Thursday, November 12, 2009

Thesis Thoughts

Derek Gregory, on writing in the Social Sciences (and I'll add, the humanities):

"If, as these [critiques on Ethnocentrism, Sexism, Abstraction in social theory] imply, there is no privileged vantage point, no singular place of reflection, no unambiguous closure, no unitary logic, then how can we make the lives of other people intelligible to us--how can we bring them within the horizon of our own (limited) sensibilities and competencies--without in some way being invasive, colonizing, even violent? Yet surely we are not condemned, in imagination or in practice, to our own eccentric worlds? I can offer no answer to what Clifford calls this predicament of 'ethnographic modernity': perhaps all we can do, at present anyway, is to disclose our vulnerabilities and, as Spivak puts it, 'unlearn our privilege as our loss.' If so, then part of this deconstructive process will entail an examination of our textual strategies-and in particular a consideration of the duplicities of narrative and image--because it is through these modes of representation that many o f our most commonplace privileges are unthinkingly put in place. To put it as starkly as possible, the crisis of representation has once again brought the politics of social theory and the poetics of social inquiry into the same discursive space."

Now don't you wish that you too could spend your days reading about the Historical Geography of Modernity? ;)

9 comments:

  1. Social scientists are merely jealous of physicists, who have such things as quantum mechanics, relativity, and chaos theory to boggle the mind. Not that human beings aren't even more complex and fascinating than the structure of the universe, but social scientists are much further from understanding them than physicists -- as confused and confusing as they may be -- are from explaining the universe. So instead they resort to using language to destroy the plain meaning of language. Sort of a social supercollider? :)

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  2. I think it makes a lot of sense! It's the best and most interesting/inspiring article I've read all week (and that's saying something, cuz there have been a lot this week!).

    But I'd find your average paragraph on quamtum mechanics confusing and tedius.

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  3. even if I did know how to spell it.

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  4. You understood that? I am even more in awe of you than before.

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  5. you understand quantum mechanics?! The sentiment is mutual. :)

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  6. Wish I did. That was sophomore physics and I got an A or a B in the course, but that doesn't mean I understood it. :)

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  7. Who is/was Derek Gregory? Someone contemporary? Don't think I would like a steady diet of his writing-style. But then, I'm not a historian...

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  8. He's a geographer. British Columbia, methinks.

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  9. I was enjoying reading it, but expecting that you would put your own retort at the end of it.

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