the phrase there is the idea of postponement, an indefinite one, until there will be time, until the hurry, the urgency will be over. However, urgency and lack of time are interrelated concepts, terms, and existential situations. The greater the hurry, the less time one has. Urgency destroys time in advance. In the end, there is no more running toward, hurry with a direction, an aim, a telos; there is only the pure and simple act of running, not knowing where or why. This is pure urgency, made into an internalized habit and a way of life, without any aim which could give it meaning7 To put it in a form which is only superficially paradoxical, this is the diachronic of the synchronic. To define it necessarily involves a delicate operation. This requires identifying the variables, or constituent dynamic identities-that is, the characteristics which already contain the whole evolutionary potential which comes later in time. Then, and only then, life history emerges as privileged material for research in the social sciences: as primary material, not of the second order, abstracted, as conversely are the fleshless, pre-coded

A Sociological Methodology

5

items, programmed for the action of the calculator-that modern deus absconditus-useful and chosen only because they can easily be analyzed electronically. Just as the mathematical economists, in order to facilitate quantification and exact measurement, in due course accepted the hypothesis of homo economicus, so too sociologists and other social scientists today run the risk of accepting as an insurmountable limit an overly reductive, impoverished conception of hu-

manly meaningful social reality.

A NONHISTORICIST HISTORICITY Corresponding to this conception of impoverished social reality-a reality which is ossified or deprived of its internal dynamic tensions, which for Aristotle was the entelechy (potentiality realized, or perfected form), that is, the impulsion toward the transformation of potency into action-is the conception of human history as the history of leaderships or elites. Also added to this is the conception of methodology as a body of specific, mechanically interchangeable techniques, as pure instrumentality to be applied to the human world as the object of research-a world conceived of as subaltern by definition, destined to serve. That is to say, it is called upon to verify or falsify the researcher’s hypotheses. The researcher is thus the sole, exclusive active subject in a research process which emerges as a profoundly asymmetrical undertaking. Under these conditions of the instrumentalizing of research, but also of research policy seen as a conscious self-situating of researchers themselves, the only possible history is not life history (which is thus potentially that of the life of each of us), but rather historicist history. It is perhaps not fortuitous that historicists, whether idealists or Marxists, should accept the social sciences with facility on condition that in turn these should be content with an auxiliary role as inferior means of intellectual activity, without authentic cognitive value at the full conceptual level, or in other words, without autonomy.8 Life history as a method at the highest level necessarily implies a nonhistoricist historicity. In other words, it implies a

6

Chapter 1

break with the notion of history as a diachronic succession toward the proof of a general meaning which the elites possess exclusively, as repositories of value. In this sense, life history, far from presenting itself as a body of elements illustrative of the already known-an optional appendix of a qualitative kind for the firm conclusions of research, achieved through the standardizing techniques of exact measurement-opens up a new phase in social science research. The positive project of identifying and interpreting structural invariants, or the convergences which emerge thematically in the individual life histories in the framework of the given historical context, replaces, as pars consfruens, the uniform, automatic procedure of historicist development. This last is scholastically-dogmatically-endowed with a historiographic methodology which is now clearly stultifying in that what comes after is always and by definition justified and explained by what has gone before. Sociological methodology based on life history thus is located at the highest critical point, before which the social sciences today are unable to move. This point is: how to get away from a historicism which is now played out, no longer capable of novelty either in the context of ”discovery”nor in that of ”validation,” except by thus removing the history from human phenomena. HISTORY AS COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Is it not amazing, and in some ways simply wonderful, that in the culture most profoundly imbued with historicism there should have been born its most subtle and fatal critic? Certainly, this is a critic constantly hanging by the thread of contradiction, as any real critic should be, since he belongs by temperament and training to the race of tightrope walkers. History is simultaneously useful and damaging. This duplicity suggested the title of a youthful, basic work by Nietzsche-”Of the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life”(1874).He starts his argument by noting that the qualitative difference between animals and man-both ”natural beings”-lies in the fact that the animal does for doing’s sake,

A Sociological Methodology

7

and thus mechanically repeats itself in its own behavior on the basis of immediate, instinctive drives. Man on the other hand acts in the light of a goal, on the basis of a project. Thus animal behavior is placidly repetitive and mechanical, incapable of memory, set in motion only by natural instincts and thus without history, or without the capacity for reflection which permits a critical return to oneself and one's own actions. Human behavior is inspired by instincts but also by the project, and is teleological. That is to say, it sets itself a goal, turns back critically on itself; it thus accumulates memories and on this basis of collective memory is able to formulate the meaning of man's own decisions and evaluate them. The animal thus has only nature, while man has nature and history. History: but what history? History is commonly understood as historia rerum gestarum, the history of deeds accomplished, of political leaderships and their undertakings. However, Nietzsche's original groundwork begins to emerge here: an excess of history prevents the making of history. According to Nietzsche, historical action, or action which breaks with the everyday and opens up new possibilities, in fact appears as practicable only when it is not held up by a paralyzing excess of "historical sense." Hence, paradoxically, there is in historical action an initial a-historical moment-even an actually antihistorical one-of which only someone deeply rooted in history is capable. In other words, only someone so certain of his own historical background as to represent it and translate it from reflex consciousness into a powerful natural instinct can set under way without pathos or uncertainty the decisions from which new historical phases are born. In this sense, therefore, history is important as the collective memory of the past, critical awareness of the present, and the operative premise for the future. However, at the same time history is dangerous. Excess of historical sense reduces the plasticity of human beings and thus seals off their ability to decide. Here there is a contradiction which Nietzsche makes clear. Faith in humanity is expressed in the need for a "monumental history," but active men, who need an inspirationwrested "monumental history," are also in conflict with that history because they cannot accept the idea that "the great

8

Chapter 1

should be eternal.” The marble of the monuments would, so to speak, already have petrified any future possibility. Nietzsche resolves the contradiction by observing that greatness, which exists at a particular time, was once at least possible, and thus will once more be possible. We move thus from the man of action to the beings who ”preserve and revere,” to antiquarian history. History becomes in this way not only the history of great events and monuments, elite history, or historical history, but also history as the collective memory of the everyday. ”What is little, worn out and decrepit acquires its own dignity and intangibility when the soul of antiquarian man, which protects and venerates, transmigrates into these things and there prepares a family next. The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself. He understands the walls, the gateway with its towers, the municipal statutes, the popular festivities like an illustrated diary of his youth, finding in all this himself, his powers, his activity, pleasure, judgment, madness, and discourteous habits. He tells himself that here one could live because here one could live. Here one will be able to go on living because we are stubborn, and it is not possible to fall to bits in the space of one night. Thus, with this ’we’ he sees beyond the ephemeral, random individual life and feels himself the spirit of the house, lineage, and city.“9 With extraordinary insight, Nietzsche here presents the essential elements of the basis of research which today relates to cultural anthropology and social history or even, as may be expressed polemically, to history from below. This means that history is no longer conceived of restrictively as the noble sequence of great events, battles, treaties, dynastic marriages, and so forth, but rather as the cumulative result of the threads and networks of relations into which, day after day, human groups enter of necessity. The individuals are destined to remain unknown but altogether they make up the living substance, the real sociological “flesh” of the historical process. Thus there comes to mind the ironic question of Bertolt Brecht: Who really built the pyramids? The pharoahs who gave them their name or the thousands of workers who carried the sand and the stones on their backs?

A Sociological Methodology

9

Clearly, not all this basic framework can come into Nietzsche’s essentially elitist perspective, but it is difficult not to grasp in it something much more than an unconscious prevision, when he writes: “And so I hope that history may be able to see its meaning not in universal thoughts, as in a species of flower or fruit, but that its value may be really that of vigorously paraphrasing a well-known, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and elevating it, raising it up as a universal symbol, thus letting us intuit in the original theme a whole world of profound meaning, power and beauty.”1°

NOTES 1. Stendhal, Filosofia nova, Turin: Beringhieri 1961, pp. 28-29 (my emphasis). 2. Cf. E. H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment, New York: Norton, 1975. 3. See chapter 4 (”Sociology between Biography and History”) in my Max Weber and the Destiny of Reason, tran. John Fraser, Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1982. 4. Cf. H. D. Lasswell, Political Writings, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951, p. 9. 5. Cf. E. Castelli, L’esperienza comune, Milan, 1942, p. 13. 6. For a critical analysis of this point, see F. Balbo, L’uno senza miti, Rome: Einaudi, 1945; and Laboratorio dell’uomo, Turin: Einaudi, 1948. 7. As regards the “hurry which-by itself-takes on its own meaning and also its form,” especially concerning the function of hurry in the ”logical precipitousness in which truth discovers its insurmountable condition,” see J. Lacan, Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 241. 8. It is interesting to note here how even Max Weber’s profound concern to leave behind the historicist tradition has been grossly misunderstood by way of the typical incomprehension of his attempt to construct historicallybased synchronic models. However, these very attempts to identify critically the cultural antecedents of a nonpartial, ancillary use of life histories recall, significantly, authors and studies for which life history is at most tolerated as illustrative. In this regard, E. Campelli’s ”La sociologia di Danilo Montaldi,” La Critica Sociologica, n. 49, Spring 1979, is instructive. 9. Is it not incredible that Nietzsche should anticipate the “we” in Gurvitch’s communitarian sense? 10. F. Nietzsche, Opere, vol. 3, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, Milan: Adelphi, 1972, p. 309 (my emphasis).

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

2

The Quality of the Everyday and the Practice of Life

HISTORY ”FROM B E L O W

”S

ocial” history, ”oral” history, ”new” history, ”psychohistory,” history ”from below,” and life history demonstrate broad, interesting areas of convergence, but should not be confused. They have in common the fact that they do not feel themselves to be obsessed, and thus, often, paralyzed by the question of what history really is and what it is not. This is a question that has weighed heavily for decades on the historiographic tradition of historicism, and which betrayed all too clearly the anxiety of preserving in all its purity a conception and practice of historical research in strict terms of elite history, political and at the outside intellectual. This, however, excluded on principle all those aspects which, by being linked to the material needs and daily survival of vast human masses, threatened to be contaminating with respect to the dominant social groups. Nonetheless the differences between the above types of history, in substance and method, are qualitative and of great importance. It will be necessary to return to these differences in their proper place, and elsewhere. 11

12

Chapter 2

However, at the same time, there is an indirect confirmation of the advantage for historical exploration in general of the ignorance or indifference surrounding the conception of what is history and what is not. This confirmation is easily extracted from French historiography, which is clearly not impeded or slowed down by late-idealist or ideal-Marxist vetoes. Hence it is capable of tackling subjects which are apparently wandering but really basic for a synchronic model, and for the multidimensional reconstruction of sociohistorical fragments: such as the history of madness, of climate, of average attitudes to death, the history of public festivities, the historical examination of the basic characteristics of French rural society, and so forth. In other words, history from below is the history of the essence of the everyday, the clarification and interpretation of life practices and practice of tradition, not relived sentimentally as mere popular folklore, but critically rethought as psychologically reassuring visions of the world, and at the same time as constellations of cognitive values, linked to and verified by the experience of life everyday. There is no doubt that this involves its employment in historiography, even in those branches less open to novelty like the Italian, and quite frequent reference to typically sociological paradigms and categories. It has been correctly observed that "among historians there is now an obvious awarenessthe transferral of the centre of their interest from the so-called histoire-bafaille to histoire-hornrne, and that with this they mean that historical narrative is no longer almost exclusively concerned with wars and peace, diplomatic negotiations and the personal affairs of heads of state, changes of government and biographical data, but rather it is trying to understand the political and social situations at various periods and in various environments, the way of life of the population, the volume of interchanges, ideals and needs, collective phenomena, and everyday reality. In academic programs and the corresponding textbooks too we can now perceive a new foundation. There has undoubtedly been a broadening of the horizon, and one can with pleasure take note of the effort to make that teaching more lively, concrete, and open."' This pleasure and satisfaction are certainly legitimate, but not large nor, perhaps,

The Quality of the Everyday

13

lasting, given the sporadic nature and still powerful resistance which figure with respect to that "broadening of horizons." THE PERSISTING "SEPARATENESS" OF SOCIOLOGY The cultural situation, not only in Italy, even though certain phenomena take on extraordinary importance there, presents a somewhat paradoxical appearance. Today, there exists a kind of sociological logos sperrnatikos. In other words, one is present at a curious transmigration of concepts and theoretical apparatuses, a penetration and utilization-mostly surreptitious-of concepts and categories borrowed from sociology. One thinks, precisely, of history, but also of geography, economics, Italian studies themselves, and so on. However, at the same time, Italian culture appears more than ever closed as regards sociology, which is systematically rejected and condemned to a ghetto existence as "sociologism." A contradictory situation is therefore emerging. While conceptual apparatuses and technical plans for sociology research are increasingly employed, in a more or less spurious manner, we have come to a real crisis of rejection of sociology, culturally isolated in its particular "separateness." For a recent example, not among the most significant, one thinks of the welcome proffered in Italy to Jean-Louis Flandrin's book on the "family" in preindustrial society. The theme of the family is typically sociological, but in Italy not even the famous Storia d'Italia, edited by Einaudi, and which believes itself inclined to the social and thus highly innovative, takes it into consideration.2 The polemical reaction of the-as it were-"official" historians was instantaneous and very tough, but did also reveal an unquestionable dis~omfort.~ Some isolated voices were raised in defense of the "new history," which was then new only relatively speaking, observing that the "official" historians, the accredited representatives of the "old history," view "microhistory" with a certain contempt. This was because they held, as Diaz argued, that "the beliefs, myths, or obsessions of

14

Chapter 2

Menocchio” (the sixteenth-century miller who was protagonist of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms) are of very little account when they “are not inserted into the major movements of society and the economy where political will is always the great motive force of historical development.” Then, they reprove the ”new historians” for having invented nothing, and for being at most affected by ”strange curiosities.” In this kind of situation, which not only concerns Italian culture but is even assisted by external factors, such as political terrorism, which cast shadows on the social sciences, the defense of sociology is necessary in order to guarantee rigor in concepts and the correct use of specific research techniques. However, this legitimate defense is made harder also by internal difficulties and weaknesses in sociology, and especially by the tendency to conceive of it in a reductive manner and perspective. This serves to make it the equivalent of any technical practice, ideally indifferent, morally neutral and mechanically interchangeable, ready to sell itself on the market to the highest bidder. This is due to the confusion between professionality, seen as manifested personal ability, and profession in the full social sense-that is, as a service requested by the client and over which the client himself has instrumentally no possibility of control.

