THE SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD AS PROBLEMATIC: WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
Loran Elizabeth Sheley
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2005
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
SOCIOLOGY
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING
2010
THE SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD AS PROBLEMATIC: WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
A Thesis
by
Loran Elizabeth Sheley
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Kevin Wehr, Ph.D.
__________________________________, Second Reader
Jacqueline Carrigan, Ph.D.
____________________________
Date
ii
Student: Loran Elizabeth Sheley
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Amy Q. Liu, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology
iii
___________________
Date
Abstract
of
THE SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD AS PROBLEMATIC: WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
by
Loran Elizabeth Sheley
This thesis presents a critical evaluation of some ways in which positivist sociological
methods hinder the development of knowledge. By way of an empirical investigation of
the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento, California, the notion that the study
of history provides advantages to researchers interested in social change is challenged.
The concept of knowledge is problematized, and the significance of pursuing an
understanding of the researcher’s relationship to the research objective through reflexive
practices is emphasized.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Kevin Wehr, Ph.D.
_______________________
Date
iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Kevin Wehr and Dr. Jacqueline
Carrigan, for their support and especially their patience during this project, the
completion of which ended up taking years longer than I thought it would. I could not
have asked for a better mentor than Kevin, whose questions and suggestions always
helped me to challenge the limits of my thinking. I am grateful for Evan Tucker’s
friendship, and this work benefited tremendously from countless conversations during
late-night walks. Corinna Fish’s comments and encouragement near the end provided a
much-appreciated boost. I am thankful that Cory Benton never complained about the
piles of books lying around the house but above all because he helped me find new ways
of seeing.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................................v
Chapter
1. ORIENTATION.....................................................................................................................................1
2. BEGINNINGS .......................................................................................................................................6
Why Does History Matter?........................................................................................................ 6
Museums, Culture, and Power................................................................................................... 7
Looking at the California State Railroad Museum .................................................................... 9
3. OBJECTS.............................................................................................................................................. 12
The State and the Museum ...................................................................................................... 12
Interests ................................................................................................................................... 14
Producers, Consumers and the Trouble with Authors ............................................................. 17
4. HISTORY ............................................................................................................................................. 20
“Missing” History.................................................................................................................... 20
The Master Discourse .............................................................................................................. 25
Liberatory History ................................................................................................................... 27
5. KNOWLEDGE .................................................................................................................................... 29
Clarifying My Objective: Unpacking the Relationship between Knowledge and Freedom ... 29
Problematizing Method ........................................................................................................... 32
Decentering Knowledge .......................................................................................................... 34
6. REFLEXIVITY, OR GAZING INTO THE ABYSS ..................................................................... 38
Bibliography................................................................................................................................................ 43
vi
1
Chapter 1
ORIENTATION
It is too bad! Always the old story! When a man has finished building his house, he finds that he
has learnt unawares something which he ought absolutely to have known before he—began to
build. The eternal, fatal “Too late!” The melancholia of everything completed!
(Nietzsche [1885] 1997:140)
My project began as a theoretical master’s thesis in sociology. My aim was to investigate
the intersection of history, culture and power by examining a single cultural institution:
the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento. When I began to think about how I
wanted to approach this study, many possible directions became known. Many writers,
including Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, John Walton, Max Weber, C. Wright Mills, Ben
Agger and Dorothy Smith, inspired me to investigate power in a single place in hopes of
revealing fragments of a larger ideological apparatus1 that imprisoned people and locked
power relations into a constellation where inequality dominates. I had many sources of
inspiration, but I was perplexed by what was needed to put them all together.
My investigation became problematic when I began to understand that the railroad
museum was not merely a tool wielded by some powerful hand as I originally thought. I
was left with an open space: it became clear that I no longer had a usable definition of a
history museum. Is it a state apparatus, entertainment, a learning environment? What is
its intended audience—children, adults, railroad enthusiasts? Is it a place where history
is archived and displayed? Is it an institution that creates history? If so, what history and
why? One thing became clear to me as I struggled to answer these questions: the
2
museum is not an object that easily lends itself to interrogation and research.
