authority and incredulity: sociology between modernism and post-modernism

Authority and Incredulity: Sociology between Modernism and Post-ModernismAuthor(s): David ChealSource: The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 15, No. 2(Spring, 1990), pp. 129-147Published by: Canadian Journal of SociologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3340747 .

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Authority and incredulity: Sociology between modernism and post-modernism*

David Cheal

Abstract. The delegitimation of others' capacities to speak and hear appears to play a prominent role in the social construction of sociology. This paper introduces the distinction between concepts of modernity and post-moderity as a means of understanding, and commenting on, this development. Giddens's revival of the moder sociological tradition is contrasted with Lyotard's postmodern concept ofparalogy, and the concept of polycentric closure is proposed as a second descriptor of the post-moder condition. Issues discussed include effects of professionalization, feminism, and nationalism on the discourse of contemporary Canadian sociology.

Resume. La deligitimation sociale de la capacit6 des autres a parler et a entendre parait jouer un r6le important dans la construction de la sociologie. Cet article presente la distinction entre les concepts de modemit6 et de postmodernit6 comme moyens de comprendre ce phenomene, et de l'interpr6ter. Le renouvellement de la tradition sociologique modere effectue par Giddens est mis en opposition au concept postmoderne de la paralogie propose par Lyotard; et le concept de la cl6ture polycentrique est propose comme deuxieme descripteur de la condition postmodeme. Parmi les

questions trait6es se trouvent: les effets de la professionalisation, du feminisme et du nationalisme sur le discours de la sociologie canadienne contemporaine.

* Please address all correspondence and offprint requests to Professor David Cheal, Department of Sociology, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 2E9.

Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 15(2) 1990 129



Introduction Recent debates among philosophers and literary critics about concepts of modernity and post-modernity are currently reshaping understandings of the social sciences in a wide-ranging international dialogue (Denzin, 1986; Hekman, 1987; Strathern, 1987; Bauman, 1988a; 1988b; Kellner, 1988; Richardson, 1988; Murphy, 1988; 1989; Manning, 1989; Smart, forthcoming). Anglo-Canadian sociology has until now remained largely detached from these discussions (cf. Cheal, 1988a; O'Neill, 1988). The issues raised by post- modernism are not without relevance for understanding the lines along which sociology in English-speaking Canada is developing. Ideas introduced in the modernism/post-modernism debate help to focus attention upon emerging issues in Canadian sociology, such as the sociology of culture and feminist epistemology.

The general issue to be taken up in this paper can be framed as the reflexive interpretation of sociological knowledge, considered as an aspect of contemporary culture. The approach taken here is part of the "linguistic turn" in social theory, which "is accompanied by a redefinition of knowledge as argumentative, discursive practice" (Benhabib, 1984: 112). I begin from the position summa- rized by Featherstone as follows:

Culture once on the periphery of social science disciplines, particularly in sociology, has now been thrust increasingly towards the centre of the field.... We can understand this in terms of two processes which must be interrelated: firstly, the way in which culture has shifted in the arsenal of social science concepts from something which is essentially explicable in terms of other factors to broader metacultural questions concerning the cultural underpinning, or "deep" cultural coding of the social... ; secondly, the way in which the culture of contemporary western societies seems to be undergoing a series of major transformations which must be investigated in terms of intra-societal, inter-societal and global processes. It should be apparent that this is one reason for the rise of interest in postmodernism. (1988: 208)

The concept of culture refers to ideas which are capable of being communi- cated and learned. Knowledge is that dimension of culture that is concerned with competent intersubjective signification (Gergen, 1988: 36-37). As competent discourse, knowledge is shaped by the pragmatic strategies of symbol manipu- lation that are employed in achieving and demonstrating competence (Brown, 1987; Morrison, 1987). When these strategies are part of an organized and self- conscious world of knowledge production, they give rise to epistemological practices (Cheal, 1989c). Science is one such world. Scientific knowledge is the kind of discourse that a community of scientists judges to be rational in relation to a set of explicit rules for the verification and falsification of ideas.

There are, no doubt, many epistemological practices in the social sciences which could usefully be discussed. The particular practices to be examined here are consequences of theoretical pluralism. In discussions of pluralism in sociology the relationship between theoretical approaches is often problematized as a struggle between truth and falsehood, between correct interpretation and error,

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between science and myth (Berkowitz, 1984; Brym and Fox, 1989). Viewed from a different angle, the problem of theoretical pluralism also has a meta- theoretical significance, in that all of us now face the problem which Berger and Luckmann (1966) once described as the tension of plausibility. The problem of plausibility has been a prominent feature of religious culture for some time (Cheal, 1981). It is also a feature of contemporary sociological culture. As Habermas (1981: 6) reminds us, "One can certainly not conjure up by magic the compelling beliefs which command authority." Arguably, the most important issues at stake in sociology today involve the search for compelling beliefs (O'Neill, 1988). These issues deserve our attention at this time, whether we choose to call our time modern or post-modern.