LIFE HISTORY AS BASIC METHOD Life history as the basic method of sociological analysis drastically eliminates these and similar reductivisms with ease. However, the conscious critical adoption of life history as method is not simple, nor can it hastily be considered a convenient shortcut, as it has sometimes been interpreted by students of “community,” socially as generous as they are culturally ingenuous. Only by way of a long series of intellectual experiences and practical tests in the field have I arrived, in my current phase of development, at the point of confronting the problem of the autonomy of the biographical method and its decisive character in the future of research in the social sci-

The Quality of the Evey d a y

15

ences. Interested as I was, in the 1950s, in the human consequences of technical and economic-industrial development, I then began to collect life histories and autobiographical documents in some Italian communities which seemed to be attacked forcefully and in notable proportions by the process of indu~trialization.~ At first, this research concerned northern Italy for the most part, and the effects on the agricultural community around a "mass production" plant, rapidly expanding as was Olivetti in those years. Later, I sponsored and carried out similar research in the south.6 It was my intention, or rather, I nurtured the hope, that by means of the research I might find a positive solution to the deficiencies of sociological studies carried out only on the basis of rigidly structured questionnaires. For some time I had the impression that research of that kind, although very rigorous from the formal methodological point of view, generally ended up by regarding as resolved problems which in reality had not even been touched upon. From the time of my visits to Chicago, and long, impassioned discussions with Leo Strauss, the immortal author of Natural Right and History and Thoughts on Muchiuvelli, it seemed clear to me that the world of values not only should not escape the attention of the domain of the social sciences in the name of a raw, fragmentary "factuality" of an old-fashioned positivist kind, but that, in addition, shared and jointly undergone experiences and values were their living thread and privileged object. However, I did not manage to see with the necessary conceptual clarity how this implied a reversal of the prevailing methodological positions, which unconsciously quantified the qualitative, and I failed in addition to see how this reversal would not take place and would be destined to remain an ambiguous prologue in the clouds if a break in the method of conceptual expression and the practice of the social sciences did not come about. I could understand that life history was an often valuable contribution to directing research, but I did not realize that the ancillary function to which it was relegated did not simply conform to the canons of an objectivity still conceived of in grossly naturalistic terms. In addition it corresponded precisely to the wish of the researchers not to take up

16

Chapter 2

a position, and their logical refusal to situate themselves politically and socially, so as not to destroy their chances in the market. In this sense, I must acknowledge that the way in which life history was presented as a method of "field w o r k in my Trattato di sociologia7is not in itself erroneous but, from the position my reflections on these themes attained, it is basically incomplete and insufficient. I was especially struck by the synthetic character of the autobiographical account as a practice of life. However, at the same time I felt the danger of literariness. That is, I was held back and tormented by the incontestable fact that the individual biography was, after all, an account of a unique and irreducible destiny. I could not see the nomothetic elements present in the descriptive. This had a reductive effect on my manner of viewing life history. At most, I recognized in it an integrative function which was in the strict sense unverifiable. I regarded it as useful as an instrument of background research-a usefulness to which today too I attribute a fundamental importance-but I could not grasp the basic elements of what I now call the dialectic of the social and which lies essentially in the complex, non-a priori determinable relation between givenness and the lived. Certainly, the structural frame, givenness, was primary in my concerns, but I could not understand that by itself givenness understood as reifi'edfactualness, a fact closed on itself and distanced from the living, is nothing. It cannot even be analyzed by the social sciences as their real object, without lapsing into the fetishism of elementary empirical data held to be theoretically autonomous and self-explanatory, as if truly thefacts spokefor themselves. Like a clumsy pathologist, by error going into the operating theater, I conscientiously dismembered the living with the same meticulous care with which he would set about the autopsy of a corpse. BIOGRAPHY AND CONTEXT For this reason, I attempted very carefully to connect the individual biography with the global, structural characteris-

The Quality of the Everyday

17

tics of the given, lived, historical situation. My problem was always that of the human and social consequences of the process of industrialization.8 This is the same problem that I was later to identify as the problematic relation between technical-formal rationality and substantial rationality: what Weber, on the other hand, called “material rationality,” from the depths of his age-old pessimism, as befitted an orphan of Bismarck and elitist malgre‘ lui, concerning the practical possibility of managing to formulate in a politically valid manner-that is, intersubjectively binding-common, properly collective, ends. In this perspective, biographies had the goal-heuristically speaking-of illuminating the transition between the peasant world and technically oriented industrial society. I held that through biographies ”transition” was no longer a mere abstract category, a purely analytical term. It was personified and, so to speak, fleshed out by specific types whose biographical elements provided sociological material in its particular nature. However, the material provided by biographies was always only material I considered to be illustrative. In the Trattafo di sociologia, I did not go beyond the notion of life history as endowed with primarily integrating functions as regards quantitative data. The examples I quoted then did not depart from the traditional type of monograph, moving between the rigorous inventory of anthropological authority, and what is called today in the United States “investigative journalism.’’ I was well aware of the ecological studies of the Chicago School of the 1930s, from Clifford R. Shaw (The Jack-Roller, A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story, 1930) to Paul Cressy (The Taxi-Dance Hall, 1932), but I did not omit the basic research of Frederic Le Play on family budgets, and I also spent a little time on the Italian contributions, though these were still very undecided between an ingenuous populist protest, social documentation, and evocative h i ~ t o r y . ~ Despite the limitations which appear today in certain formulations in the Trattato-limitations connected primarily with the schematic, dichotomous opposition between the descriptive moment and nomothetic standardization-I think

18

Chapter 2

that from then on the importance of life history was indisputable. As I argued, this was because ”it allows us to move to analysis in depth,” just as in its whole scope there appeared to me to be its characteristic difficulty ”because it demands an immediate contact, one of reciprocal confidence between the object of research and the researcher.”l0 The discovery of the interactionist relation implied by this “confidence,” as basic and specific in life history, must consequently be seen to be extraordinarily productive in shaping a critical sociology. In fact, during this research in the 1950s, little by little the idea of a sociology as participation was taking shape, distinct from the generic ”participant observation” as also from mass observation, in such a way as to present itself as the first nucleus of an alternative, metamechanistic, methodological foundation.” STAGES OF AN INTELLECTUAL ITINERARY This is not the place to retrace critically this intellectual journey, which is not without tangled knots not wholly unraveled, but in which, notwithstanding, three phases which correspond fairly exactly to the same periods of my scientific work can be distinguished and briefly described here. a) The study of Thomas and Znaniecki (The Polish Peasant in Europe and America),12 in which the function of biographical materials is purely illustrative with regard to knowledge already acquired by other means. In this sense and for this aspect Herbert Blumer’s criticism seems to me to be c o n c l ~ s i v e . ~ ~ b) The phase of Vite di baraccati (Naples, 1976), in which, especially in the first chapter, I criticized the bases of Oscar Lewis’s research on the culture of poverty. My criticism basically concerns Lewis’s notion of the family as the ”natural unit” of inquiry.14However, the whole book should be seen as the sequel to a previous work, Roma da capitale u periferia (Bari, 1970), in which traditional quantitative methods, as also in the later Studi e ricerche sul potere (Rome, 1980), had yielded all they could. For example, they had permitted the establishing of a connection between poverty, social mar-

The Quality of the Everyday

19

ginality, and ”special classes,” so that these classes, set up to help children who normally were not able to keep up with the others as regards scholastic achievement, ended up in practice by branding them with a mark of mental inferiority which confirmed their state of social inferiority. However, in order to understand the scope and human meaning of the phenomenon, biographies and intensive, specific case studies showed themselves to be essential, not purely integrative of quantitative data. c) The current phase, in which I am suggesting the study of the primary group and ”basic associations’’ through the biographical method, centering on some fundamental variables such as 1)experience of work (cf.Studs Terkel, Working, 1970); 2) class structure as global, structural position and at the same time as specific existential content; and 3) the context, both given and lived, in the framework of a determinate historical situation (the notion of ”historical horizon”). Today, I take note, perhaps with a clarity and immediacy formerly denied to me, of how difficult it is to acquire the full knowledge of the cultural and political implication-in the proper sense, not the party political one-of the research work one is engaged in. It seems quite clear that many researchers who customarily use the biographical method nonetheless are unaware of its possibilities and use life histories as a not strictly necessary element of a qualitative kind to integrate work based on survey methods or opinion polls carried out on representative samples of a given, statistically identified universe (naturally,based on official statistics). In these cases, life history is presented as a photogenic overlay. This use of the biographical method is not in itself illegitimate, but it does demonstrate a radical inability to place the problem of such research at the critical level. Besides the interactionist relation, which revolutionizes the traditional foundations of research in that it presupposes a situation of basic equality between the researchers and the human groups being analyzed, the unique thing about the biographical method is that it allows one to reach social strata and structures of attitudes which, because of their marginal nature and their state of social exclusion, inevitably escape formally

20

Chapter 2

gathered and analyzed data, and the official images society has of itself. The insurmountable limitation of surveys concerns not only the asymmetrical structure of the research, the precodification of the questions against the opposite responses before knowing what the important problems may be, or the unjustified second-level analysis of data now completely abstract and hence dehumanized. This limitation is also a technical starting-point datum and derives from the fact that their sampling operations inevitably require data already gathered officially, and which cannot be contested. The research thus designed and organized starts off already from the conditions of a ”hostage of officialdom,” or, that is, is already in the very hands of that formal institutional structure when it should rather have the task of critically testing, describing, interpreting, and deinys tifiing. If then one is aware that in only moderately developed societies the most important social problems, whether as structure or behavior, do not merge and do not stand out with the desired clarity in the framework of official figures, precisely because of their refractory nature in the face of the tendency to encapsulate bureaucratically that which is lived, a double phenomenon becomes manifest. On the one hand, there is the tendency for social science research to adopt already constituted and rigid methodological categories which exclude from the scope of the research what is basically extraneous to it, even when by chance it is socially and politically of great potential importance. On the other, there is the need to adhere to a methodology as technique of listening, in which between the researchers and the human group being investigated there is established on equal footing a communication which is not only methodologically correct but in addition humanly meaningful. This meaning is not a moralizing, optional addition, but an integral part and guarantee of methodological correctness. NOTES 1. I? Brezzi,”Storiografia, sociologia, civilta,” in I? Brezzi, M. C. Galli, F. Ferrarotti, G. Harrison, Cultiuologia del sacro e del profano, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966, p. 17.

The Qualify of the Everyday

21

2. See J-L. Flandrin, Families in Former Times, trans. R. Southern, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 3. For all of these, see F. Diaz, L'Espresso, 6 February 1980; for an overview of the influence of the Annales, see M. Aymard, "The Impact of the 'Annales' School in the Mediterranean Countries," in Review, nn. 3 4 , Winter-Spring 1978, pp. 53-64. 4. In this regard, see the review of J-L. Flandrin's book by G. Corsini, in La Crifica Sociologica, n. 53, Spring 1980, pp. 133-35. 5. I have written extensively on the process of industrialization as a global social process, now collected in Sindacafo, indusfria, sociefa, Turin: UTET, 1970. For the more strictly autobiographical aspects, see the prefaces to some of my books, especially M a x Weber and the Destiny of Reason, trans. John Fraser, Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1982, and Lineamenti di sociologia, Naples: Liguori, 1976. A very summary first outline of my development in this respect can be found in my remarks in "Appunti sul metodo biografico," La Critica Sociologica, n. 47, Autumn 1978, pp. 130-32. 6. See my article in J. F. Scott, The Community Factor in Modern Technology, Paris, 1950. Part of this research involved the commune of Castellamonte, Canavese: cf. Quaderni di Sociologia, n. 1,Summer 1951. Later, in 1959, I published the biographies in Piccola ciffa,Milan: Ed. Communita, 1959 (second edition, with an extended photographic section, Naples, 1973). 7. Cf. F. Ferrarotti, Traftato di sociologia, Turin: UTET, 1968. 8. As seems clear to me as I look backward, right from my earliest books, such as Premesse a1 sindacalismo aufonomo, Turin: Movimento Communita, 1950; I1 dilemma dei sindacafi americani, Milan: Ed. Communita, 1954; and Laprofesta operaia, Milan: Ed. Communita, 1955. 9. See in particular my Trattato di sociologia, pp. 387-91, 419-23. As regards Le Play, I brought out his originality, in that he had discovered the method of participant observation independently, fifty years before Malinowski introduced it into anthropology, and seventy years before it passed into modern sociology (cf. p. 421). Today, besides the names then mentioned, from F. Cagnetta to D. Dolci and R. Scotellaro, the biographies collected by N. Revelli, in I1 mondo dei vinti, Turin: Einaudi, 1977 (whose extraordinary character is not greatly damaged by not being placed sufficiently in context), should be referred to. 10. F. Ferrarotti, Traffafodi sociologia, p. 387. 11. See Ferrarotti, La sociologia come parfecipazione e alfri saggi, Turin: Taylor, 1961, and An Alternative Sociology, ed. J. W. Freiburg, trans. P. and B. Columbaro, New York Irvington Publishers, 1979. 12. For a panoramic review of Polish sociological studies based on life histories, see J. Markiewicz-Lagneau, "L'autobiographie en Pologne ou l'ousage social d'une technique sociologique," in Revue Francaise de Sociologie, n. 4, October-December 1976, pp. 591-611. 13. See H. Blumer, "Critiques of Research in the Social Sciences: 1.An appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki's 'The Polish Peasant in Europe and America,''' in Bulletin 44, New York, 1939.

22

Chapter 2

14. In my view it seems essentially misguided that the various members of the ”Sanchez family,” for example, should recount their history independently of each other as individual-monads, thus losing for the family itself its character as ”primary group,” and giving rise instead to a series of ”parallel lives.” In the life histories I have long been collecting, by contrast, each person‘s account is continually interrupted and corrected, as it were, by the comments of other members of the group, precisely because the group itself lives its own specific life and interacts in a rich, interrelating dialectic.