Before I decided to focus on the railroad museum, I had determined that the goal
of my work was to gain knowledge and understanding about the ways in which power
operates in society. I intended to do so as a means to develop a clearer understanding of
social change or, more precisely, the obstacles to social change. As the study progressed,
two distinct yet intertwined purposes emerged. The first purpose was to compare my
empirical observations to existing theory. I began with an approximate research question,
gathered some data, and I expected to contribute to the sociological body of literature
about power and social change at the end.
The second purpose was to gain an understanding about social science processes
through reflexive and iterative meditations on my own thoughts and actions during my
empirical investigation. Thus, the sociological method itself became an object of study. I
encountered a myriad of problems during the course of investigation, and I often thought
that it was because I did not have a sufficiently narrow research question and that I
needed to be more specific. However, over time I began to understand that even very
specific research questions are often not as simple as they seem, and embedded within
them are large assumptions. Many of the problems I was having were related to these
embedded assumptions, but the trouble was that I could not see them. As I repeatedly
tried to narrow my focus, I ended up layering more and more assumptions on.
Eventually, I saw this and decided that I had to go back to the beginning—to a place that
1
My thought was informed by Louis Althusser’s (1971) concept of ideological state apparatuses.
3
existed in my mind long before I wrote anything down about the railroad museum.
The second part of the work I described above is what eventually became most
important to me. I was familiar with the work of several writers who warned that
research problems needed to be situated in sufficient context to avoid overgeneralization.
When I initially wrote my thesis prospectus, and when I began to analyze the museum
contents and attended the museum docent training, I was careful to be aware of my
presuppositions and to think critically about how these could be shaping what I was
seeing. For example, I was careful not to conceptualize the state as a monolith, and from
the outset imagined it as a collection of actors with multiple interests. However, I ended
up using other preexisting concepts to try to more accurately describe what I saw, and the
additional concepts and language also added more layers of presupposed relationships
and assumptions. This was problematic not least because it seemed to get me no further
toward my goal of understanding.
I became immersed in trying to describe how, by whom and for whom history was
being constructed in the museum, but I did not seem to notice that at the base of my
inquiry was the fact that we all—the people I was observing as well as myself—seemed
to care about history, but do not question why. I first came up on the edges of this
problem while attempting to write a statement of the problem and discuss the sociological
significance of my project. Part of what made this task so difficult was that there was no
shortage of acceptable directions to go. I could have easily argued that the museum
presents an ideological view of history that suppresses the reality of racism by hiding it
beneath a veneer of appreciation and praise for the hard work contributed by minorities.
4
These portrayals are socially and sociologically significant, in turn, because the visitors,
taking it on the museum’s good authority that their claims are true, could adopt the
museum’s representation. Adopting the museum’s perspective, furthermore, could
contribute to continued racism.
I recognized early on that taking this approach would have made for a less
ponderous thesis, but the trouble was that my “findings” would have begged the question:
what should the museum be doing instead? Even if I had not chosen to state explicitly
that I thought museum reform was the solution, such a position would have been implicit
in whatever I ended up writing. In fact, it would have been the only way to conclude had
I chosen to use that approach. However, I was not actually interested in making a better
museum; I was interested in broader social change. Another question was raised: if I
could see this before I had even conducted my research, how does this affect my ideas
about how knowledge is created (knowledge is supposed to be the result that comes after
the research process)? What could I do to end up with something that was not a foregone
conclusion?
Although in the end I understood this project as having two purposes, I should
make it clear that it has been difficult attempting to distinguish them clearly. Part of the
problem was that I could only define one by referring to the other. My project is best
understood as an infinitely circular process, in contrast to the linear and positivist model
that is generally proposed (question, literature review, empirical investigation, findings
and conclusion). That being said, one hopes that a project can come to an end, even if it
is inevitably incomplete. What follows is my best attempt to describe that process in a
5
comprehensible way. The study embodies a long argument with I have had with myself
that I thought was about power but was actually about the possibility of freedom.