Modern knowledge Modernity is a project, in which the goal of progress is thought to be achieved through the managed transformation of social institutions. The project of modernity dominated the classical formulations of sociology as a discipline (Touraine, 1988). Smart (forthcoming) notes that, "The representation of social life which has to date constituted the core of sociology emphasises the idea of modernity and evolution and tends to equate societal formation with the development of nation states." According to Anthony Giddens, the very existence of sociology is "bound up with the 'project of modernity"' (1987: 26). That is because the historical origins of sociology lie in "the coming of modernity," which is to say in the dissolution of the traditional world and the consolidation of the modern (Giddens, 1987: 15). In Giddens's view, contemporary sociology remains faithful to its origins in three related respects. Firstly, Giddens claims that the subject matter of sociology is "the social world brought about by the advent of modernity" (Giddens, 1987: vii-viii). By this he means that the substantive core of sociology is the study of those institutions, such as the nation- state, that were created by and which in turn have created the continuous transformation of social life. Secondly, Giddens maintains that the "ambition of sociology" continues to be to improve the human condition, through "the practical governance of social change" (1987: 17). Thirdly, Giddens holds that the "idea of achieving a unified theoretical language for sociology is... more or less convergent with the first springs of development of the discipline" (1987: 29). Giddens, like several other contemporary general theorists, wishes to revive the latter idea, and to reinstate it in the form of a theoretical synthesis that will give a renewed coherence to sociology.

These three themes - namely, the study of institutionalized transformation, the social direction of social change, and the program of an integrated foundation for social knowledge - are closely related in sociological theory. In the work of Touraine (1988), for example, they appear as concepts of institution, historicity, and the sociology of action. These themes are linked by the belief that modern societies are different from traditional societies, since

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modem institutions offer the promise that human existence can be improved. It is the particular responsibility of the sociologist to recognize and to support those social movements which seek to ensure that the changes brought about by modem institutions are indeed progressive. In order to do this, a universal intellectual foundation is necessary. This is to facilitate comprehensive models for the description of change, which may be used to determine the extent of its beneficial consequences throughout society, and ultimately the world.

This neatly interlocking set of ideas has had a powerful influence upon sociology, which is still felt today in positive interpretations of nationalism (Tiryakian, 1988). However, it is a form of sociological discourse that only makes sense from within the larger discourse of modernity (Habermas, 1987). Since modernity is "merely" an historic option and not an historical necessity, the modernist complex in sociology aptly described by Giddens is open to question.

Post-modern knowledge It is no longer possible to take for granted the idea that the moder world is

capable of producing endless human progress, leading inexorably into an ever more glorious future (Vattimo, 1988: 4-11). Rather, such historicist claims, which are exemplified by the Marxist model of progress through class struggle, now appear reflexively as merely one manifestation of a questionable culture of

modernity. The most serious questioning of modernist assumptions has come from the post-modernist theorists, such as Jean-FranCois Lyotard (1984).

Lyotard claims that science was until recently legitimated by programs for the

emancipation of humanity and for the unity of all knowledge (i.e., the second and third points in Giddens's definition of sociology outlined above). He believes that these two "grand narratives" have now lost all grounds for credibility and cannot be revived in their classical forms. Lyotard questions the presumptions of modernist thought, because of failures in its programs for emancipation (e.g., Marxism) and because of the fragmentation of science.

The claims of the post-modernists are controversial, and they have provoked a considerable critical response. Some of the deepest concerns about post- modernism are held by theorists on the left, who believe that Marxist meta- narratives about revolutionary agents of emancipation from capitalism still retain much of their validity at the end of the twentieth century (Callinicos, 1985; Allor, 1988). Left modernism's faith in its own progressiveness crucially depends upon the belief that it is the wave of the future. It cannot, therefore, possibly conceive of its own eclipsing. In defence of their claim to occupy the future, left modernists have sometimes tried to define post-modernism as merely a current expression of conservative social formations (Habermas, 1981: 13; Sangren, 1988:418). However, there is enough of value to be learned from post- modernism to suggest that such a point of view is oversimplified, and post- modernism cannot be so easily dismissed (Huyssen, 1984: 28-36, 48-49;

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Hohendahl, 1986; Hassan, 1987: 223-224). We shall see below that post-modem ideas about the connections between knowledge, power, and discourse have recently been given a radical thrust within feminism.