3

+ Biography as Interaction

THE AUTONOMY OF THE BIOGRAPHICAL METHOD

T

he discussion of the biographical method and its autonomy should be reopened. The use of biography in the socia1 sciences, despite the particular favor shown to it for some time, has not exhausted all its possibilities and indeed has even retarded the advance of the conceptual, and practical, awareness that life history as a method in the full sense necessarily implies a break as regards current methods, and that in addition this break rests and is manifested on the basis of a systematic uncertainty in its present use. This involves a rigorous accounting as regards: a) The Erlebnis, especially in Wilhelm Dilthey's theorization, as the possibility of "reliving" existential and historical experience in terms of "interior interconnection," not assured by reference to a psychologizing subjectivism and voluntarist idealism. b) Versfehende Soziologie, Weber 's "understanding sociology," whose attempt, so widely misunderstood by interpretators of a more or less strict historicist persuasion, to construct a synchronic or "ideal-typical" model-only with 23

24

Chapter 3

diachronic historical materials-an be appreciated. This however does not escape the well-known deficiencies of formalism and methodological individualism.' c) Intuitionist current, formerly harshly criticized by Max Weber-whoever wants a sermon should go to a monastery; whoever wants visions should go to the cinema. d) The minimalist use, ancillary and illustrative, pioneered by Thomas and Znaniecki in their classic work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, confined by them, however, in the framework of a function broadly illustrative of socio-anthropological considerations separately gathered and analyzed. Currently, on the other hand, we see the tendency to use biographies as illustrative material not strictly necessary in the context of the studies, surveys, polls, all based on quantitative techniques, almost as though to "sweeten" the rigors of exact quantitative measurement, thereby dusting off again the unjustified dualism between tough-minded and soft-minded-r sentimental-investigators. The latter are more drawn to a cloying philanthropic and social-populist participation than to the tough discipline of scientific research in the real sense. See, for a recent example, John Goldthorpe's research on social classes and on the affluent worker, where, when it is admitted, life history is conceived of as repetition, an appendix, for the traditional quantitative surveys: as a qualitative sounding, but scientifically not serious because it is not quantifiable (!), and hence subject to the dreaded deficiencies of the "science of the vague," as one might in this context define the human sciences. e) The d4assement suggested by Daniel Bertaux, which falls under the attack of the remarks on Insiders and Outsiders by Robert K. Merton as "empathic participationism," essentially acritical.2 FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE INDIVIDUAL TO THAT OF THE GROUP PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES Traditional biographical method prefers secondary materials ("more objective") to primary ones, or those collected directly

Biography as Interaction

25

by the researcher in contact with the subjects of the study, systematically bringing the secondary to the primary. Despite this epistemological abdication, this method retains the value of breaking with traditional methodologies: it is a new word, and fragments of society long crushed by a kind of formal, sociological encirclement and suffocation break the barrier and force themselves on our knowledge. However, the biographical method does not realize and indeed betrays the greater part of its heuristic potential when it accepts being a marginal methodology of social history and a sociology in search of a ”concrete shell.” The elementary condition for a renewal of biographical method runs by way of a reversal of this tendency.

W e must abandon the privilege accorded to secondary biographical materials. We must bring back to the very heart of the biographical method primary materials and their explosive subjectivity. We are not only interested in the objective richness of pri-

mary biographical material; we are chiefly concerned with its subjective fullness of meaning in the context of complex interpersonal communication-reciprocal between the narrator and the observer. Here we are approaching the central problem. How can the

subjectivity inherent in autobiography become scientific knowledge? If the biographical method decides no longer to dodge and re-

nounce the subjectivity and the absolute historicity of its material, in what manner can it ground its heuristic value? Let us be satisfied with tracing the general, hypothetical lines of a reply. Every autobiographical narrative recounts, according to a horizontal or vertical section, a human practice. Now, if, as Marx put it in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, “the human essence . . . in its reality is the ensemble of the social relations,” any individual human practice is a synthetic activity, an active totalization of a whole social context. Life

is a practice which appropriates social relations (social structures), internalizes and retransforms them into psychological structures for its de- and restructuring activity. Every human life reveals

itself through its less generalizable aspects as a vertical synthesis of a social history. All behavior, every individual act, appears in its most individual forms as a horizontal synthesis of a social structure. How many biographies are needed

26

Chapter 3

to arrive at a sociological ”truth,” and what biographical material will be most representative and give us first some general truths? Perhaps these questions have no meaning, because-and in full consciousness we emphasize this point-our social system is completely within each of our actions, our dreams, fantasies, accomplishments, and behavior, and the history of this system is completely within the history of our individual life. In the strict meaning of the term, we “imply” the social through a synthetic interpolation which de- and restructures it, endowing it at the same time with psychological forms. However, as it is the product of a synthetic practice, the relation which links an action to a social structure is not linear, and the close relationship which runs from a social history and a life is certainly not a mechanical determinism. We must abandon the determinist model which directed the attempts to interpret the individual through sociological frameworks, borrowed from bad textbooks of a naturalistic science which the most alert scientists themselves had already abandoned. The individual is not an epiphenomenon of society. In relation to the structures and history of a society, she is an active pole, and impresses herself on it as a synthetic practice. Far from reflecting the social, the individual appropriates it, mediates it, filters and retranslates it by projecting it in another dimension, which then becomes that of her subjectivity. She cannot break away from it, but does not suffer it passively, and indeed reinvents it every second. Here, Sartre’s formulation seems to me the only possible one, at least in the sense of a suggestive literary example. Man-and I would add, man invented by the bourgeois revolution-is the singular universe. Through his synthetic practice he singularizes in his actions the universality of a social structure. By means of his de- and retotalizing activity, he individualizes collective social history. Here we are, therefore, at the heart of the epistemological paradox with which the biographical method presents us. We can no longer compare what an action or the history of a life has in common with the actions and the histories of other individuals-in a general perspective which alone could be scientific knowledge-with

Biography as lnteraction

27

everything this action or this history contains which is absolutely specific. Uniqueness, that is, which will never be science, but an unexplained, prescientific residuum, chance. A social anthropology which considers each person as the individualized and active synthesis of a society eliminates the distinction between the general and the particular in an individual. If we are, if every individual represents a singular reappropriation of the social and historical universal, which surrounds him, we can know the social by departing from the point of the irreducible specificity of individual practice. From the restoration of subjectivity to science: what makes an action unique or a history individual presents itself as a means of access-often the only possible one-to the scientific knowledge of a social system. This is not a linear path, and is often cryptic, requiring the invention of keys and new methods in order for it to be pursued.

BIOGRAPHY AND SOCIETY The anthropology which we have just sketched legitimizes our attempt to read a society through a biography. It subsequently legitimates the heuristic value of a biography all of whose epistemological specificity should be preserved. However, sociological biography is not only an account of lived experiences but also a social microrelation. The most solitary autobiographical monologue represents no less than an attempt at communication and implies all the same the ghost of an interlocutor. Now the sociologist who stimulates, who collects an oral account, is a real interlocutor who impersonates a neutral, absent ghost. We distrust this wizardry and restore to the biographical interview all its consistency as social interaction. The biographical accounts we use are not monologues delivered before an observer reduced to the condition of the human support of a taperecorder. Every biographical interview is a complex, social interaction, a role system, a system of expectations, orders, norms, and implicit values, often also of sanctions. Every biographical interview hides tensions, conflicts, and power

28

Chapter 3

hierarchies. It appeals to charisma and to the social power of scientific institutions as regards the subaltern classes, and evokes their spontaneous defensive reaction. They do not recount their own lives and their own Erlebnisse to a tape: they tell them to an individual. The form and the content of a biographical account change according to the interviewer. They depend on the interaction which represents the social terrain of communication. They are situated within a relational interaction. The interviewer is never absent even if he simulates absence. He is always reciprocal even if apparently he rejects every reciprocity. The illusion of objectivity negates the interactional quality of the biographical account: if at times it acknowledges this, it does so in order to exorcise its operative role and to relegate it to the margins, among the subjective residues before which the objectivity of the human sciences shows itself always to be sullied. This concerns, then, the restoration of the biographical account to the fullness of its relational nature and its communicative intentionality. We shall then define another of its basic characteristics, possibly the most unrecognized, that every indi-

vidual act is the totalization of a social system.

Every account of an action or a life is at the same time an act, the totalizing synthesis of lived experiences and a social interaction. A biographical account is not at all a news report, it is a social action by means of which an individual synthetically retotalizes his life (biography) and social interaction in progress (the interview) in the midst of an accountinteraction. Does the biographical account retail a life? We shall rather argue that it recounts a present interaction by way of the course of a life. There is no greater biographical truth in an oral, spontaneous account than in a newspaper, in an autobiography and in certain memories. We cannot acquire this biographical truth simply by loading ourselves with the interactional truth which fills out the account. The sociological reading of a biography moves by way of the hermeneutics of the social action which reinvents the biography by telling it in the framework of an interaction-an interaction which the observer must not evade and must live in an active manner right to the end.

Biography as Interaction

29

The sociological analysis of a biography takes us to the hermeneutics of an interaction. Here we are, therefore, at the clinical pole which appears to characterize knowledge of the individual in the human sciences. "It is the transposition of the clinical situation to different disciplines which deal with man, which cause explicitly to reappear the problem of knowledge of individual content^."^ "The clinical situation places patient and therapist in an immediate relationship, the observer and the observed. By 'immediate relationship' we must understand a relationship not wholly conceptualized, which develops at the outset confusedly the relationships between the one and the other, in such a way that the situation which becomes stabilized cannot correctly be described as a totally asymmetrical encounter between an active subject and a passive object, but rather as a couple whose partners play alternating roles. . . . Spontaneously, the clinical situation is experienced through the magical, mythical means of communication. The central epistemological problem is how to explain the development of this situation with a range of authentic knowledge, without degenerating either into an irrational technique of mechanical objectification, or into a practice of enchantment."4 These are articulations between the observer and the observed within a reciprocal interaction. Scientific knowledge demands a hermeneutics of this interaction. The biographical account is perceived as social action. The biographical interview seems to me a perfect example of the clinical pole of the human sciences. Every biographical account sends us back to the de- and restructuring of an act or individual history viewed as the horizontal or vertical section of a social system. This consequently gives us: a) A totalizing image of a social system, from the social space wherein sociality is sketched out, and where social action is analyzed (history of a life, description of an action); b) A totalization under way (a biographical account) as the active synthesis of the totalizing image and the interaction present where it is situated. In biography society, perpetually being born, coexists with structured society. Social action in being coexists with reified social action. The biographical account

30

Chapter 3

owes itself immense, unexplored, theoretical importance to this basic sociological ambiguity, and also its largely ignored or betrayed heuristic fertility. HUMAN PRACTICE AS TOTALIZING PRACTICE The act as the active synthesis of a social system, and individual history as social history totalized from a practice: these two propositions imply a heuristic passage which sees the universal through the singular, which seeks the objective by hinging on the subjective, and which discovers the general through the particular. In my view, the biographical method invalidates the universal validity of the Aristotelian proposition ”There is no science which is not science of the general.” No. There can be science of the particular and the subjective, and this science arrives by other paths-paths which often seem paradoxical-at a knowledge of the general. But Aristotle’s argument goes further. Indeed, it rejoins the formaldiscursive logic which is the model of Western scientific thought. The critique of the hegemony of the general in scientific axioms conceals a critique of the hegemony of the ”concept,” of the process of abstraction which creates it, the deductive threads which make it plain, and the inductive fabric which together ground and test them. It involves the ”tree” of logical, linear propagation. Let us go still further. The notion of totalizing human practice (which I take from Sartre, but which we find still more rigorously formulated in Tarde and Simmel, to speak only of sociologists) refuses to consider human behavior (actions, biographies) as the passive reflexes of a conditioning which comes from the general-that is, from society. This behavior on the contrary expresses a synthetic practice which de- and restructures social determinisms. It is not the mechanical result of external influences, though these are appropriated through a synthetic activity which retranslates them into individual actions which are not reducible to their determining factors. Certainly we cannot linger over these analyses (we refer to the whole tradition at their root). However, we do

Biography as Interaction

31

emphasize their main characteristic. Man is not the passive object which mechanistic determinism claims. The terrain of each action or human behavior witnesses the active co-presence of external conditioning and human practice, which filters and internalizes them while it totalizes them. In this area, nothing is passive, a simple reflection, or an epiphenomenon. The mechanistic and determinist model cannot account for the doubly dialectical role (negation and negation of the negation) intrinsic to human practice. The rejection of the dichotomy between the active subject and the passive object in the field of human behavior extends to that manner of behavior peculiar to scientific intentionality, and to its object, individualized human behavior. Here, too, there is not an object which knows and one which is known. The observer is strangely, ridiculously, involved in the area of his or her object. The latter, far from being passive, continually modifies his or her own behavior as a function of the behavior of the observer. This circular feedback process makes any presumption of objective knowledge absurd. Knowledge does not have the "other" as its object; its object is the unforeseeable (in its specific forms, a priori) interaction, reciprocal between observer and observed. Thus it becomes a dual knowledge through the intersubjectivity of an interaction. The deeper and more objective the knowledge, the greater will be the integral and intimate objectivity. The observer will not know his object through and through-and we emphasize scienfijicdysave at the expense of being known by it in an equally profound manner. Knowledge then becomes what sociological methodology has always wished to avoid becoming: a risk. Even, it is the "reflectiveness" of the pupil in the friendly pupil of whom Plato spoke in the Phaedrus. The specific nature of the biographical method implies the transcendence of the logico-formal framework and the mechanistic model characteristic of established scientific epistemology. If we wish to use the heuristic potential of biography sociologically, without betraying its essential characteristics (subjectivity and historicity), we must project ourselves d'emblie out of the classical epistemological framework. We must seek elsewhere the epistemological foundations of the

32

Chapter 3

biographical method, in a dialectical reason capable of understanding the reciprocal synthetic praxis which governs the interaction between an individual and a social system. We must seek them through the construction of nonmechanistic, nondeterminist heuristic models-models characterized by a permanent feedback of all the elements in them, ”anthropom ~ r p h i c ”models ~ which only a nonanalytical, nonformal logic can grasp. This, then, is a dialectical reason, historical and extraneous to any ”occasionalism”;it is capable of an approach toward specificity (”the specific logic of the specific object” [Marx]), of not reducing the concept to a conceptual construct, and of rising ”from the abstract to the concrete” (Marx). This dialectical reason does not claim hegemony. It has nothing to do with Diamat or with the Engels of the Dialectics ofNature. It willingly acknowledges for formal logic and deterministic models an axiomatic role in the sciences of nature. It acknowledges for them a role for the sciences of man where these see themselves as sciences of the general. However, when it is a matter of not sending the individual back into the sphere of the unknown and of chance, and when we are dealing with the consideration of human practice, only dialectical reason allows us scientifically to understand an action, to reconstruct the processes which make behavior the active synthesis of a social system, and to interpret the objectivity in a fragment of social history by starting from the nonevaded subjectivity of an individual history. Only dialectical reason allows us to attain the universal and the general (society) by emphasizing the individual and the singular (man). The specific character of biographies reaches to the discussion of the assimilation of all sciences to the science of nature. If, epistemologically, we wish to respect biography, we are forced to admit a radical gap between nomothetic intentionality and descriptive intentionality, a break which implies having recourse to two different reasonings. Biography revives the Methodenstreit. It thus becomes the single occasion for reopening a more profound discussion on the logical, epistemological, and materiological foundations of

Biography as Interaction

33

sociology. It is also the occasion for a new reflection on the foundations of the social.