Although I consider my investigation of the railroad museum completed, it feels more
like a beginning than an end.
A statement that captures my position at the outset of this study is: The California
State Railroad Museum is an ideological apparatus deployed by the state in pursuit of its
interest to perpetuate existing social conditions by repressing the truth of history, which
prevents our freedom. I revisit this statement at the beginning of each of the next four
chapters; this is intended to serve as a compass, to provide bearings for the reader.
Chapter 2, Beginnings, grounds my investigation in the sociological realm and provides
an account of my thought at the outset of my project. Chapter 3, Objects, discusses
problems I encountered with using preexisting concepts to guide my exploration. In
Chapter 4, History, I critically examine the notion that history is a liberating force.
Chapter 5, Knowledge, is my contemplation of the meaning of knowledge and its relation
to sociological practice. In the final chapter, Reflexivity, I contemplate the significance
of my work and its implications for my future research.
6
Chapter 2
BEGINNINGS
The purpose of this chapter is to sociologically ground my position statement, The
California State Railroad Museum is an ideological apparatus deployed by the state in
pursuit of its interest to perpetuate existing social conditions by repressing the truth of
history, which prevents our freedom.
Why Does History Matter?
History has occupied a central place in sociology since the early days of the
discipline.2 Karl Marx, for example, situated contemporary power relations in a
historical context which allowed him to imagine a future outside of the present; by
tracing the path of domination, the path to freedom became clear.
As William H.
Sewell, Jr. (2005), a historian and sociologist, notes, social scientists interested in social
change should pay attention to history. History, however, is not solely the domain of
academics. Since I was interested in the link between large-scale social change and
history, I wanted to examine a type of popular or mass history: public history. According
to John Walton, “Public history signifies the past of a community (region, country) as it
is generally understood by its citizenry; the sum of knowledge about the past as presented
2
Although history has always had a place in sociology, “historical sociology” was not a formally
recognized subdiscipline until about the early 1980s. See “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful
Sociology,” Chapter 3 in Sewell (2005) for an account of the origins of historical sociology. See Gilbert
and Wehr (2003) for an explanation of the field of contemporary historical sociology.
7
in monuments, museums, commemorative sites, popular culture (fiction, film),
architecture, and design, as well as in history books ranging from popular chronicles to
scholarly texts. Public history is the past known to the informed populace, to persons and
groups who want to know who are we? and what is out story?” (2001:287). Asking and
attempting to answer these questions is important if we are to make connections between
where we have come from, where we are, and where we can go from here.
One problem with “official” versions of history is that they are often dominated
by views of the past that tend to reinforce and legitimize contemporary inequality.
Walton’s (2001) study of the changes in historical discourse in Monterey over time
showed that although official history is constructed in a way that omits important facts, it
should be kept in mind that history making is a contentious process that is always
vulnerable to change by a variety of social actors. History is not merely a story about
what happened; instead, it is a story that changes over time, depending in large part on
the politics of the era in which it is constructed. This leaves open the possibility for
social movements to replace certain versions of history with different versions, versions
that can include elements and voices that were previously excluded. Social movements
can change the historical narratives in places public history is portrayed such as
monuments and history museums.