Turning now from meta-narratives of emancipation to meta-narratives of unified knowledge, Lyotard points out that the speculative unity of knowledge envisaged in positivistic epistemology is broken. Furthermore, he does not believe that Habermas's ideal of knowledge, as agreement arrived at through non-distorted reciprocal communication, is attainable in practice. That is because scientists would first have to agree on the rules of discourse by which agreement on scientific problems is to be achieved, and because they would also have to agree that the ultimate goal of dialogue is consensus. Lyotard maintains that Habermas's faith in agreement is unrealistic on both counts (Lyotard, 1984: 65-66). As Lyotard puts it, in contemporary science: "There are many different language games - a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches - local determinism" (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv).

This does not mean that totalizing accounts of a supposedly unifying social scientific paradigm no longer exist. Narratives of paradigmatic expansion can still be found in several social science language games, including the structural analysis of networks (Berkowitz, 1982; Richardson and Wellman, 1985). However, the fact remains that these days any particular claim to the truth is merely one alternative among several such possibilities. As a result, no one paradigm ever becomes the paradigm, and the predictable consequence of paradigmatic "revolutions" is merely a constant circulation of concepts (Cheal, 1989c). Subjectively, Lyotard claims, the failure of paradigmatic revolutions to deliver on their promise of unification has resulted in a widespread "incredulity toward metanarratives." He therefore claims that the only viable legitimation for scientific knowledge today is paralogy, that is, the ceaseless creation of the new in unexpected forms of reasoning which breach established rules (Lyotard, 1984: xxv).

If there is any one theme which links the various interests in post-modernism itis surely pluralism(McKinney, 1986; Hassan, 1987:167-187; Bauman, 1988a: 225-226). It is thought that there are multiple meanings in social life, and in social theory, that define multiple realities (Cheal, 1988a; 1989a; 1989b). In sociology we are very familiar with the modernist rhetoric of pluralism as crisis, which focuses upon the lack of agreement within the discipline and the absence of a core paradigm (Udehn, 1986). Lyotard's approach to scientific pluralism differs from the crisis theorists. He claims that the status of knowledge is altered when science enters the post-moder condition of pluralization. Each item of knowledge is no longer a piece that has a place (or should have a place) within a cumulative body of knowledge. Instead, it is an element in the continuous production of concep- tual pluralism. Lyotard's invocation of a new term - the post-moder - to describe this condition is important. It suggests that we should no longerjoin the modernists in describing pluralism as a crisis, that is to say as an event which

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might be overcome by superior technique. Instead, we are encouraged to see apparent chaos as an ongoing state, within which the possibilities for all future knowledge will be determined (Bauman, 1988b).

Lyotard is, of course, not the only one to make the point that theoretical pluralism may be the normal, and even the desirable, condition in the human sciences rather than a temporary aberration (Kliever, 1982; Boudon, 1988). What makes Lyotard's work fruitful is his insight that the dilemmas created by a pluralistic science are not only cognitive problems, but they are also problems of authority. The contingencies created by the existence of a plurality of theories appear to us as individuals primarily as the question of what to believe. Collectively, however, this uncertainty takes the form of the question of whose beliefs will be accepted by others. The latter issue is a question of social behaviour, which can be subjected to sociological analysis (Murphy, 1983: 635- 639).

Lyotard (1984: 8) observes that the status of knowledge as science is decided by "legislators," for example, journal editors, reviewers, session organizers for conferences, seminar leaders, etc.1 Legislators prescribe the conditions under which statements are accepted into the discourse of the scientific community. Their gatekeeping for the scientific community is a social role, and the authority of the legislators depends upon the social processes by which their decisions are authorized. The nature of scientific knowledge therefore ultimately depends upon the legitimacy of the legislators, whose appointments and actions are judged to be in accordance with a set of principles that constitute the scientific community. However, the consequence of paradigmatic pluralism is that such legitimation is precarious, since there exists not one set of principles but many.

Delegitimation Science, Lyotard points out, is an unstable activity because by legitimating itself science throws its own unstated assumptions open to critical reflection (1984: 38-39). The result, he observes, is "a process of delegitimation fueled by the

1. Bauman (1987) has claimed that it is characteristic of post-modernity to shift the task of the intellectual from legislation to interpretation. It is important to note here that from the perspective of a discipline such as sociology there are two kinds of legislation - external and internal. It is the former, that is, the role of the intellectual as maker of authoritative statements for society, which Bauman believes has been displaced by the role of the interpreter. However, this does not necessarily mean that the internal role of the legislator as gatekeeper for the scientific community has also been displaced (1987: 145-146). Bauman notes that, "While the post-moder strategy entails the abandonment of the universalistic ambitions of the intellectuals' own tradition, it does not abandon the universalistic ambitions of the intellectuals towards their own tradition; here they retain their meta-professional authority, legislating about the procedural rules which allow them to arbitrate controversies of opinion and make statements intended as binding" (1987: 5). In Bauman's view, there has been a narrowing of intellectual authority here, from policy invention to policing the truth. We shall see below that in fact the hold that legislators have over their "meta- professional authority" is also increasingly tenuous.