NOTES 1. This point has been well taken and expressed by P. Ammassari in his introduction to the Italian translation of Gerth and Mills’s Cliaracter and Social Structure: ”Weber, who was firmly nominalist, rejected any ’substantialist’ (substanzielle) conception of collective formations, repeatedly insisting that the sole unit of analysis of sociology is the action of the individual being (Einzelindividuiiin) and that any other concept (state, class, stratum, family, community, association, and so on) simply denoted a particular category of social relations, which could be considered as independent subjects only for investigative purposes. However, from this nominalism which preserves only the individual, and puts forward the connection of subjectively intended meaning in action as the correct object of sociology, there does not follow simply and primarily a psychosociological study of such meaning and its ’typically homogeneous’ forms: that is, of the uniformities of meanings, intentions and motives which make up the phenomenology of social action.” (H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Caratfere e sfruffnra sociale, Turin: UTET, 1969, p. xix). 2. See D. Bertaux, Desfins personnels et structure de classe, Paris: Puf, 1977, but especially the report presented at the 1978 World Sociological Congress at Uppsala, Sweden. 3. G. G. Granger, Pensie fornzelle et sciences de l’lzonznze, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967, p. 189. 4. Granger, Pens&, p. 188. 5. R. Ham6 and P. F. Secord, The Explanation of Social Behavior, Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1973, chapter 5.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

4

The Social Nature of the Individual

FIRST ELEMENTS OF A ”RELATIONAL DIALECTIC”

A

person is never an individual. It would be better to call him a singular universe. He is ”totalized” and at the same time universalized by his epoch: he retotalizes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity. Universal by way of the singular universality of human history, singular by way of the universalizing singularity of his projects, he demands to be studied simultaneously in the two senses. We must find an appropriate method. The general lines of Sartre’s regressive-progressive method for a social science of biography are well known: the horizontal and vertical reading of the biography and the social system, a heuristic movement of coming and going from biography to the social system, and vice versa. The fusion of this double movement means the exhaustive reconstruction of the reciprocal ”totalizations” which express the dialectical relation between society and a specific individual. The integral knowledge of one person thus becomes the integral knowledge of another. Social collective and singular universal mutually illustrate each other. The attempt

36

Chapter 4

to understand biography in its total uniqueness on the basis of the sixth thesis on Feuerbach becomes that in the interpretation of a social system. As a difficult synthesis of a structural and a historical approach, this methodology does not turn down the contribution of nomothetic knowledge. Indeed, it even requires it, though in order to integrate it in a heuristic movement into hermeneutic, nonlinear models which appeal to dialectical, not formal, reason. In the biographical method we shall find the classical methodologies of sociology. However, they serve us as a backdrop, indispensable but analytical instruments, and thus relatively marginal to a central synthesis which attempts to restore the synthetic unity of a social system from the reciprocal, active articulation between a society and individual practice. This nonanalytical method poses additional important problems. First, how is this double movement between the individual and the collective poles of any social terrain structured? What are the phases and stages which mediate between the two poles? By way of what mediations does a specific individual totalize a society, and a social system project itself toward an individual? The second problem: with its constant reference to individual practice, is not the epistemological perspective of the biographical method not perhaps implying a nominalist, atomized conception of the social as it establishes some series of interactions (the "social" of Tarde, Simmel, von Wiese, Moreno, and even Sartre)?Third problem: does not our approach to the biographical method not perhaps negate any practical possibility of its use? If the model of good sociological utilization of biography is the 2,500 or so pages of Sartre's L'ldiot de la Famille, is there not perhaps risk of provoking the sociologists into silence, or rather causing their anxious return to classical methodologies? These are logically heterogeneous problems, but they go back to what Sartre called the "problem of mediations." "Valkry is a petit bourgeois intellectual-of that there is no doubt. But any petit bourgeois intellectual is not ValQy. The heuristic insufficiency of Marxism (and I should add of the traditional biographical method) is contained in these two

The Social Nature of the Individual

37

phrases. To grasp the process which produces the person and his product within a given class and society in a given historical moment lacks in Marxism (and in sociology!) a hierarchy of mediations."' It is necessary to 'ynd the mediations which would allow us to generate the singular concrete, the life, the real, dated struggle by setting out from the general contradictions of his productive forces and relations of production."*Each individual does not totalize a global society directly. She does so through the mediation of her immediate social context, and the limited groups of which she is part, since these groups in turn are active social agents which totalize their context, and so on. In the same way, society totalizes each specific individual by means of the mediating institutions which totalize it ever more precisely as regards the individual in question.

THE FIELD OF SOCIAL MEDIATIONS The simultaneous heuristic passage from biography to society and vice versa implies consequently a theory and a typology of the social mediations which make up the active fields of reciprocal totalization. As Sartre said, we must establish a hierarchy of these spaces for mediation. We must define their functions, and their methods of incidence on individuals of whom they are part. We must also read them from "the other side," that is, by setting out from the perspective of the individual who in turn synthesizes them horizontally (his immediate social context, the context of his context, and so on) and vertically (the chronological sequence of his impact on the, different spaces of mediation-the family, infant peer groups, and those of school age, and so on. Above all we must identify the most important spaces, those which serve as pivots between structures and individuals, the social fields where the singularizing practice of man and the universalizing effort of a social system confront each other most directly. What are these spaces? "At the level of relations of production and of sociopolitical structures the singular individual is conditioned by his human relations. There is no doubt that this conditioning, in its first, general truth, does not take one back to the 'conflict of

38

Chapter 4

the productive forces with relations of production.’ However, all of this is not lived so simply. . . . The individual lives, and knows more or less clearly what his condition is, through his membership of groups. The greater part of these groups is local, defined, and immediately g i ~ e n . We ” ~ may therefore reply: these are restricted or primary groups. Families, peer groups at work, in the neighborhood, in school classes, in barracks, and so on: all these groups participate at the same time in the psychological dimension of their members and in the structural dimension of a social system. By means of their deand restructuring of the context which it carries out, group practice mediates and actively reproduces the social totality in its formal and informal microdocuments, its lines of power and communication, its norms and sanctions, and its methods and networks of affective interaction, and so on. The group itself becomes itself in turn, and simultaneously, the object of the synthetic practice of its members. Each of them reads the groupfiorn his individual perspective. Each of them builds himself psychologically as an ”I,” starting from his reading of the group of which he is a part. The primary group is shown also to be the basic moment of mediation between the social and the individual. It defines itself as the social terrain where the totalization of his social context, and the totalization which all group members employ individually within the group totalization, coexist indissolubly. The field offers itself as a space for articulation where the public and the private are reciprocally joined together and disappear into one another, along with the structures and the ”I,” the social and the psychological, the universal and the singular. It is the privileged pace of the singular universal which seems to be the protagonist of the biographical method as we understand it. Within the system of mediation which enunciates the interrelation between a biography and a social structure, the primary group occupies a crucial pivotal space: however, if these are the role, the meaning, and the heuristic expectancy of the primary group, why do we not make that the chief, direct protagonist of the biographical method? Why not substitutefor natural biography the biography ofa primary group as a basic heuristic unit for a renewed biographical method?

The Social Nature of the lndividiial

39

THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE PRIMARY GROUP This idea is less farfetched than it may seem. For example, it gives an answer to two other problems we indicated above. Every theory of the bases of the social or of sociological method which starts from any social atom (the individual, elementary interaction) falls into nominalism, into an atomist logic and social psychology. The majority of theories of social action have stalled at this very point (see, for example, the fine section in Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought on the nominalism which masks Weber’s theory of action). Now, I believe that an approach which stands resolutely beside dialectical reason can avoid these dangers, even if it is based on individual practice. Sociological nominalism is no longer conceivable where a concept no longer possesses the form of abstraction typical of formal logic. Besides, how could nonlinear models of interpretation of the social conform to the linear series of atomistic sociology? There remains the real danger of psychologistic reduction, but in any case the choice of the primary group as basic heuristic unit takes us at once beyond any risk of nominalism, atomism, and psychologism. This is because, if we use a correct interpretative model, a primary group cannot be reduced to the network of its elementary interactions. At every second it overcomes these, and emerges as a social totality, defined not by its ”internal system” of psychosocial relations, but by the system of strictly social functions which root it in its context. As for the problem of the operational potential of the biographical approach we propose here, the abandonment of the individual in favor of the group does not eliminate all the difficulties, but nonetheless considerably diminishes them. Taken as the due point of departure, the heuristic coming and going, the group allows us to eliminate the most complex stage of the whole biographical methodthe understanding of the infinitely rich totalization which an individual uses in his context and which he expresses through the cryptic forms of a biographical account. Recourse to biographies of primary groups lets us avoid this initial step. It allows us to situate ourselves at the start not at the level of the individual in a situation-the level dominated by the

40

Chapter 4

psychological dimension-but at that of the immediately social aspect of the primary group. We know hardly anything about the individual as the "ensemble of social relations,'' of which Marx spoke. The inattentiveness of scientific psychology, and its indifference in the face of the social, offer us no intrapsychic or relational model of the social individual. We know much more about groups. Certainly, the rejection of deterministic models and the idea of the group as active totalization of its context make useless and misguided most of our knowledge about groups. However, we possess models which can be rethought, and hypotheses which can be reintegrated into the framework of a different logic and heuristic intention. With groups, we are immediately in the social (a social which does not exclude the individual), and we are not working in the void of a field which has still to be cultivated (the singular universal). We know where to go and how to search. THE INDIVIDUAL IS NOT A SOCIAL ATOM The biographical method has almost always turned to the individual. This choice of the banality of the evident hides a gross misunderstanding. This is because the individual is not, as has too often been believed, a social atom, and thus the most elementary heuristic unit of sociology. Simmel saw this clearly at the beginning of his Soziologie. Far from being the simplest element of the social-its irreducible atom-the individual is in her turn a complex synthesis of social elements. She does not ground the social, but is its sophisticated product. Paradoxically, the authentic element of the social in my view is the primary group, the apparently complex system which in reality is the most simple object for the sphere of sociology. We measure and identify, by relation to this relatively stable Gnrndkorpev, all the mobile, rich, fluctuating complexity between multiple, contradictory totalizations which characterize the so-called elementary interactions, and the growth in sociality in relation to this Grundkb'upev.We measure the giddy, dense, and complex synthesis which an individual represents from the point of view of sociology. If we accept the individ-

The Social Nafiire of the lndividital

41

ual as "register" of sociological knowledge: why should the primary group not also constitute the register of the biographical method? If our working hypotheses are valid, the renewal of the biographical method requires a new theory of social action. This theory would no longer be based on the action of one or more individual agents, but on that of a social tofali f y , the restricted group read by means of "anthropomorphic" models, nonmechanistic ones. The biographies of the primary group pose new problems in its turn. How can we obtain the biography of a group? Does it involve juxtaposing or cross-tabulating the individual perspectives which its members have of the group and its history? Will it not be necessary to establish a continuous interaction with the group in its totality? Again, how will the dialectic, taken between the totalization the group makes of its context, and the totalization each member of the group makes of this totalization, be identified? By what mediations can we integrate into our sociological perspective the basic models and techniques of observation set out by psychology, psychoanalysis, and family and group therapy? A whole body of theoretical reflection awaits us, in order that we can one day make the journey from the most simple to the most complex: the discovery and identification of the specific (historical) terms of the individual's sociality.

NOTES 1. J-P. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique: Questions de me'thode, Paris: Gallimard, 1960, p. 44. 2. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, p. 45. 3. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, p. 49. Sociology, therefore, as a science not of the reified social, but rather of "social action," or the social in action, as Weber intuited (soziales Handeln), widely misunderstood by his commentators, old and new. 4. I do not mean here by "sociological register" the most elementary social facts (we should be thrown back into full nominalist logic), but rather the simplest heuristic categories sociology has at its disposal (sociology which excludes any parti pris on the ontological structure of the social).