Museums, Culture, and Power
History museums exhibit history to a wide audience. The post World War II era
has been marked by a rapid expansion of the number of museums, as well as a shift in the
content and an aim toward broader audiences (Luke 2002). While museums are a
8
prominent cultural institution in America, relatively little sociological research has been
conducted to explore their role in society, especially in comparison to other cultural
products (Macdonald 1996). History museums are cultural objects, institutions and
collections of relationships between people. Culture is the practice of constructing
knowledge, as well as the results of that process, which in turn shapes the ways in which
knowledge is further constructed. Culture is furthermore discursive; it exists in language
that is socially produced and reproduced in order to give meaning. One of the central
features of culture is that it is simultaneously reflective and constitutive; it represents
social ideas and knowledge, but is also used in the creation of knowledge—culture is a
process.3
The multifaceted character of culture makes it difficult to study: almost inevitably,
there is a tendency to focus on the end-result of cultural production, usually in the form
of cultural artifacts, or on the productive process, where the agents of cultural production
or cultural institutions are analyzed leading to the goal of creating a certain understanding
of the world with power relations in mind. While history is sometimes defined as a
collection of events and artifacts from the past, it is more accurately a cultural practice,
carried out by social actors in the present in places like museums. Moreover, history is
the practice of the production of historical discourse: within this practice, material objects
are assembled and narratives are developed, but underlying these is the construction of
3
For a discussion of different uses of “culture” in the social sciences, see “The Concept(s) of Culture,”
Chapter 5 in Sewell (2005).
9
historical knowledge through language; objects and events are not left to speak for
themselves. Power relations shape this construction of knowledge. Within the
bureaucratic realm of the museum, power relations are often hidden for a variety of
reasons. The knowledge presented in the museum concerns the past, but beneath the
surface, this knowledge about the past is informed by power relations of the present; thus
history museums link the past and the present. As Sharon MacDonald notes, “Museums
are socially and historically located; and, as such, they inevitably bear the imprint of
social relations beyond their walls and beyond the present…. It is because museums
have a formative as well as a reflexive role in social relations that they are potentially of
such influence” (1996:4).
Looking at the California State Railroad Museum
I was intensely fascinated by the California State Railroad Museum (CSRM) from
the first time I walked inside. It was “free museum day” in Sacramento and a friend and I
decided to see as many museums as we could that day. The railroad museum was our
first stop. I assumed that portrayals of history which did not expose and problematize
contentious relationships between people contributed to the continuation of such
relationships, especially those relationships based on race, class and gender. I accepted
the idea that an accurate understanding and exposition of history was necessary for social
change in the present and the future.
The CSRM is a standard destination for area tourists, elementary school students,
and railroad buffs. One of its primary subjects is the transcontinental railroad, the social
history of which is important for understanding the history and national identity of
10
Americans. The CSRM is regarded as an exemplar of its genre and subject matter.
Furthermore, the railroad museum is representative of something much larger than what
is contained within its walls: public history. Looking at the railroad museum, it appears
that “our story” has changed over time. In 2005 the California State Railroad Museum
opened a new exhibit that purported to show the “human face of railroading.” Below is a
selection of quotations from the museum’s announcement about the new displays:
…the railroad industry … shaped the attitudes and structure of a continental nation. In
short, railroads and railroad workers made America.
Throughout the Railroad Museum, guests now encounter life-like figures representing
real people at work on the railroad. Appropriately attired and placed in settings that
replicate actual work environments, these figures help bring to life the challenges,
hazards, triumphs and rewards that were an everyday part of railroading….
…guests will note these workers came from diverse backgrounds: African American,
American Indian, Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Mexican American, and Italian American, to
name a few. Interpretive panels, photographs, and artifacts communicate the
contributions of these workers….
The goal of the project is to help Museum guests understand and appreciate that
railroad history is American history — and that this history involves thousands of diverse
people, along with locomotives, passenger and freight cars. (CSRM 2006)
These quotations contain very broad claims about aspects of race, political economy,
family and community, and national identity. This announcement is a rare occasion of
the museum identifying itself to visitors as the authors of the text contained within the
museum, and explicitly states a goal. Inside the museum, there is no such
acknowledgment; instead, the displays described are intended to be treated as immutable
facts. The announcement provides instructions for how to understand what visitors will
see, and beyond that, how to understand history. The museum displays are not the only
mode by which knowledge is transmitted to visitors. Teresa Bergman analyzed the
11
orientation films at the CSRM with the goal to “delineate the symbolic meanings and
relations of power that are represented and how they gain audience acceptance…”
(2003:429). She found that the films represent history in a hegemonic way, and the
museum “denies voice to those who experienced the railroad’s racial and economic
inequalities” (Bergman 2003:429). Moreover, she argues that the position of the museum
as an authority conditions the power relations between the museum and its audience,
which makes the audience more likely to uncritically accept these exclusive portrayals.