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demand for legitimation" (Lyotard, 1984: 39). This process is full of contradictions and dangers.

Delegitimation consists of attacks upon institutions and persons, whose purpose is to discredit the procedures for the legitimation of legislators, as well as to deauthorize particular legislators for their failure to act in accordance with correct principles. Both tactics are widely practiced in sociology today. In fact, degradation ceremonies are such frequent performances that they have become commonplace and pass almost unrecognized, as normalized science. Four examples of delegitimation performances will be described here, in order to provide some empirical data for the discussion that follows.

In a recent letter to the editor of Society/Societe, Barry Wellman (1989) complains that the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association is not a professional organization. In support of his complaint Wellman alleges that there is poor "quality control" in the selection of conference session organizers and participants. As a result, he claims, the legislators for the discipline include individuals who lack certified preparation for their role. In addition, Professor Wellman decries a "lack of opportunity for senior colleagues to participate in an advisory role." The unfortunate consequence, apparently, is that "wise counsel from established scholars" is lost to Canadian sociology.

Being an established sociologist in the United States may also mean much less today than many people used to think it did. Consider, for example, the reception given to Neil Smelser's (1988) edited Handbook ofSociology by his colleagues. Smelser is the quintessence of an establishment scholar. He has had a great influence upon the development of American sociology throughout his lengthy career and, unusually, he continues to be respected and to hold positions that are at the centre of institutionalized social science. One such recent position was as editor-in-chief of a handbook, which was intended to codify everything of importance in the discipline over the past quarter century. The reaction to Smelser's efforts has been very mixed.

Today, readings of a volume like Smelser's Handbook begin from an explicit recognition that legislation is a problem which is open to critique. Calhoun and Land, for example, note in their review that, "What a handbook says by simple inclusion and exclusion of topics, approaches, and specific works is very significant... even before one considers the explicit evaluations it offers" (1989: 475). It is in keeping with post-modem perceptions of pluralism that the Handbook of Sociology should be subjected to what is historically an extraordi- narily detailed and serious set of reviews (Sica, 1989: 506). The end result is that Smelser's Handbook has been heavily criticized, particularly for its exclusions. More significantly, these criticisms have led to the conclusion that the task of editing a handbook should never again be given to one person. In other words, the process by which the manuscript was produced is now judged to have been wrong. Calhoun and Land conclude that:

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This is not simply a criticism of Smelser's efforts. On the contrary, part of the problem is precisely that sociology as a discipline does not have strong institutional settings for developing - and contesting -canonical representation of the field. The absence of these forums - and introductory textbooks are not a good substitute - makes the task of an individual editor like Smelser a great deal more difficult, and the likelihood of an intensely contested product much greater. We are not

persuaded that sociology is inherently more heterogeneous, or even at this moment less coherent than other disciplines in the social sciences - or for that matter the humanities and physical sciences. Our problem is not that we have more or deeper chasms across which to try to communicate, but that we have weak institutional mechanisms for accomplishing this communication and agreeing about what to take seriously. (Calhoun and Land, 1989: 475-476)

The point, to repeat, is not that Smelser did a good job or a bad job. The general feeling, in fact, is that he did as good ajob as could be expected under the circum- stances. Nevertheless, the Handbook of Sociology has now been delegitimated by representatives of the American Sociological Association as the product of flawed procedures. These are interesting times in which to be an established sociologist.

My third illustration of delegitimation in sociology is to be found in the work of Dorothy Smith. Here we move to a higher, and more abstract, level of critique. Smith's broad delegitimation of most sociological institutions is exemplified in her demand that women should engage in "the repudiation of the professional, the expert, the already authoritative tones of the discipline, the science, the formal tradition, and . . . return to the seriously engaged and very difficult enterprise of discovering how to begin from ourselves" (Smith, 1979: 144).2 Smith's attack is launched from the base of a carefully argued position that women are everywhere systematically discriminated against, and that the privileged status of male speakers includes the social sciences, most of whose practitioners have been men (Smith, 1974; 1975). Smith believes that men in the social sciences have not understood women's lives, and perhaps they have misunderstood their own lives too. This is because the work that women perform for men in their capacities as wives, secretaries, and assistants makes possible a suppression of consciousness of routine matters among men, who are thereby limited to understanding the world in abstract and scientific terms. That is not the case for women, she argues, whose social location enables them to see the world