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

5

The Symmetrical Limits of Naturalistic Objectivism and Psychologism

THE INTERACTIVE PHASE

L

ife history as the basic method of sociological analysis overturns the traditional framework and overcomes the fetishism of the rigid questionnaire, which already in the 1950s David Riesman was calling the science of IBM machines. Life history involves the interactive phase. This phase is the moment of great novelty, the one which constitutes the real qualitative distinction between life history and social history, oral history, history from below, psycho-history, and so on. As with the sciences of nature, the social sciences are also concerned with facts. What must never be forgotten, even if by chance it complicates the research techniques, is that the facts which interest the social sciences are facts which occur in and through persons: they are facts which concern attitudes and behavior in human beings. This seems obvious, but it should be recalled because in the practice of social research it is normally cut out or simply forgotten. The reasons for this forgetfulness, and the self-censorship from which it probably derives, should be carefully explored because they are in-

43

44

Clinptcr 5

structive in themselves. The criteria of scientific analysis, when applied to the human world, are explosive, and generate fear and insecurity. Even societies which are historically ingenuous enough or imprudent enough to offer themselves up to the analytical gaze of the social scientist know they are involved in something much more dramatic than a psychosocial striptease, and that really the basic values of society and those who live in it are under attack-their level of rationality, their basic congruity, or their contradictory nature. The question has long been remarked upon: ”in spite of the exactions of scientific method to which they are properly committed, social scientists cannot escape the fact that they are fundamentally concerned with states of mind. Social scientists are closest to their subject matter when they are concerned with feelings, sentiments, standards, and ideals. They are, in fact, usually concerned with these, even when the language does not apparently have that meaning. An ’economic policy’ means only that somebody intends something and a ’political machine’ is only figuratively a machine-it is people, with hopes, ambitions, intentions, understmdings. Neither a family nor a religion can be learned about by counting people or by measuring a house or a temple; these two are states of mind, and the influence and relations of the states of mind of some people with respect to those of other people. By talking about ’the origin of magic,’ or the ’diffusion of matrilineal clans,’ even anthropologists managed to get some distance from a recognition of states of mind as their subject matter, as Dr. Benedict remarks. Under the influence of the scientific method that was adopted by students of humanity in the nineteenth century, humanity was cut into pieces of nature as much like plants and animals as they could be made. But as each fresh effort is made to understand humanity ‘as it really is,’ the thing turns out to be made of states of mind. ”And of these states of mind, the schemes of values of people are central and of most importance.”’ This should not be understood in the sense of a psychologizing of the social. Such an intellectual operation has deficiencies and mystifications which, though their social and political implications are profound, are now clear and quite well

The Synirnetricnl Limits

45

known. Hearsay Freudianism seems now to define the prevailing culture and has a good claim to be considered the new conformism or, more exactly, the new tvahison des clercs. The objective contradictions are hidden and the real suffering of individuals which these produce are made dependent on the psychological attitudes of the individuals themselves. In Julian Benda’s judgment-author in the 1930s of the famous pamphlet La frahison des clercs-the treason of the clerics was something very precise and specific. The intellectuals-who Benda, in the manner of Mannheim, imagined to be free and disembodied-befruyed their function by mobilizing in favor of the existing order against the coming of a democracy with a broader social base, ”which for them represented the emblem of disorder,’’ the ”rebellion of the masses” which Ortega y Gasset had apocalyptically prophesied. Today, the attack on democracy is more insidious and subtle. It does not happen in the name of order, but rather in the name of the great private sentiments and by appealing to the instinctive impulses which traditionally have seduced the masses and prevented them from transforming themselves from subjects to citizens. THE SPONTANEISTIC IRRATIONALISM OF THE NEO-HERACLITANS

Moreover, today, those who exalt spontaneous impulses and the return to the personal and the private, the champions of direct experience, of ”offering oneself” (eucharistically?) to others, do not even need to pretend, as Benda’s intellectuals still did, to be the bodyguards of reason. They even pose as champions of dissent, of marginality, and the ”totally other.” They restore to a place of honor-with suitable mutilations, or failure to understand-Nietzsche and the oracular neometaphysics of Martin Heideggger. They do not think about, nor conduct, interpersonal scientific research: they ”intuit.” ”Instrumental” reason has created too many victims and lost its old prestige: their gospel is that one must fight science and let oneself go. . . .

46

Chapter 5

There is nothing new from the viewpoint of the history of the social sciences. What the hearsay Freudians today do not seem to understand is the fundamental convergence of two worlds of thought apparently diametrically antithetical, that of Emile Durkheim and that of Sigmund Freud, with regard to the individual: this is an explosive, delicate commodity, to be handled with care, to be hedged in and controlled, after careful examination, so as to avoid grave problems for the social system-anomie, violence, and destructiveness. Undoubtedly one is dealing with two great conservatives. Though deeply laicized and ”nonmilitant atheists,” at the end of their careers they recognized the unsuppressible and, through time, probably indefinite, social function of religion. It is rare in the history of thought and the social sciences to find an example of greater distrust of the spontaneity and ”natural richness” of the individual than that demonstrated by these two logical and radical critics of tradition. Today the situation appears very different as regards their supposed heirs. Above all, the hearsay Freudians have thrown themselves on Eros in order to dig out from him improvized, scientifically untenable, and morally fraudulent explanations. Psychologizing in the spontaneistic manner about ”hard” social facts-in Durkheim’s sense-has had its ultimate result, the dissolution of any serious critical demand regarding existing institutions, and the pragmatizing of thought in the name of needs and demands as impelling as they are ephemeral. Today’s neo-Heraclitans burn incense and unloose hymns to ”movement,” any movement, even those which by chance indicate only the wrinkling of a capricious moment of intellectual fashion rather than the groundswell of new ”emerging sociality.’’ They are thus condemned to the pseudo-vitalist, a-critical irrationalism which coincides with the contemporary decline of universes, orders, and ideas, and it is cleverly used to proclaim the uselessness of any proposal for the rational transformation of society. On the other hand, it has been correctly observed that the paths so far trodden by the process of psychologizing the social have been shown to be inadequate for their functions and still more for their ideological ambitions. Now a mass phenomenon in the urban middle strata, psychoanalysis has been

The Symmetrical Limits

47

increasingly reduced to a technique of readaptation and spurious consensus, in the crudest cases of flat, philistine conformism. Notwithstanding this, perhaps because of the interactive relation implied beyond and against any asymmetry between therapist and patient, psychoanalysis retains an immanent critical tension, a recall to primary needs and to an ensemble of ethical demands-for a different life, for an alternative society-which make it dangerous. Transactional models of social interaction which have replaced the latter dissolve the ego into a system of roles. They assault-often victoriously-the unitary personality of the individual. The result is not so much that feared by Herbert Marcuse. Rather than onedimensional man, we have atomized, fragmentary man. The social being is reduced to the various and unpredictable whole of his perceptions. Sociality is reduced to a network of messages and communications, according to a logical thread with a high level of suggestiveness, which now clearly connects realms of thought which run, by way of Marshall McLuhan, from Jean Baudrillard to Niklas Luhmann. The fundamental task, behind the variety and the very contradictoriness of the positions, may be said to have been accomplished. The social has been carefully emptied, and deprived of any objectively binding nervous system. It is like a hollowed-out skull. Society is reduced to a metaphor, a theater. Individuals no longer have destinies, but roles, foreseen and foreseeable.

GROUP BIOGRAPHY IS NOT GROUP THERAPY For our general argument it is hardly necessary here to warn that the biography of the group has nothing to do with the various techniques of group therapy. In the methodological proposal advanced here it is useless to hide from oneself that the risk of psychologizing the social by making its institutional aspects disappear (those hard aspects which, as Durkheim reminded us, cannot be liquidated by a mere wish), is an ever-present risk. The relation between roles and destinies is at stake. The human drama runs through this relation.

48

Chapter 5

The importance of the biographical method is established by the fact which directly involves the relation, which challenges it and prunes and analyzes it. The sense of security in quantitative methods, and the apparent calm they provide, with the superficial and beguiling exactness of figures, are directly linked to the exorcism they conduct against the qualitative aspects of human experience and to the negation of life as choice and drama. The part which each must play, and which is handed out on the great stage of society, undoubtedly weighs on the archetypal structure of individual motivation and orientation. However, the unit of elementary analysis for sociology, it should not be forgotten, is not the individual but rather the actor, or the individual with a role to "play," which is also the part he has to live. Psychologizing the social has this terrible aspect: that it topples, obscures, and obliterates the institutional toughness which stands before individual volition. It does not help us to understand that the real anguish of the human being, in a deeper sense than the words suggest, lies in having forgotten his cue. It is not only Lionel Trilling's Opposing Se& nor the intellectualist fetish on which elitist culture discourses and with Plutarchian impulses clumsily conceals the nostalgia of a society composed of few people, and the lament for having lost the slaves. A merely polemical or censorious attitude does not come to terms with the real dimensions of the problem. The interpersonal reading of individual behavior has exposed the connectionsbetween psychic suffering and primary group. On the other hand, the primary group appears as the living sociological flesh of the institutional apparatuses which are more or less formally codified. Alienated and destructive interpersonal dynamics are tied to social microstructures and develop and are consumed, thereby challenging the structures, their organizational logic and orientation, and the bases of their legitimation. History and society thus are synthesized in the biography of the individual. They are the raw material of which biography is the literal signal, the aorist contraction, and also the symbol. Perhaps in this sense one can say that every autobiography is always a camouflaged autobiography. Literary models in this regard are, very naturally, extraordinarily suggestive. For example: "the

The Symmetrical Limits

49

most extreme forms of this emancipation (of the contemporary novel in relation to the narrator-character relation) are not perhaps the most visible by reason of the fact that the classical attributes of the 'character '-name, physical and moral 'character '-have disappeared, and with them the reference points of grammatical circulation. Borges undoubtedly offers us the most spectacular example of this transgression . . . in the story entitled 'The Form of the Sword,' where the protagonist begins to recount his horrible exploit by identifying himself with the victim, before confessing that he is in reality the 'other,' the vile spy, up to that point treated with due disgust in the 'third person.' Moon himself provides the 'ideological' comment on this narrative procedure: 'What a man does is as though all men had done it."'* For this reason, the psychologistic dissolution of the social is forced to transcend itself, to go further. This is not only a matter of identifying and grounding a nonhistoricist history, or a history capable of constructing synchronic, not merely diachronic, models, set up to grasp the ties of interdependence or "functional correlation," to use the language and phrase of Spencer-neither does it involve simplistically burning incense to the myth of a progress so automatic as to form a kind of lay religion, at the same time raw and commonplace, without tension and drama. Elementary paradigms of human behavior are sought, from which supposedly universally applicable characteristics were drawn, but which were at the same time a- or metahistorical. It is clear that now the dissolution of the social into psychologism is forced to appear under the lying uniform of a psychological semiotics, which, as in the case of Parsonian structural-functionalism, claims to prefigure and exactly anticipate all possible human behavior. Its descriptive schemas and taxonomies hinge on formalistic entities whose link with the social field and the specific, historical background, has been completely broken. Universal, really generic, categories, daughters of indeterminate abstraction, are triumphant: "bet," "seduction," "falling in love," "challenge," "love," "violence," "aggression," and so on. These are the sinews, the chapter headings of modern tracts on the passions and

50

Chapter 5

feelings which in their frank historicity recall the works on morals of the eighteenth century. We could say that the model of theoretical psychologism as ideology, set up as a coherent system, is the Instructions to Confessors of Sant’Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori, or the painstaking and refined casuistics of seventeenth-century Jesuit moral philosophy. Indeed, one aspect of convincing plausibility, typical of abstract and historically indeterminate categorization, should be noted. It is adapted to anyone without corresponding to anyone’s effective experience. Who has never been infatuated, has never experienced the pangs of nostalgia, or of anguish or uncertainty, risk or fear? Who can say he has never experienced within himself, in depth, the corrosive frustration of a missed appointment, or the upraising delight of a goal longed for and finally reached? The semiotics of the passions does not claim to discover: it limits itself to clarifying a ”spontaneous” knowledge, already in the possession of whoever is listening or reading. Its practice is anamnestic. Its phenomenological descriptions simply confirm themselves. They work on the dangerous protocols of common sense and look for confirmation in introspection and memory, between the materials of the everyday and the private, in solitary experiences. A new style of communication of knowledge is born, in which the guru-lecturer-interpreter thinks aloud in a fictitious first person. The listeners-readers become the Iwe impersonated by the guru who, by his discourse, makes himself an individualized mirror for each of his listenersreaders-spectators. “My violence,” ”I who love”-these phrases take every member of the audience for a swift introspective examination-repeated a thousandfold-of his own violence-love, so as to discover once more in himself the genuine confirmation of what the collective ego is saying through the guru. The group is atomized in a solipsistic brooding mistaken for knowledge. Not only does the criterion of scientific knowledge as ”public procedure’’ diminish, one which is open to all and analytically controllable by all, but the guru himself must become ever more a cryptic oracle so that anyone can find in his proto-form discourse their own solitary truth, an Erlebnis-knowledge, incommunicable

The Symmetrical Limits

51

and yet self-evident. The mirror is expertly the ”mirror of my desires,’’ and is presented as the form of rationality in the culture of narcissism. THE DEATH OF SUBJECTIVITY IN THE NAME OF ITS REEVALUATION The cognitive and practico-political implications of this situation have been exposed with cruel zeal. ”If in Freud neuroses and psychoses are rooted in an erotic and infantile past, and hence are completely or only partially eradicable, here they are dependent on the flow of communication. The communication models implicitly accept a parliamentary notion of reality where there are no real antagonisms; in the official accounts all conflict and differences are traced to breakdowns in communication, as if real contradictions did not exist.”3The same notion is stated or implied by much of the communication theory of psychoses; repression and antagonism are sublimated to become mixed and confused messages. Hence, in Gregory Bateson, who pioneered this approach-and on whom Laing and Cooper draw-the ego-function is interpreted as a way of discriminating the various codes of communication. For instance, in the case of schizophrenia it is not necessary to look for a specific trauma in childhood. The specificity to be investigated and established is to be looked for at a very abstract and formal level. Again, the issue does not consist in the fact that these abstract formulations are wrong. Rather, they are superficial. If during a therapy a specific approach turns out to be effective, there is no argument. What is under discussion here is the fact that a given approach which might be effective within the limits of the therapy might pretend also to be something more than a description of the ongoing processes. In other words, an interruption of communication is something more than a mere breakdown in communication. It is rooted in other tensions and possibly in conflicts of a different nature. Communication is only a moment of existence. It is not its totality. Society is not a linguistic metaphor.