Equipped with a toolbox of sociological concepts, I visited the CSRM several
more times. During these subsequent visits, I performed careful analyses of the displays
and observed interactions between museum staff and visitors during tours. I attended a
40-hour docent training class to gain a better perspective on the processes behind the
authoring of the museum’s historical discourse, and I immersed myself in literature about
the history of the railroad to identify gaps in the history presented by the CSRM. My
goal was to figure out precisely how the ideological apparatus was created and how it
operated on visitors’ consciousnesses to reproduce social conditions that obstruct social
change.
12
Chapter 3
OBJECTS
In this chapter, I revisit my original position statement, The California State Railroad
Museum is an ideological apparatus deployed by the state in pursuit of its interest to
perpetuate existing social conditions by repressing the truth of history, which prevents
our freedom, to discuss problems I encountered when I tried to transform reality at the
CSRM into objects.
The State and the Museum
One of the primary assumptions in my position was that the museum works to
serve the state’s interests. This implies but does not clearly define a number of
problematic concepts, not least the state and the museum. Because the CSRM falls under
the bureaucratic umbrella of the California Department of parks and Recreation, I
assumed that the state operated from the top down through through the bureaucracy to
determine the museum’s activities. By building this relationship in, I uncritically viewed
the state as a faceless monolith that controlled the activities of the museum. But how
would that control work exactly? And what did I mean by the state? Although there is
no consensus in sociology4 about the concept of the state, there are certainly observable
effects of the state on the daily lives of people. For example, in California we are
compelled to pay income and sales taxes and make deposits on beverage containers we
4
See, for example, Wehr (2004), pages 20-21 for a discussion of recent developments regarding the state in
political sociology.
13
purchase, all of which are collected by the state. The state also administers punishment
to people found to have violated the law. However, these activities are very complex and
ultimately conducted by people, rather than some extra social force.
As Dorothy Smith (1990) explains, the positivist method usually undertaken to
provide explanation for social phenomena happens through the process of removing
lived experience from its context, placing the objectified knowledge into an abstract
realm, then reordering sanitized data into concepts and frameworks that form a presupposed order of the world, based on pre-existing categories such as “the state.” This is
similar to Emile Durkheim’s ([1895] 1982) concept of social facts, which are ultimately
categories that freeze social reality into timeless, placeless objects. In addition to
treating the state as a frozen object, I was also building in a power relationship: the state
controls the activities of the museum. For Smith (1990), power relations, or “relations
of ruling” exist in observable practices that people engage in, and these practices must
be observed to develop an understanding of power. In this way, rather than thinking
about social reality in terms of concepts, it can be thought of instead as collections of
relationships between people.
Once I became aware of what I had been doing, I tried to be mindful of Smith’s
(2005) institutional ethnography5 and strove to spend my time in the museum, especially
5
Institutional ethnography is roughly a sociology that comes to know the social world by observing the
everyday activities of people with the aim of formulating a map or guidebook of rules that can give us clues
about power relations.
14
during docent training, seeing what people actually did, rather than fitting what I saw
into existing categories. Through this process, I saw that even the people who are
formally employed by the state as museum workers have little control over how the
meaning making works in everyday interactions with visitors. The bulk of people who
are involved in such interactions are volunteers, who outnumber paid staff by about
fifteen to one.6 To be sure, museum employees had the final say in the selection and
placement of the objects in the museum and are responsible for approving scripted talks
given by the docents. However, in the everyday practices of knowledge transmission to
visitors, I did not see a top-down power relationship. At the same time I was
deconstructing the concept of the state, I also began to deconstruct the concept of the
museum. As I described above, the museum is not a just a building that contains
historical artifacts; it is a practice that involves people interacting with other people to
share knowledge about the history of the railroad.
