{"id":1832,"date":"2009-02-04T07:31:27","date_gmt":"2009-02-04T07:31:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/etherwave.wordpress.com\/?p=1832"},"modified":"2009-02-04T07:31:27","modified_gmt":"2009-02-04T07:31:27","slug":"historiographic-atavism-and-the-dilemma-of-science-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rational-action.com\/etherwave\/2009\/02\/04\/historiographic-atavism-and-the-dilemma-of-science-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"Historiographic Atavism and the Dilemma of Science Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Historiographic atavism has the following features. As a way of introducing arguments, an atavistic chain of reasoning takes minimal consideration of the prior formulations or the prior solutions to a specific problematic. Every argument is fundamentally a novel one by virtue of its complexity or its departure from a frame of conceptualization. <\/span> <\/span>An atavistic claim can exist only if it reduces a prior body or school of scholarship either to a bare methodology<\/em> or to a bare summary<\/em>. <\/span>This robs previous historiography of the conceptual rigor it rightfully possesses. <\/span>Historiographic claims, while competing in reality, exist as exemplum in the atavistic narrative. <\/span>Historiographic atavism is then the instrumental use of previous scholarship, particularly a recovered or hereto underutilized methodology, to underscore the novelty and the complexity of endless and non-reducible particulars. This allows every account to remain particular, correct, locally valid, and non-confrontational<\/em>. All atavistic arguments present themselves as the most open of all methodologies to critique. <\/span>The endless nature of the critique and this seeming freedom impedes the formulation of positions, claims, and disciplinary progress. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Historiographic atavism develops from a critical suspension of synthetic narrative. Its antithesis is the \u201ccanon.\u201d <\/span>Its historical subject is the locality. <\/span>Universality or “synthesis”\u00a0 is only achieved through the interconnection of\u00a0 localities. <\/span>These particulars, interconnected on some level to a defined \u2018whole,\u2019 are endlessly (re)producible through the work of textual or material analysis. <\/span>This analysis produces particular historical subjects that are nonetheless incapable of becoming complementary or subsumable elements through an act of induction into a meaningful synthesis. <\/span>Every locality rhetorically relates to the \u2018whole\u2019 but is incommiserate with it.\u00a0 Every particular work of scholarship remains incongruous, but nonetheless applicable, to the previous work of scholars.\u00a0 Such is the paradox of atavistic scholarship.<\/p>\n

The second paradox of atavistic scholarship is the degree to which as a\u00a0 cumulative enterprise it assumes, antithetically against its stated intentions, an evolving and definitive expertise on the part of its reader.\u00a0 If narrative and synthetic judgment is ultimately absent from the text itself, and the crucial act of synthesis is left to the reader, that reader must be within the community of experts on the subject in order to understand the topic at hand and to discern its significance.\u00a0 Atavistic scholarship is\u00a0 suitable for the most discerning and informed of experts, but this goes against science studies’ self-professed desire to engage with a public beyond itsel<\/em>f.<\/p>\n

A reconciliation of perspectives into a coherent scholarly world-view is possible.\u00a0\u00a0 Due to the methodological aversion to the consolidation of gains as well as to the assumption of an dialogue of equality<\/em> with the reader,\u00a0 thought to be a public <\/em>but, who is, in fact, an expert, the specific analytic richness of a specific work generated by the atavistic scholarship is appreciable only through an\u00a0 external methodological narrative and an external taxonomy imposed through the reader’s subjective expertise.<\/p>\n

Atavistic scholarship, due to these two paradoxes, even when not pursuing fictions produced by its own methodology, mistakes craft and complexity for the suspension of judgment.\u00a0 By beginning\u00a0 matters\u00a0 philosophically and with the totality of the argument described through the invocation of particulars, the entirety of the historical project becomes meaningless.\u00a0 The historical, which should unfold as a densely packed series of causal narratives central to arguments,\u00a0 becomes, as an exemplar,\u00a0 a consequence or a byproduct of a <\/em>process<\/em> of change over time<\/em>.\u00a0 The exemplar does nothing to demonstrate or to narrate how this change actually occurs, only that it does as illustrated by the exemplar.<\/p>\n

The ‘case-study’ is, in many instances, not\u00a0 an example of proper historicist reasoning, but\u00a0 actualized methodology, the illustration of a black box decisionism <\/em>on the part of the author to present the best evidence of a theory. Such decisionism is perfectly appropriate in a court of law, when one is pleading a case.\u00a0 Historians are neither lawyers or rhetoricians, as they see themselves.\u00a0 The presentation of a case in a court of law depends upon the rebuttal from the opposing side, thus the presentation of the best evidence to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary is an acceptable presentation of argument.\u00a0 Science studies literature finds its rebuttal in the testimony of the expert reader and thus a court of understanding<\/em> is established between the local study and the community of experts who will most likely read the text. Nowhere however is the significance of the project found within the text.<\/p>\n

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Historiographic atavism has the following features. As a way of introducing arguments, an atavistic chain of reasoning takes minimal consideration of the prior formulations or the prior solutions to a specific problematic. Every argument is fundamentally a novel one by virtue of its complexity or its departure from a frame of conceptualization. An atavistic claim<\/p>\n

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