2. Not surprisingly, Smith's sociological practice differs from the uncompromising tenor of her

delegitimation of sociological tradition. She has confessed that inpractice she "could not imagine beginning all over again," and she has "not hesitated to learn from men" (Smith, 1987: 9). Smith's distinctive sociology has in factbeen constructed quite deliberately out of elements of the "formal tradition" inaugurated by men, especially Marx's theory of ideology. Smith's delegitimations of institutionalized social science lie uneasily beside her frequent references to Schutz, and her open acknowledgement of all that she has learned from George Herbert Mead, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Karl Marx, and Harold Garfinkel (Smith, 1987: 8-9). It can, of course, be argued that inconsistency in this connection is no vice. Harding (1986b: 19) states that "Feminist analytical categories should be unstable - consistent and coherent theories in an unstable and incoherent world are obstacles to both our understanding and our social practices." This point of view is likely to appeal more to a post-moder sensibility than to a moder sensitivity.

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in ways that are both abstract and scientific and material and local. The standpoint of women is therefore judged to be superior to that of men. But "women's standpoint locates a subject in the fundamental 'item' of the twofold basis of knowing the world. The organization which divides the two becomes visible from this base. It is not visible from within the other" (Smith, 1979:169).

The fourth, and final, illustration of sociological delegitimation to be considered here concerns the selectivity practiced by Canadian nationalists in presen- tations of what counts as Canadian sociology. Jackson has been most explicit about the positive side of this selectivity. He notes that "the very act of selecting particular paradigms from a broad range of possibilities is a political act... to favour certain paradigms over others is to further legitimize currently-established ways and to legitimize those emerging on the scene" (Jackson, 1985: 617). On the negative side, approaches such as symbolic interactionism and exchange theory have been delegitimated as being largely irrelevant to Canadian concerns. Brym, for example, has acknowledged that he excluded "the considerable body of purely micro-sociological research that has been conducted in English Canada" from his review of Anglo-Canadian sociology (Brym and Fox, 1989: 2). This exclusion is justified, he states, because: "In my view, such work is Canadian only in an incidental sense and is properly thought of as contributing more to a substantive field . . . than to the study of a certain geographical area... sociological research that does not tell us something about how and why Canada is significantly different from, and significantly similar to, other societies has not been reviewed here" (Brym and Fox, 1989: 2). Micro- sociology, it seems, is delegitimated for failing to contribute to Canadian sociology insofar as it is presumed not to address questions of Canadian identity vis-a-vis the United States. Whether or not this is the kind of thing that Lyotard had in mind, it is certainly striking confirmation of his claim that knowledge today is atomized into heterogeneous networks of language games (1984: 17).

Post-modern science: Paralogy or polycentric closure? Under present conditions of plural language games, Lyotard's prescriptions for post-modern science are potentially of great significance. In Lyotard's opinion, post-modern science has given up searching for total knowledge of a system - any system. Instead it embraces empirical discontinuities and paradoxes, which often translate into conflicts between opposed interpretations and models. Once it is accepted that there is no determinate solution to certain kinds of problems, a variety of possible solutions may be tolerated, and indeed encouraged, as alternative descriptions of the objects to be investigated (Toulmin, 1982). As Lyotard puts it, post-modern knowledge "refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy" (Lyotard, 1984: xxv).

Lyotard (1984: 61) emphasizes that locally determined innovation is not in itself paralogy, although that is part of it. Paralogy, he claims, is a move "in the

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pragmatics of knowledge," or in other words what I have referred to here as an epistemological practice. It is the dual process of delegitimating old knowledge, and legitimating the new, within a dialogic scientific "game." More than that, Lyotard' s description of this process assumes that the game of science is always open to new solutions and to new players, and that the possibilities for new knowledge are therefore boundless. This is an idealized description, that rests upon a concept of science as a uniform field. Studies in the sociology of sociology, on the other hand, indicate that Lyotard's description of the principle of openness in science must be qualified by accounts of the social processes of professional and political closure that are at work everywhere (Murphy, 1983).