Interests
In addition to imagining the state and the museum as frozen concepts rather than
collections of relationships between people, my position statement also built in a power
relationship (the state controls the museum’s actions), as well as an idea of interests.
Categorizing social actors based on interests has long been a sociological practice.
6
Staffing levels were changing at the time I attended docent training in 2007, but the figures given then
were 40 paid staff, including people who performed administrative and other types of work that did not
involve interacting with the public, and over 600 volunteers.
15
Weber, for example, argued for assigning meaning to social action based on rational
interests, and that placing all action into an “ideal type” has benefits for analysis of social
action including “clear understandability and lack of ambiguity” ([1914] 1978:6).
However, the assumption that the museum would act in the state’s interests, as I have
already discussed, does not make sense because neither “the state” nor “the museum”
actually do any acting. Even if I revised my position statement to replace “the museum”
with “the people who work in the museum,” it would not clearly state why I thought that
they would be doing such a thing and what those interests are. Instead of trying to
demonstrate how the museum acted in the state’s interest, and therefore seeing the lived
reality inside of the museum through preexisting concepts, I decided to see if I could find
out the goals of the people who worked in the museum and begin to map the relations
that actually existed.
In Chapter 2, I included some text from the CSRM’s announcement about a new
exhibit. One particular section of text that guided me in looking for the museum’s pursuit
of the state’s interests was, “The goal of the project is to help Museum guests understand
and appreciate that railroad history is American history…” (CSRM 2006). I read this text
as a directive to visitors to understand what was being presented as a common history
that should be shared by all Americans and invoke a sense of common national identity,
which could be seen as serving the state’s interests, naturalizing its existence and keeping
people invested in their roles as citizens. What I was actually doing was again trying to
fit what I saw into existing categories. However, in reality, there is no single goal being
pursued in the CSRM.
16
At different points during my docent training some of the museum goals
mentioned were teaching children about the railroad, getting people to understand how
railroad history matters to them in their everyday lives, and to perpetuate the existence of
the museum, but not all of the museum workers shared these goals. In fact, some people
did not seem to have a goal at all other than to have fun. A characteristic that stood out to
me was that many people were railroad fans, and had begun collecting toy trains as
children and never stopped being interested. One docent I met drove from Nevada every
Saturday to volunteer at the museum. Other people I met were interested in California
history and saw the railroad as an important piece of that history. To be sure these people
hoped that they could inspire others to care about the railroad too, but not as a means to
keeping them from being free.
Another goal that emerged was to give the visitors a good museum “experience”
and get them to want to come back, preferably for multiple visits. There is no longer a
focus on maintaining a static narrative, and some displays are rotated to give people
something new to see. During docent training, the trainees were told that museum
workers should spend energy “trying to make sure the product you have meets the
audience’s needs.” Thus, history was merely a product to be consumed, rather than a
grand, ideological glue that holds national identities together. If this statement is read
outside of the preexisting relationships I had assumed, it would seem that the visitors are
actually more powerful that the state or the museum. Although it would require
additional analysis to tease out just how those relations work, it would have been
something I could not have taken seriously at all if I had insisted on clinging to my
17
categories.
Most of the people in the docent class with me planned to work inside of the
museum, doing work such as leading tours. Others planned to work on the train that runs
up and down the river levee outside of the museum. There was another, less popular job:
working with the crew to maintain the track for the tourist railroad. During my
experience working on the railroad track an entirely different reason for volunteering
appeared. It struck me one day while I was working that it was hard to understand why
people would get up early on a Saturday morning to do the often very physically
demanding work of maintaining a railroad line. Some people said that because they
worked in an office all day, they enjoyed the opportunity to get outside and work. I also
experienced a great deal of joy from operating huge machines and driving spikes with a
sledgehammer. It was fun and outside of what normal everyday practices were. It had
nothing to do with caring about railroad history.
Producers, Consumers and the Trouble with Authors
So I was neither interested in “the state” nor “the museum,” as such, and I had
abandoned trying to see museum practices through a lens of interests. Even if I could
have identified an agenda, the issue of mapping power relationships was problematic
because on the most basic level it was difficult to determine who the social actors were.