52

Chapter 5

Moreover, psychologism cannot be counted on as a defense of subjectivity. The subject is actually in danger and bound to decline in present-day society-a society in which rationality has abandoned the individual to become a structural characteristic of impersonal formal organizations-especially if, in order to save it, it will be, as it were, intensified and glamorized. The cult of subjective feelings, eventually helped by drugs, is bound to weaken and finally to destroy the subject. As it has been aptly remarked by Russel Jacoby: “A cult of subjectivity dopes the discontented into taking their own death, figuratively and in fact, for life itself. The immediacy of it all drives out mediacy of any of it. Sustained political and theoretical thought is not simply rejected but forgotten and repressed. The slogans and rhetoric that replace it are as vacant and thoughtless as the society that tosses them up. The specter not only of society, but of its opposition, that has lost its memory and mind, haunts history. . . . The depletion of political concepts in favor of psychological and subjective ones is a byproduct of the scramble for the remnants of human e~perience.”~ It becomes clear, therefore, why the autonomy of biographical method and life history as sociological methodology of listening fight, by reason of their basic interactivity, simultaneously on two fronts: against the raw authoritarianism and naturalistic objectivism of the quantifiers and also against the authoritarian manipulation of the p~ychologists.~ It is not by chance that now for some years the theoretical debate on biographical method has seen a rather surprising revival.

NOTES 1. R. Redfield,”Social Science among the Humanities,” Measure, n. 1, Winter 1950, p. 65. 2. G. Genette, Figure 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1976, pp. 294-95 (my emphasis). 3. R. Jacoby, Social Amnesia, Boston: Beacon Press, 1975, p. 143. 4. Jacoby, Social Amnesia, pp. 115-16. 5. On objectivism and its unsurmountable limits, see F. Gil, Coppiefilosofiche, in Enciclopedia, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1978, pp. 1050-95. As regards psychoanalysis as practice and the forms of power to which it gives rise, see among others, P. Sollers, ”Le marxisme sodomis6 par la psychanalyse,” in Ln violence, Paris, 1978, pp. 61-69.

6

The Specificity of the Biographical Method: From Naturalistic Social Research to ”Joint” Research

A DOUBLE REQUIREMENT

I

n my opinion, the growing interest in the sociological use of biography corresponds to a double, basic need: a) The need for methodological renewal, that arises from the generalized crisis of the heuristic tools of sociology. The classical methodology of the social sciences, what Gouldner called, ironically, the ”Holy Method,” has lost its good reputation. There are increasingly numerous complaints concerning its basic axioms, of objectivity and nomothetic intentionality. Comte wrote, ”In general one does not observe well except by placing oneself outside.” However, the effort to integrate sociology in the field of the natural sciences has produced only a scholastic method. In fact, there is no real growth of sociological knowledge corresponding to the increasingly sophisticated techniques. We are too often forced to regret the ingenuous methodologies of the classics, which did not dissolve the social into heterogeneous fragments and preserved in their object of study its concrete significance and its synthetic unity. Behind the methodological emphasis we see the outline, or

53

54

Chapter 6

the triumph, of a new identity and a particular ideological function of the sociologist and of sociology. The sociologist is becoming the technician of a ”social” whose foundation and structures he or she is careful not to call into question. Sociology offers itself as a system of natural techniques for intervention-social engineering. In the most critical areas of sociology, one is now asking if one should not rightly abandon the axiom of objectivity which grounds the method. This return to discussion of the subjectobject separation becomes a systematic search for other approaches. This forces us to reintegrate the observer into the epistemological framework of sociology. The reified passivity which the Method attributes to the‘ social ”thing” is negated. The hyperbolic doubt goes further. It is reattached to the hegemony of nomothetic intentionality. The search for social ”laws” has come up against growing difficulties, at times with real dilemmas. At the same time it remains the touchstone of the scientificity of sociology. Its critics stress vigorously the heuristic uselessness and formalism of these laws. They claim a right to concreteness, and in fact assert the immanent historicity of any social fact: its irreducible specificity, which only a descriptive intentionality can account for. This reopening of the issue of objectivity and the character of the nomothetic which characterize sociological epistemology has led to the growing estimation of a more or less alternative methodology-biographical method. b) The need of a new anthropozogy, which appears in ”advanced capitalism.” Here too we are dealing with a need for concreteness: the major structural explanations which provide very general categories do not satisfy those to whom they are addressed. People want to understand their daily lives, their difficulties, contradictions, tensions, and problems which they impose. They demand, consequently, a science of mediations which can translate social structures into individual or microsocial behavior. How do social structures and dynamics create a dream, a failure, a psychosis, individual behavior, or the concrete relation between two individuals? This need for a social hermeneutics of the individual psychological sphere cannot be comprehended and gratified by classical sociology.

T h e Specificity of the Biographical Method

55

In fact, the latter proposes constant and general relations where instead there is a need to link the absolute historicity of an action with the generality of writing. It establishes accompanying variations between a taxonomy of individual behavior and social taxonomies, where there should be an uninterrupted articulation of genetico-conditional hypotheses which run from an action or an event to a structure by way of a network of social mediation. Now, biography which becomes a sociological tool seems to promise this mediation from action to structure, from an individual history to social history. It seems to imply the construction of a system of relation and the possibility of a nonformal, historical, and concrete theory of social action. This is a theory which would be able to eliminate the "epistemological break" which in Althusser 's view unsurmountably divides the psychological from the social sphere. It is a theory which consequently can respond to the most urgent needs of other human sciences seeking a critical reopening of discussion-psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. We have a crisis of method, the need for a social hermeneutics of individual concrete actions: biographical method stands at a crossroads of the theoretical and methodological research of the human sciences.

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE BIOGRAPHICAL METHOD Before sketching the general lines of a critical biographical method, one must question the use sociologists have made of biographies. a) Biographical method from the beginning has been presented as a scientific challenge. This challenge has two shocking aspects: biographical method claims to attribute a knowledge value to subjectivity. A biography is subjective at various levels. It reads social reality from the viewpoint of a historically specified individual. It rests on elements and materials for the most part autobiographical, and thus exposed to the innumerable deformations of a subject-object which observes

56

Chapter 6

and reencounters himself. It is often located in the framework of a personal interaction-interview. In the event of any biographical account this interaction is much closer and more complex than the relations of the observer-observed admitted by the Method. It involves the co-optation of the observer into the truth of the observed, reciprocal manipulatory mechanisms which can be controlled with difficulty, the absence of objective reference points, and so on-the biographical method presents itself as beyond any quantitative and experimental methodology. The quantifiable elements of a biography are generally few in number, and marginal. Biography brings out quality almost entirely. Besides, one cannot see how the logic of experimental method could be applied to biography. How can life history, the Erlebnis of behavior, falsify any general hypothesis? They have tried this in the United States, but with very slender results. Subjective, qualitative, alien to any schema of hypothesistesting, biographical method is d'embZke projected beyond the epistemological framework established by the social sciences. Sociology did not accept the challenge which came from this epistemological diversity and which tried everything to restore the biographical method in the traditional schemas. And at what a price! Through a double epistemological and methodological circuit we have been forced to use biographical method while totally canceling out its heuristic specificity. b) This epistemological impoverishment of biography has often taken the form of reduction to an ensemble of juxtaposed biographical material. Once its synthetic unity has been broken, biography becomes a simple, crude inventory of sociological knowledge. This inventory will be translated by the subsequent development of sociology into a series of often fragmentary and always partial information items. This reduction does not recognize any real heuristic autonomy for biography. Biography is only the vehicle and the condensed support of basic information which by themselves would have no value or meaning-a personalized sociological fragment which offers a series of useful data if analysis manages to place these in the framework of a much more general interpretation. In current parlance, it is possible to "extract" ele-

The Specificity of the Biographical Method

57

ments, problems, hypotheses, and information, from a series of biographies. A second phase of the research would transcend and reintegrate all this in a larger interpretive framework, which a really scientific methodology will then take the task of testing. Biographies are used "for knowing," but they are stubbornly not considered as organized knowledge, but as cryptic knowledge that one must learn to decipher. This use of biography as a source of information is clearly legitimate and often necessary (thinking, for example, of the reconstruction of ancient skills). This cannot be confused with the heuristic specificity of the biographical method: rather, it belongs to the attitude toward the chronicle of social historians who make use of oral sources. c) The epistemological impoverishment of the biographical method has also taken on a second, much more sophisticated, form. This is the reduction of biography to a simple social "life history" usable as an example, a case, or an illustrafion within an interpretation situated on a higher level of abstraction. Now, the function of a "case" or "examples" conceals a whole epistemology. First and foremost, the concrete as an example implies a formalist interpretive framework. The logical break which sets the (abstract) form against the (concrete)content of the social fact transforms every event or every social and specific act into a proof a posteriori of the validity or operational capacity of a formal model and a social taxonomy. Conversely, we know the concrete when we recognize it by means of a formal typology-that is, when we situate it in the class of events of which it is a case or an example. In this epistemological perspective, a biography will not interest the sociologist as a section or vertical or horizontal slice through a social system which it is supposed to synthesize in the form of individual actions. A biography will be interesting as a meaningful example of certain aspects of the social which a structural analysis will already have studied exhaustively. The biography of a young delinquent may perhaps confirm a theory about juvenile deviance; perhaps it will confirm a structural study of urban marginality and anomie; it will never be the logical point of departure, though at times it will be the temporal point of departure.

58

Cknpter 6

Further, the reduction of the concrete to examples returns to a logico-formal epistemology which gives the value of knowledge only to those generalizable aspects of an event or specific action. The Aristotelian axiom ”there is no science which is not science of the general” governs a model of abstraction which sends back into the sphere of the irrational, chance, and the unknowable everything which makes up the unrepeatable specificity of any event. Only what is common to other events of the same, or another, social agent is worth knowing scientifically. Biography concerns the sociologist for what it has in common with other biographies which are sociologically analogous. The specificity of an individual history which distinguishes it from any other and makes it unique thus becomes an epistemological barrier, a ”residue” which cannot interest science and returns one to a logic of ”chance.” The call to a descriptive reading which emerges from any biography has always been placed in parenthesis by the biographical method, or, better, has been relegated to the sphere of psychology. We have not simply been forced to extend historical or psychiatric methods-that is, to construct typical biographies which would permit the definition of homologies between biographies-but also to locate them in relation to an irreducible specific moment. d) Such a reduction of biography to a juxtaposition of information and to an example sends one back to what we have termed an epistemological challenge. The two elements which make up the specificity of biography are barriers which are to be surrounded or uprooted. Subjectivity and the antinomothetic requirement of biography define the limits of its scientificity.They are the immanent characteristics despite which biographical method, notwithstanding everything, preserves a certain heuristic value. THE EPISTEMOLOGICALWAGER Even among the experts of biographical method, its inherent epistemological wager has escaped them. In fact, we have been forced to bring biography back to the epistemological

The Specificity of the Biographical Method

59

shelter of the natural sciences-objectivity, the inductive study of constant correlations (the nomothetic attitude), the quantitative translation of acquired information, and so on. The subjectivity inherent in any autobiographical account or document-because, let us not forget, the materials used by the biographical method are mostly autobiographical-escapes a hermeneutics of biography which only uses its objective aspects. The reading of biographical materials becomes the systematic search for more general information, data, descriptions, social ”life historicity”-in a word, for ”facts,” which open up a gap through the ”carnival of subjectivity” (Lukics). The qualitative is annulled in the presence of the quantifiable. The active subjectivity of autobiography is extinguished in the objective life of biographical chronicle. The history of life, any biographical material in fact, claims to be unique! The absolute historicity they claim is denied by a hermeneutics which is alert to their characteristics as examples-common, that is, to other histories, materials and their fixed correlations, and the classification of a social taxonomy. It is the generality which the biographical method sniffs out in the biographies it uses. The remainder-the particular, the specific, the unique-reveals local color, maintains a concrete shell in the effort of abstraction, and has nothing to do with scientific knowledge. This double evasion is projected by the epistemological specificity of biography into a methodology of which neither the premises nor the results have ever seriously been discussed. The central methodological problem of the level of representa tiveness of a biography, which may measure its utility for inductive generalizations, corresponds to the epistemological negation of subjectivity. What are the criteria and the conditions of this representativeness? When and how does a biography ground scientific knowledge? Traditional biographical method has provided two answers which correspond to two different uses of biography. On the one hand, biography will help to verify an interpretive model. The choice of the more representative biographies requires that their general criteria of identification be already established. Now, these criteria are simply the main variables of the

60

Chapter 6

hermeneutic or descriptive models which biographies have to test. A biography is representative if it is structured around elements which correspond to the projection of the model’s variables on the level of an individual life. Reduced to an example of a control, biography teaches us nothing that was not already in the formal model. It confirms and tests already acquired knowledge, and is certainly not a source of new knowledge (scholastic reductions of the concept as the support for an abstract model). Nonetheless this claims to confirm and test: when not reattached to the general model through a network of hypothetical mediations, the concrete example does not prove; at best it illustrates. Again, the example, the interpretive or taxonomic model does not verify the case except on the condition of throwing into the residual sphere of the ”case” everything in the biographies in question which is not generalizable and is special and unique to each on-verything, that is, outside the model. This is an occasionalism very like a logical petitio principii, since it legitimates the escarnotage, the magical disappearance of the concrete which contradicts the model! On the other hand, the difficulties increase if we no longer claim only to test the model or type, but to elaborate it by starting from biographies. To give them once more a heuristic role is a noble effort, but on what can the general value of the hypothetical models this produces be based? For it is clear that the choice of the more representative biographies of the social universe will depend wholly on the sociological intuition of the sociologist, and thus on the sociologist’s value system. Certainly one cannot easily get out of the labryinth of formal logic and its model of abstraction! Thus, biography is a proof which an underlying occasionalism directs a priori toward the desired conclusion; or it has an active heuristic role which leads to the hypothesis whose general representativeness is grounded by nothing. In the first case, biography is relegated to the function of a concrete, marginal support of the analytical framework. In the other, it remains a very generic instrument which can only be used scientifically in the preliminary phases of sociological investigation. In both cases, nothing seems to justify Thomas

The Specifcity of the Biographical Method

61

and Znaniecki’s famous statement that biographical documents were ”the perfect sociological material.” The difficulties posed by the “representativeness” of biographies have now pushed the upholders of the biographical method toward a still more reductive approach. Increasingly often, the representativeness of some accurately selected biographies has been replaced by a representativeness based on numbers. The number of biographies replaces their nature as examples. Biographical methodology is structured according to the statistical model of sampling. The quality of biographical material, its richness, loses importance in favor of its simple statistical representativeness. Biography is assimilated into the unstructured interview: it is distinguished from it only by reintroducing local color and a more diachronic accent. The hermeneutics of biography too imitates the forms of analytic interpretation characteristic of the interviews-the identification and quantified translation of objective elements, the use of quantitative elements as illustrative scraps of supporting evidence, and so on. At the price of eliminating specificity and interest, established biographical method attempts to squeeze biography into the traditional epistemological framework and methodology of sociology. Naturally, this methodology uses ever more objective techniques, set up so as to guarantee the extraneousness of the observer in the neutralization of the materials. The biographical interview is undoubtedly the one which involves sociological situations to the greatest extent. As authentic interaction, often very intense, it is purged of the subjectivity of the sociologist like that of the autobiographical account. Hence are derived all the techniques which help to distance the very suspicion of an active role of the observer, who must not participate directly, but must only ”stimulate” the object. The American SociologicalAssociation goes so far as to counsel an ”absent presence, darkly passive,’’ with completely factual verbal stimuli (who, whom, when, where) and the ostentatious recourse very swiftly to the tape and other gadgets of scientific objectivity. The same technical exorcism of the subjective is applied to the materials. Their linguistic coloration is diluted by transcription into a basic language, neutral and

62

Chapter 6

banal. The majority of observations and qualitative details are thus eliminated. Biography is often transformed into a record of a chronology, an authentic sociologicalfiche. One arrives at a third person rewriting and a bureaucratic toneWeber said sine ira nec studio-and not the history of a human experience but its objective skeleton. This is a wretched destination for the epistemological paradoxes inherent in biographical method!