Science, Lyotard (1984: 24) tells us, consists of the communication of statements of verification and falsification about their own propositions, that are made by the members of a group of persons who are competent "on an equal basis" (emphasis added). The formal equality between scientists is accounted for by the fact that no scientist identifies with a totality. Therefore, Lyotard asserts, "in principle, no scientist embodies knowledge or neglects the 'needs' of a research project, or the aspirations of a researcher, on the pretext that they do not add to the performance of 'science' as a whole" (1984: 63). Lyotard recognizes that in reality the practice of science may not always turn out so well. He describes the alternative to paralogy as "terror":

Of course, it does not always happen like this in reality. Countless scientists have seen their "move" ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because it too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions, not only in the university and scientific hierarchy, but also in the problematic.... But when the institution of knowledge functions in this manner, it is acting like an ordinary power center.... Such behavior is terrorist.... By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened.... The decision makers' arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists in the exercise of terror. It says: "Adapt your aspirations to our ends - or else." (Lyotard, 1984: 63-64)

It is necessary to add to Lyotard's account of science here by noting that scientists in their roles as legislators are in fact decision makers. The social forces that constrain participation in academic language games are not only external to science, but they also penetrate it. They are mediated by scholars and scientists themselves in their struggles for scholarly recognition (Murphy, 1983: 658). In the social sciences many legislators do identify with totalities, such as "Canada" (Brym), or "women" (Smith), on whose behalf they claim to speak. Some totalities, such as "the profession," seem likely to serve as bases for attempts to reinstate the project of a unified sociology. Other totalities, such as "women's standpoint," are unifying in their internal reference, but are divisive in their external reference. They have been important influences pushing sociology in the post-moder direction of theoretical pluralism (Harding, 1986a; Flax, 1987). The latter development is especially interesting, because it is now evident that pluralizing totalities do not end in consensus or in paralogy. 138



Paralogy is one of two epistemological practices that can be detected in post- modem sociology. The other is polycentric closure. Paralogy and polycentric closure have quite different implications for the future of post-moder knowledge. Which of them predominates must have a considerable effect upon both the form and the content of sociology.

Among the examples of delegitimation described above, the response to Smelser's Handbook of Sociology illustrates the practice of paralogy. Smelser's capacity to embody the discipline as a whole has been called into question. It is further recommended that in future the canons of the discipline should be drawn less narrowly, so that a wider range of sociologists can participate, and so that different ideas can also be represented. Interestingly, Alexander's (1988) chap- ter in that volume, describing the trend that he detects towards synthetic theorizing, is described by one reviewer as "combative and partisan" (Coser, 1989: 477), and by another as "parochial" (Sica, 1989: 505).

In contrast, the delegitimations by Smith and Brym point in quite a different direction. Brym and Smith legitimate particular fields of sociological research (Canadian studies and women's studies), through delegitimating alternative approaches that make competing claims for attention. This is, in Lyotard's phrase, "delegitimation fueled by the demand for legitimation." Lyotard (1984: 39) expected that widespread delegitimation would result in the loosening and flattening of the established hierarchies of science, accompanied by the erosion of disciplinary boundaries, the crossing of intellectual borders, and a state of constant flux in the relations between different fields of enquiry. To a remarkable extent this has been achieved within Canadian studies, and most especially in women's studies. But contrary to what we might have expected, new barriers were erected at the same time between these fields and the surrounding matrix of social scientific discourse. This practice of polycentric closure consists of marking out particular territories within which certain kinds of work (e.g. micro- sociology, and studies of women conducted by men) are unwanted. The result is a mosaic of bounded discourses.

The dilemmas of polycentric closure as a post-modem epistemological practice have been felt more acutely by feminists than by nationalists (though see Brym, 1989). That is because the nation-state is one of the great totalizing institutions of modernity, whose borders are coterminous with what needs to be known for administrative purposes. Women, on the other hand, have generally existed as a marginalized Other in all forms of modernization. Their knowledge has been felt to be of little use to the centres of power in moder institutions. Therefore, the ambiguities and contradictions of a social science that oscillates between power and autonomy, between totalizing and relativizing, between authority and incredulity, between closure and openness, are more visible today in feminist theories of knowledge than they are in any other area (Harding, 1986b; Hartsock, 1987; Moi, 1988; Hawkesworth, 1989; Miller, 1989; Walby, 1989).