THE SPECIFICITY OF THE BIOGRAPHICAL METHOD: "JOINT" RESEARCH AND ITS METHODICAL PROBLEMS The negation of the specificity of biography, thanks to a nomothetic methodology and to reifying techniques, betrays its essential nature, which is its profound historicity, its uniqueness. On the contrary, it is a matter of making explicit through and through the implications of this specificty and groundingalso the epistemological, methodological, and technical specificity of the biographical method. The materials used by biographical method can be divided into two large groups. On the one hand we have primary biographical materials: that is, autobiographical accounts directly collected by a researcher in the context of a face-to-face interaction. On the other, we have secondary biographical materials, or biographical documents of any kind which are not used by a researcher in the framework of a primary relation with his "characters": correspondence, photographs, written accounts and statements, official documents, court records, press cuttings, and so on. Earlier we recalled that current sociological research much prefers secondary biographical material. The reasons proposed for this preference are of various kinds. However, the basic, true reason, has always been passed over in silence. The real reason is that primary biographical materials, as opposed to the secondary, necessarily imply, for their collection in acceptable conditions, a basic situation and status of equality between researchers and objects of research.

The Specificity of the Biographical Method

63

This in itself is enough to destroy the traditional notion of scientific research as a power operation, of the initial awareness of the researcher as private capital to be ”spent” ad lib, and of human groups as ”objects” of study, by definition subaltern, passive material for analysis, persons naturalistically degraded into findings of raw material for the success of the scientific undertaking which they have no possibility of significantly influencing. With the proposal formulated here, this model of ”colonialist” research, still today largely in a majority, is put into crisis; research is transformed in both its bases and practice into ”joint” research. From sociology as a neutral technique and socially neutral administrative practice, one moves on to sociology as meaningful human participation and the occasion for self-development. Beyond this essential transition, which should not be confused with the vague voluntarist sociality which often tries to make studies which are deficient from the scientific point of view acceptable on the moral plane, very difficult problems of method remain unsolved. Only the practice of research and critical reflection upon its conduct will be able jointly to arrive at a solution. Nicole Gagnon has, in my opinion, grasped some of these problems very accurately. First, it seems to me that Gagnon understands the essence and the limitations of such an important work for the methodology of life history as Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez. It is true that in this case the ”discourse is richer than the comment of the sociologist,” and that the ”art of the researcher here converges with that of the journalist or film director: he is pressed to discover the case-type and put his story in good order.”’ Further, especially with respect to Daniel Bertaux’s position, I believe Gagnon’s evaluation, which tends to place him on the level of oral history rather than that of the anthropologist, is well founded. There is no doubt that the sources of which the oral historian avails himself are at the same time ”witnesses” and ”actors.” However, it is a fact, says Gagnon, that in the case of Bertaux’s research on bakers ”the most valuable information was provided not by the bakers themselves but by a dealer in trading investments.”2

64

Chapter 6

This is a methodological position which is still partial, and clearly focused with regard to a specific heuristic interest, "because there is life story and life story, baking industry and artisan bakers, biographical data and autobiographical account, practices and experience. If I ask an artisan baker how bakers are produced, is this really the same thing as asking him to tell me his life story? Perhaps I should get the same account if I seemed more interested in his personality than his occupation? Should I not perhaps, at the moment of using the material, go to a different definition of the data?"3 The idea of protecting oneself from the "viscous mysteries of the lived" is a warning never more timely. Life history is often presented as a form of journey, specially in accounts by immigrants, or in terms of a personal itinerary still able to present itself as highly meaningful only within, or as representative of, a social group. Again, it may be taken as especially remarked on by Agnes Hankiss as a "mythologizing of childhood''-as the basis of the strategy of an adult ego trying, understandably, to "integrate his successes and failures into an historical unity.'I4 Once again, the tendency to structure in psychological terms relations with the institutional structure of the social seems very strong: from the individual point of view it takes on the clarity and obvious immediacy of a natural process. The explicative schema can then become seriously negated. Neither, as disclaimer or as alibi, is it valid to argue that this is a matter of giving the floor to those "sentenced by history." The intention is certainly praiseworthy, but as a guarantee of scientific validity and human meaning it is rather deficient. The oral culture of illiterates cannot be a-critically mythologized without giving rise to serious analytical inconveniences, and to politically and socially contradictory positions. It is well known how prejudices and emotional reactions weigh heavily on the notion of culture in general, but especially on that of "popular culture"-not only among anthropologistswhich it is neither easy to clarify nor to dispel. In general, "men of culture" have openly a consolidated interest as regards the fate of culture, whether literate and linked to the printing press and the written word or, conversely, to use

Tlic Spccificity of the Biogrqdiicnl Method

65

Marshall McLuhan’s paradoxical formulas, of a tribal kind, auditory and tactile other than visual. It is probably for this reason, basically a prescientific one, that when they deal with this they take hold with a degree of emotiveness considerably greater than can be tolerated. This emotiveness, understandable and justifiable in itself, does, however, have the inconvenience of not permitting the clear distinction between personal preferences and scientific findings. Thus, as regards ”high” or academic, scholastic, culture, ”popular culture” spellbinds them and exercises the attraction of the ”lived.” It would perhaps not be out of place humbly to point out that demagogic empathy spreads, and that high culture also, in order to travel across the earth and among people, needs to be thought out, even also to be written, assimilated, published-in a word-lived. However, the distinction between high culture and popular culture-or ”low” culture-is perhaps subject to the dichotomy between culture reflected upon, articulated and fully aware, and inznzediateZy existen tial culture, anthropologically conceived of as a mode of life, the ensemble of shared experiences and values. This is basically linked to the everyday, perhaps not wholly unmindful of the spontaneous, noisy utterances of the ”great beasts” of Vico’s phrase, which an alert contemporary musicologist would not have a hard job in seeing reemerge in deafening rock music. There is, however, a difference to be sought between high and low culture in the fact-empirically verifiable-that low culture, through its existentially significant nature, is also irreversible and does not permit the intellectual game (which we should be tempted to call ”intellectualistic”) of changing opinions, basic attitude, and ideals with a rapid stroke of the pen. I believe in addition that high culture, dominated by the classical-humanist tradition-insofar as it appears as the last normative moment of any possible culture in the real sense-demonstrates two insurmountable limitations which in the contemporary world are not only theoretical weaknesses but grave political and moral deficiencies. First, high culture in the normative sense is exclusivist and ends up logically by contrasting the cultured individual, the kalds kcii agathds, to the undifferentiated mass of

66

Chapter 6

the many, the polloi, more anthropoids than men in the full sense or, if you wish to use the Crocean phrase-disdainfully benign-men in the purely biological sense. Second, culture in a normative sense, as essentially eurocentric, is a culture which forbids the understanding of others, and hence communication with them on an equal footing; it can at most consider them as a "premise," or cultures "so to speak," "illicit" cultures, precultures, or uncultures. In this connection there is, on the other hand-possibly to remove or self-absolve from a guilt complex which, according to Claude Lkvi-Strauss, is the authentic "remorse" of Western European civilization-a tendency to glamorize popular culture as the single, exclusive depository of genuine popular values, while mythologizing about a kind of antiquissima Italorum sapientia. This amounts to an untenable and demagogic mythologization of the everyday, even in its most clearly banal and nonmeaningful aspect^.^ In this regard, it is my opinion that one should return to a critical, basic reading of Antonio Gramsci. Aside from the gross misunderstanding of Albery to Asor Rosa, among others, when he took, in Scrittori e popolo, "national-popular" to mean "sentimental" and "low-brow," there is in Gramsci a clear awareness, wholly sociological, that we must analyze specific relations of production. These, equally with any other product, also condition "cultural production," its distribution, and its yield.'j This must be explicitly remembered, despite the well-known limitations in Gramsci's conception of the social sciences and in particular of sociology. Gramsci entertained of the latter a reductive and old-fashioned positivist conception, as is above all evident in the critical observations on Robert Michels. However, incredible though it seems, Antonio Gramsci seemed to take up a more open and advanced position than his modern followers. The idea of "relations of production," while basic and necessary, is not enough to account for social phenomena which are also culturally complex. In my research on the Mafia as a problem of national development I had already remarked how relations of production do not explain everything,just as, on the other hand, factors like "mentality" or "custom" end

The Specificity of the Biographical Method

67

up by considering as an explanation what was to be explained in the first place. I then observed that insofar as they are basic to the production of the material means of subsistence and perpetuation of any society, there is no doubt that relations of production hold a logical and historical position of the first order. However, further, if they are adopted unilaterally as universal explanatory criteria, it is impossible to escape from the shallows of mechanistic arguments which recall too closely the dogmatic, not to mention the miserably catechistic, use of dialectical materialism, Diamat, in the Stalin p e r i ~ dRelations .~ of production do not merely refer us to a macrosocial structure dominated by an impersonal logic: in the complex framework of Marxist argument, they also point to a gesellschaftliche Sein, a real "social being," which is provided by the ensemble, or "network of social relations which underlies the technicalformal structure of the productive system. In this sense, life history and workers' autobiographies in general are basic tools for going beyond the formally codified, objective, institutional framework, and for attempting the explanation of the nexus institutions-society-groups-individuals.8 It is interesting to observe how official Italian Marxism finally arrived at the stage of "realizing" the consummation of the historicist political-cultural tradition from which it was born, now set roughly before the deficiencies of the diachronic model. These deficiencies would require the construction of an explanatory, predictive synchronic model-which Max Weber in the 1920s identified in a climate of total misunderstanding which still continues today. However, official Italian Marxism knows of no other way out save the perpetuation of the analysis of politics as a "disembodied" reality, enclosed in itself, in an elitist and late Crocean perspective. On that basis it plays intellectualistically with politics, losing it along the way (see for this the review Laboratorio politico), or else treads the old paths of a vapid irrationalism linked to a falsified reading of Nietzsche and the oracular, neometaphysical suggestions of Martin Heidegger. Neither should it be thought that with the proposition of life histories or the different but converging one of oral history and history from below, there is a claim to offer a miraculous

68

Chnpter 6

recipe capable by itself of resolving all the problems. Awareness of the problems actually open is not lacking among the practitioners of the ”new history” themselves. It has been remarked: “We write history using sources which become organically expressed at the moment we collect autobiographies-how much of the intervening period, the most recent evolution of mind, has modified the legacy of remembrance? How much can we describe of a period in the past using oral sources collected now?” These questions are important, but do not detract from the validity of other observations: ”Oral history is born from the common people . . . it stimulates teachers and students to collaborate, to break down the barriers between history and the community, and encourages members of the poorest classes, and especially the old, to recover a sense of dignity and self-confidence.At the same time, oral history challenges the myths which history takes for granted, and the authoritarian judgments sanctioned by tradition, and makes ready a weapon for the radical transformation of the social significance of hi~tory.”~ The difficulties of methodology and conceptualization met by the ”new history”-meaning by this term the nondynastic, nonelite types of history, from oral to psycho-history-have on the other hand, fairly obviously, provided the occasion for a series of attacks, which have spread in France itself to level charges against both its theoretical presuppositions and its political orientation.*OThe differences between history and life histories are basic, but the contribution that the idea of ”historical horizon” offers to life histories and their analytical meaning is essential, in the sense that it prevents their surreptitious use in a psychologizing fashion. This does not mean seeing, as we have emphasized above, only a qualitative brushstroke in life history which serves to embellish an already given picture by means of its existential dimensions. On the contrary, the problem lies in constructing a new historicity, which means a nonhistoricist one, not merely diachronic and purely from above, and at the same time in not dehistorizing human phenomena. Franco Fornari allows us to clarify further with an example (which deals with the apparent banality of the everyday and

The Specificity of the Biographical Method

69

seems an intellectually refined way of recycling its remains), how inadequate is the dehistorized psychological dimension." Fornari's is relatively simple and linear. By way of logical (denotative) analysis and coinemic analysis (connotative, symbolic) of the verbal interactions of a class Council, Fornari proposes to witness in action the relations between the public collective-the State with its system of norms and laws-and the private collective-the family as a system of three roles: father, mother, and child. The class Council is indeed the point at which these two dimensions (public and private) are simultaneously present-a place selected, what is more, in a significant moment: that of deciding whether or not to transgress a State norm, concerning the adoption of textbooks. Fomari sets out to show how structures and affective-private codes influence the perception of public structures and their objective-structural codes. In other words, he wants to record statu nascenti the unconscious psychological-social legitimation of the forms and contents of social power. This is all done with a therapeutic-in the broad sense-intention. The coinemic analysis of affective codes which condition the perception of public, institutional facts should allow them to be perceived in a way less pervaded by uncontrollable private phantasms. Here are the conclusions: the coinemic analysis of the class Council demonstrates the continual presence of the private in the perception of the public. The State is experienced as a maternal, persecuting entity. Fornari indeed speaks of the possibility of understanding the whole "social" as the product of a primary paranoia (an argument taken from Andre Green). The social would thus be derived from the enlarged projection of persecuting family specters! Some limitations become clear, and I shall outline them schematically. 1)Fomari returns from the private to the public through the mediation of affective family codes. This is a classical psychologistic perspective, which grounds institutional dynamics on enlarged family dynamics and codes. It would have been more correct to go from institutional dynamics to family dynamics and codes as their mediated expression (to go from the whole to its parts). A State which for precise historical-social

70

Chapter 6

motives is at the same time persecutory and welfare, provides models of authority which reinforce persecutory-welfare family models and make possible the familiaristic perception of the State itself. The heuristic first stage should be the institutional-structural fact, of which the private moment is the complex, mediated expression. It is not the State which derives its forms from the family (for example, its welfare-persecutory nature). It is the family which is confirmed and reinforced in its affective codes by the structural forms taken historically, from the State (which then naturally finds it convenient to root itself in these codes, thus perpetuating itself). 2) To start from the family and the private in order to grasp therein the foundation of the social and the State implies an atomistic conception of the social as the juxtaposition of elementary units, not as a totality heuristically different and primary as regards the series of the parts (cf. pp. 29-30: “The task is to reduce the social to units of human interaction”). 3) The following reductive reading of these psychologicalsocial interactions, reduced to the classical attraction-repulsion (introject-project)model, is typical of all rational frameworks (Simmel, Von Wiese, Moreno, and so on). 4) There is a consequent reductive conception of ideology: ideology=private-affective code=irrational, and on the contrary public=scientific-rational=objective.This is a reduction of ideology to a moment of irrational-private implanting of the public, social fact. It is an obliteration of ideology as a Weltanschauung rationally oriented to its goal from the point of view of social power (badly assimilated Frankfurt School!). Ideology is ”false consciousness’’ but can also present itself as ”plausible project.” 5) The affective codes selected have a dehistorized, universalizing, and formal character: the codes of Father, Mother, and Child are not historically and socially undifferentiated: within the same formal group different ”Father” codes may coexist. 6) It is not the informal structure of the affective codes which determines the affective unconscious life of the group (for example, the class Council), but the network of structural social roles. That the representatives of the Father and the Mother should be two teachers (and not a father and mother

The Specificity of the Biographical Method

71

present in the Council as parents) is due to the prevalence of the real (not affective!) power of teachers in the Council itself.

Therefore, if is fvom the structural analysis of the group fhaf institutional psychoanalysis should start, noffvom its afective structure.

In the same way, psychoanalysis of ideology should start from social structure, not from the psychological-social structure nor indeed the psychological-individual one. These are the basic reasons which guarantee the validity of our proposal of group biography insofar as it places itself at a safe distance from individualist atomization and also from the outmoded positivist type of macrosociological analysis, while at the same time it assists and satisfies the basic requirement now facing the social sciences. This requirement lies basically in transcending the logic of diachronic linearity, and thus requires the construction of a historically based synchronic model, or a departure from the now inadequate historicist historicity and the foundation of a new historicity which will not disembody the political as regards the social, but rather retrace their deep, unitary dialectic by exploring the reciprocity between givenness and the experienced. In this perspective, life histories and group biography, beyond any more or less irrational, demagogic romanticism, become an obligatory stage toward the methodological and substantial renewal of the sciences of man in society.

NOTES 1. N. Gagnon, ”Donnees autobiographiques et praxis culturelle,” Cahiers lnternationaux de Sociologie, July-December 1980, p. 291. 2. Gagnon, ”Donnees autobiographiques et praxis culturelle,” p. 292. 3. Gagnon, “Donnees autobiographiques et praxis culturelle,” p. 293. 4. A. Hankiss, Ontologie du moi: Le Xiarrangement mythologique de l’histoire de vie, paper presented at Uppsala, Sweden, August 1978, published as ”Ontology of the Self“ in Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, ed. D. Bertaux, Beverly Hills, Calif Sage Publications, 1981. 5. This undoubtedly offers ammunition and openings for the most stubborn of the elitists. For a recent, suggestive example, see Edoardo Sanguineti: ”In times like ours, of open narrators, naif writers, and the whole revival of interest in oral literature, spontaneous and wild, in which the ’cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller’ is minutely examined-like the Menocchio explored

72

Chapter 6

by Carlo Ginzburg, and the ’Poor men’ of the contemporary Parma chronicle by the parish priest Franchi, without mentioning that kind of irresistible cult not established and entrenched for every form of extra-, para-, contro- and sub-literature. . . .” (Paese Sera, 26 February 1981, p. 3). 6. On “popular culture,“ see Sociologia della cultura popolare in Italia, ed. R. Cipriani, Naples: Liguori, 1979. 7. See my Rapport0 sulla ma@, Naples: Liguori, 1978, especially pp. 289-91. 8. I had already stressed in my A n Alternative Sociology (ed. J. W. Freiburg, trans. P. and B. Columbaro, New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979) the analytical importance of workers’ autobiographical accounts on their working activity, underlining too the risk of psychologizing which might mystify factual contradictions (cf. pp. 110-18). 9. See La storia ora1e:fra antropologia e storia, in Quaderni Storici, n. 35, p. 315. 10. For a quick note see R. Rossanda, ”Dopo la storia, quale destino,” in I1 Manifesto, 13 February 1981, p. 6: ”France has had two schools: the traditional still defended today by Michel Debre against new approaches to teaching. But it also had, at the end of the 1920s, the birth of ’ h a l e s ’ and the rise of the historiography of Bloch and Lucien Fsbvre.” 11. F. Fomari, I1 Minotauro: psicoanalisi dell’ideologia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977.

Index

Althusser, Louis, 55 Ammassari, Pirzio, 33nl animals, 6 7 Aristotle, xvii-xviii, 5, 30, 58 Augustine, Saint, x autonomy, xviii-xix, 14-16, 23-24, 52

55-56, 58; totalization and, 28-33,35-36,4041; uses of, 18-20, 55-58, 5940. See also life history Blumer, Herbert, 18 Borges, Jose Luis, 49 Brecht, Bertolt, 8 Burckhardt, Jacob, x

Bateson, Gregory, 51 Benda, Julian, 45 Bertaux, Daniel, 24, 63 biography: autonomy of, 14-16, 23-24, 52; epistemological impoverishment of, 55-58; of groups, 38-41,47-51,69-71; heuristic value of, 27-33,3941, 53-55,56-62; historical context of, 16-18; of individuals, 3941; materials of, 24-25, 62-63; need for, 53-55; objectivity of, 58-62; as participation, 18-20,27-29, 31, 61-62,62-71; qualitative research and, ix-x, 55-56; quantitative research and, 18-20, 24, 56; social mediations and, 36-38,54-55,69-71; society and, 25-33,35-36; specificity of, 62-71; subjectivity of, 24-33,52,

Cellini, Benvenuto, x class Council, 69-71 collective memory, 6-9 communication theory, 51 Comte, Auguste, 53 culture, 64-66 democracy, xxiii-xxiv, 45 dialectical reason, 31-33,3941 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 23 Durkheim, Emile, 46,47 economics, xix-xx, xxii-xxviii, 5 efficiency, xxv Engels, Friedrich, 32. See also Marxism facts, x-xi, 4 5 , 4 3 4 4 family, 18,22n14,69-71 73

74

ltidex

feelings, 49-51 Fleck, Ludwig, xii-xiii Fomari, Franco, 68-71 Freudianism, 4547. See also psychology Gagnon, Nicole, 63 Goldthorpe, John, 24 Gouldner, Alvin W., 53 Gramsci, Antonio, 66 Green, Andre, 69 groups, 3641,47-51,69-71 Hankiss, Agnes, 64 Hegel, Georg W. F., xvii Hegelian dialectics, xxvi-xxvii Heidegger, Martin, 45, 67 historicism, 5-6,67-68, 71 history: from below, 11-13; biography and, 16-18; as collective memory, 6-9; historicism of, 5-6, 67-68, 71; new, 67-68; oral, 67-68; periodicity in, 1-3; qualitative research and, x; social science and, x-xii, xiii, xxvii-xxviii; sociology and, 13-14; time in, 3-5, 12, 23-24,49, 67-68, 71. See also life history Horowitz, Irving, xxiv humanity. See individuals; society Husserl, Edmund, xiv individuals: biography of, 3941; collective memory of, 6-9; economics and, xix-xx; periodic nature of, 1-2; qualitative research and, ix-x; reflection by, 4,6-7; social mediations and, 36-38; society and, xvii-xviii, 2-3,25-33,35-37,4647. See also biography; life history industrialization, 15, 17 interaction. See participation irrationalism, 4 5 4 7 Jacoby, Russel, 52

Lasswell, Harold D., 2 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., xx-xxiii, xxviii Levi-Strauss, Claude, 66 Lewis, Oscar, 18,63 life history: as basic method, 14-16, 67, 71; facts and, 6 5 , 4 3 4 4 ; methodology of, 63-65; nonhistoricist nature of, 5-6, 67-68; as participation, 17-18; reduction to, 57-58; society and, 1-3; time and, 3-5. See also biography; history Lukacs, Georg, 59 Mach, Ernest, xii-xiii Maffesoli, Michel, xiv man. See individuals Mannheim, Karl, 45 Marcuse, Herbert, 47 Maria de’ Liguori, Sant’ Alfonso, 50 markets, xix, xxii, xxviii-xxix Marx, Karl, 25,32,40 Marxism, xxiii, xxv-xxvii, xxxnl4, 36-37,6647 materialism, xx, 3, 11 McLuhan, Marshall, 65 Mead, George H., xxvi mediations, social, 36-38,54-55, 69-71 Merton, Robert K., xxi, 24 Michels, Robert, 66 Mills, C. Wright, xx, xxii-xxiv, xxv-xxviii mind, 44-45 Montaigne, Michel de, x Moon, 49 moralism, xxiv muckraker tradition, xxiii-xxv neo-Heraclitans, 4 5 4 7 Nepos, Cornelius, x Nietzsche, Friedrich W., xii, 6-9,45, 67 nonhistoricism, 5-6, 67-68, 71 objectivity, 53-54, 58-62 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 45

Index Parsons, Talcott, xxii participation, 17-20, 27-29,31, 61-62,62-71 Peirce, Charles, xxvi periodic human nature, 1-2 Plato, xvii, 31 Plutarch, x positivist model, xi pragmatism, xxv-xxviii primary materials, 24-25, 62-63 private collective, 69-71 problematization, xii-xiii, xvi, xix, xxvii-xxix psychology, 44-53, 55, 58,64 public collective, 69-71 qualitative research, ix-xi, 55-56. See also science; social science quantitative research: biography and, 18-20,24,56; economics and, xxii-xxviii; life history and, 4-5, 15-16; limits of, ix, x, xiv, xxviii-xxix; pragmatism and, xxv-xxviii; in sociology, xviii, xix-xxii. See also science; social science Rawick, George P., xxiv reasoning, xiv, 31-33,3941 reflection, 4,6-7 relations of production, 66-67 religion, 46 Riesman, David, 43 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26,30,35,36-37 science, ix, xiv-xvi. See also qualitative research; quantitative research; social science secondary materials, 24-25’62-63 Simmel, Georg, 30, 40 slaves, xviii social science: facts in, 4344; history in, x-xii, xiii, xxvii; muckraker tradition of, xxii-xxiv; precision of, ix, xii, xiii-xiv; predictive capacity of, xiii-xiv;

75

problematization in, xii-xiii, xvi; psychologization of, 44-53; reasoning in, xiv; spontaneist irrationalism in, 4547. See also qualitative research; quantitative research; science society: biography and, 25-33, 35-36; class Council in, 69-71; concept of, xvi; definition of, xvi-xviii; groups in, 3641; individual and, xvii-xviii, 2-3, 25-33,35-37,4647; life history and, 1-3; theory and, xv; totalization and, 28-33 sociology: autonomy of, xviii-xix, xxii, xxvii-xxix, 14; crises of, xiv-xv, xviii-xix, 13-14,53-55; economics and, xix-xx, xxii-xxviii, 5; history and, 13-14; object of, xv-xvi, xxix, 53-54; as participation, 18-20; quantitative research in, xviii, xix-xxii; reduction of, 14; rejection of, 13-14 Sorokin, Pitirim A,, xx Spencer, Herbert, 49 state, xvii-xviii, 69-71 Stendhal, 1-2 Strauss, Leo, 15 subjectivity, 24-33,52,55-56,58 Tarde, Gabriel, 30 theory, xv Thomas, William Isaac, 24, 60-61 time, 3-5, 12,23-24,49, 67-68, 71 totalization, 28-33,35-37,4041 Trattato di sociologia, 16, 17-18 Trilling, Lionel, 48 truth, 25-26 values, x-xi, xxvii Veblen, Thorstein, xxiii-xxvi Weber, Max, xxvi, 9n8,23-24,33nl, 62,67 Znaniecki, Florian, 24, 60-61

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

About the Author

Franco Ferrarotti was born in Piedmont, Italy, in 1926. He graduated at the University of Turin in 1949 with a dissertation on “The Sociology of Thorstein Veblen.” In the same year, his translation of Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class was published by the publishing house Einaudi and was savagely attacked by Benedetto Croce in the Corriere della Sera of 15 January 1949. Ferrarotti replied with two essays in the Rivisita d i Filosofia and earned national prominence. Independent Member of the Italian Parliament (1958-1963), he did not stand for reelection in order to devote himself to scientific research. In 1960 he was awarded the first full-time chair in sociology established in the Italian university system. In 1965 he was a ”Fellow” at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California. In 1978 he was appointed Directeur d’Etudes at the Maison des Sciences de 1’Homme and The Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is presently professor of sociology and a director of the doctoral program at the University of Rome, Faculty of Sociology. Several of his books have been translated

77

78

About the Author

into English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Having founded in 1951, with Nicola Abbagnano, the Quaderni di Sociologia, which he edited until 1967, he is currently editor of La Critica Sociologica.