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The feminist project of the emancipation of women requires a compelling narrative which describes what women are and what men are, how and in what ways men and women are different, and why men are a problem for women. In order to pursue this project successfully it has been found necessary to engage in the deconstruction of beliefs contained in resistant cultures, that are variously described as androcentric, misogynistic, patriarchal, phallocentric, etc. (Weedon, 1987). These deconstructions have often employed post-moder theories that see all knowledge as socially constructed within particular discourses, and they typically delegitimate claims to truth as concealed claims for male power (Ebert, 1988). However, such deconstructions cannot stop at "man," but inevitably extend to the category "woman" and thus to woman's standpoint (Fraser and Nicholson, 1988).3 They therefore end by casting doubt upon the naturalness of concepts of female identity, that are deployed in feminist politics (Poovey, 1988). That outcome is no basis for the compelling beliefs which all social movements require if they are to mobilize support (Tong, 1989: 232). The dilemma of feminism caught between modernism and post-modernism is expressed by Alcoff (1988: 420) in the following terms:

If gender is simply a social construct, the need and even the possibility of a feminist politics becomes immediately problematic. What can we demand in the name of women if "women" do not exist and demands in their name simply reinforce the myth that they do? How can we speak out against sexism as detrimental to the interests of women if the category is a fiction? How can we demand legal abortions, adequate child care, or wages based on comparable worth without invoking a concept of "woman"?

The solution to this problem, at which a number of feminists seem to have arrived more or less simultaneously, is to regard standpoint epistemologies as transitional legitimations (Harding, 1987). The project of feminist transformation is then grounded not in woman's standpoint, but in feminist agency, that is to say in a conscious political act of choosing to speak for emancipatory goals in concrete sites of struggle. Henceforth, in Felski's (1989:231) words, it is by their "strategic value" for the political struggles of everyday life that social scientific categories are to be justified. This decision, we should note, makes the dominant principle in the human sciences that of opposition between communities of"us" and "them." It is, as Harding says, a "politics of solidarity" based on "an oppositional consciousness" ( 986a: 196). What the consequences of this principle are likely to be we can see in Harding's complaint about the

3. Compare Smith's authoritative claim for knowledge from a woman's standpoint, in the quotation above, with the following incredulous account of truth from the perspective of post-modem feminist cultural theory: "There is no 'outside' ideology, no unmediated direct access to the 'real' or the 'truth' from which to critique ideology; to be outside one ideology is merely to be located in another one. If one is always situated in ideology, then the only way to demystify these ideological operations of production and concealment - the only way to engage in ideology critique - is to occupy the interstices of contesting ideologies or to seek the disjunctures and opposing relations created within a single ideology by its own contradictions" (Ebert, 1988: 27).

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disadvantage for feminists of using traditional approaches. She says, "The very fact that we borrow from these theories often has the unfortunate consequence of diverting our energies into endless disputes with the nonfeminist defenders of these theories: we end up speaking not to other women but to patriarchs" (Harding, 1986b: 16). Similarly, there is Hartsock's turn away from conversation, because she believes that women are not yet in a position to participate as equals in academic discourse. She concludes that conversation "will not work," because it would "only reinforce previous power relations" (Hartsock, 1987: 200-201). Who we speak to and who we would rather not speak to, and what we talk about and what we do not talk about, are evidently issues of great practical as well as theoretical importance in science today.

Last rites: The death of modern sociology The problematic nature of professional speaking and hearing has not always been thought of as an important issue for sociological theory, even when it is recognized as a serious practical concern. From the perspective of a post-moder construction of temporality (Cheal, 1988a), it is necessary to take up issues in the future of sociology in order to define its present theoretical significance. In the language games of an ideal scientific community, communication is reciprocal. That is to say, the communication roles of sender and receiver of signs can potentially always be reversed. Any receiver at one moment can become a sender at a later point in time, and so on. But what happens if the "sender" declines to speak, because the audience is deemed to be incapable of an appropriate response? Or, what happens if the "receiver" will not listen, because the sender is judged to represent a discredited authority? On these occasions, we must suppose, dialogue comes to an end.

Lyotard notes that shared language games are the minimum relations required for any community to exist, including communities of scientists. Scientific dialogue is the social bond that constitutes the community of science producers. In the present moment between modernism and post-modernism we should be aware of the effects upon that bond of delegitimating others' capacities to speak and hear. Erecting barriers to unwanted messages creates an exclusive field of discourse. The benefit from this is that specialized problems internal to the discourse can be pursued at greater length than would otherwise be the case. The disadvantage is that it becomes difficult to conduct debates between different approaches, because "them" outside the discourse are not taken seriously or have been rendered practically invisible.

Women have experienced that kind of invisibility for a long time, of course, which is why the feminist project has been so important for the recovery of neglected issues in sociology (Cheal, 1988b; 1989a; 1989b). However, today there is another question that looms large in our future. Are we witnessing the creation of a second form of closed discourse, which is merely the mirror image of that which went before (Hawkesworth, 1989: 543-547)? Toril Moi, a

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socialist feminist literary critic, has concluded that: "Articulated in isolation, the emphasis on female difference comes disturbingly to echo the very patriarchal prejudices against which the champions of women's equality are struggling" (1988: 6). If that is so, and if tendencies toward articulation in isolation become stronger among sociologists too, then the consequence would be less a sociology remade by feminism, and more a division of sociology. The latter, coming on top of earlier and still unresolved divisions in the discipline, must deepen the crisis in the modem concept of sociology. That concept will now be reconsidered in the light of the issues discussed above.

It was noted above that, according to Lyotard, modem science is legitimated by two kinds of meta-narratives of progress, namely meta-narratives of emancipation and meta-narratives of unified knowledge. It was also shown how both types of meta-narratives are incorporated in an undifferentiated manner into the moder concept of sociology described, for example, by Giddens. It was further noted that this concept is unstable, as evidenced by the widespread practice of agonistic delegitimation. The principal reason for this instability is the contradic- tion, in the very foundation of sociology, between its two legitimating principles. If today Canadian sociology is rocking on its foundations, it is because the consequences of contradictions in the project of modernity have proven increasingly difficult for modern institutions themselves to manage.

The high point of the meta-narrative of the unification of knowledge in sociology was undoubtedly Parsonian systems theory. That grand synthesis neglected difference and pluralism (Cheal, 1988a), and it was soon broken by a variety of pluralizing forces, including nationalism and feminism. The latter approaches were allied with important social movements, and they were legitimated by ideologies of emancipation from American neo-imperialism and from male hegemony. Such meta-narratives of emancipation can be the bases for unified sociological traditions. But they cannot provide the basis for a spontane- ous unification of sociology. That is because movements of emancipation are always movements for social change, in which the members of different social categories will have different interests. As long as sociologists are drawn from a variety of social backgrounds and have a range of social experiences, then their different interests in change will give rise to sociological divisions, varying in intensity over time to be sure, but never completely resolved. During periods of tension those divisions may lead to the discipline becoming structured along lines of polycentric closure.

Polycentric closure is a form of science in which the process of knowledge production itself has the capacity to create the absence of scientific knowledge. To see how this can happen we need only consider the consequences for Canadian sociology of the macro-sociological boundaries of "The Great Canadian Identity Trap" (Brym, 1989: 495). The exclusion of micro- sociology from "Canadian" sociology by legislators such as Brym does not seem to have diminished the activities of Canadian symbolic interactionists, who

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maintain a lively presence within the discipline. What it has done, however, is to diminish the possibilities for critical mediation between micro-sociology and macro-sociology. An unintended consequence of nationalist gatekeeping is that there has been little discussion in Canada of ways of superseding the opposition between micro and macro sociologies. In several other countries, the micro- macro debate was a major focus of attention during the past decade. In Canada that debate could not flourish, because one side of the problem was not even a part of the "Canadian" discourse.

There is a general conclusion to be drawn from this pattern of events, which might otherwise seem to be of interest only to specialists in sociological theory. The recent micro-macro debate in sociology has been important, because it is part of a serious effort by modernist sociologists to regain the goal of theoretical unification as outlined, for example, by Giddens. The bifurcation of sociology into micro and macro fields since the 1960s has been more than a minor incon- venience. It has been a formidable problem for all those who take seriously the classical ambition of sociology, to provide a coherent and therefore integrated account of social life.

The current rush of general theorizing - by Giddens, Alexander, Touraine, and others - is the result of a broad international awareness of the severity of the crisis that now exists in modern sociology's definition of itself. The examples of sociological delegitimation described above suggest that the claims which are sometimes made in this connection for a new trend toward convergence in the discipline should be treated with caution. Giddens's modernist vision of a more cohesive social theory seems feasible only if we ignore the effects of feminist epistemology (e.g., Smith), nationalism (e.g., Brym), and the displacement of centre and periphery in professional institutions (reported by Wellman and illustrated by the treatment of Smelser). In other words, we would have to ignore some of the most powerful forces that shaped Canadian sociology in recent years, and which continue to influence the development of sociology in Canada and in other countries. The drift of the present paper is that it is already too late for brave attempts at rescuing the project of moder sociology.

In the absence of a genuinely unifying paradigm, the legitimation of any particular theoretical approach entails the delegitimation of other approaches. This situation has existed for more than two decades now, and the result has been the normalization of sociological delegitimation. That development must increase the barriers that any attempt at theoretical integration would have to overcome, before it could be successful across the discipline. Delegitimation leads to a weakening of the links between speakers and hearers, and to a narrowing of the social spaces within which particular knowledges circulate. It is therefore difficult to see how a trend toward sociological decomposition can be reversed, short of universal terror, once the process of delegitimation has been set into motion under conditions of polycentric closure. The history of moder sociology is coming to an end.

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authority and incredulity: sociology between modernism and post-modernism

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