There are no clear producers or consumers of the museum’s historical discourse.
Macdonald (2002) writes that in her ethnographic study of a museum, she encountered
difficulty in making determinations about the producers or authors of a science exhibit,
and this, for her, raised the larger question about authors of cultural products and
18
knowledge in general. The “authorial puzzle,” she explains, actually stems from a
problem with conceptualizing agency, which she notes is a “category that has become
rather naturalised in sociology, and which surely cries out for more specification”
(2002:94). In her work, she was mainly discussing the problem of attributing authorship
to individuals when many people had contributed work to the creation of a museum
display.
A related but somewhat different problem appeared in the CSRM. I became
aware that another presumed authorial distinction was unclear: the distinction between
museum workers and museum visitors. This distinction had served as the foundation of
my initial inquiry, but the reality I observed in the museum pointed in a different
direction. Yet again, I was only able to take notice of this when I problematized the
preexisting categories and sought to see things as they actually were. Weber ([1904]
1949) noted that the real goal of cultural analysis is to understand the significance of
culture for us. The people who make and take meaning from the museum, those for
whom the museum has significance, are the same people, not separated by their position
in the production or consumption processes of culture, a boundary that is impossible to
determine given that most of the museum workers seemed to be engaged in cultural
production for themselves. One way to interpret this is that museum workers are both
producers and consumers. However, this calls into question the usefulness of the
distinction in the first place. Perhaps it would have been useful for me to answer Michel
Foucault’s question before beginning my work: “What difference does it make who is
speaking?” ([1969] 2003:391). Attempting to answer this question might have allowed
19
me to move beyond the distraction of producer and consumer categories, to ask different
questions,7 questions to remind me that in my preoccupation with these categories, I was
uncritically objectifying another concept: history. It is toward this concept that I turn my
attention in the next chapter.
7
Foucault pointed to these questions: "What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it
been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where
there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions?” ([1969] 2003:391).
20
Chapter 4
HISTORY
In this chapter, I revisit my original position statement, The California State Railroad
Museum is an ideological apparatus deployed by the state in pursuit of its interest to
perpetuate existing social conditions by repressing the truth of history, which prevents
our freedom, with the intention of deconstructing the idea that the truth of history can set
us free.
“Missing” History
History can be thought of as a type of objectifying concept, as described Chapter
3, but in this project, it represented a special case due to the significance it held in my
construction of power relations, namely that its exposition and dissemination are the
means to liberation. In particular, I assumed that the relationship between the museum,
the state, and the rest of us is one of repression. Therefore, the struggle against the state’s
historical repression by way of exposure of hidden truths at the CSRM could be thought
of as a revolutionary and emancipatory act. My first task was to develop an
understanding of the events that occurred during the history of the railroad. I intended to
look for examples of events or topics that were presented at the CSRM, though in a
seemingly incomplete manner.
Most of the displays shown in the CSRM focus on railroad work. As I described
in Chapter 2, the museum undertook a major reorganization of its displays in 2005 to
highlight the “human side” of railroad history. Recall from the announcement:
Throughout the Railroad Museum, guests now encounter life-like figures representing
real people at work on the railroad. Appropriately attired and placed in settings that
21
replicate actual work environments, these figures help bring to life the challenges,
hazards, triumphs and rewards that were an everyday part of railroading….
…guests will note these workers came from diverse backgrounds: African American,
American Indian, Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Mexican American, and Italian American, to
name a few. Interpretive panels, photographs, and artifacts communicate the
contributions of these workers….
The goal of the project is to help Museum guests understand and appreciate that railroad
history is American history — and that this history involves thousands of diverse people,
along with locomotives, passenger and freight cars. (CSRM 2006)
The portrait painted here of railroad history is conspicuously multicultural and free from
conflict, but in reality, race- and gender-based tensions were the norm. For example,
during the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the most dangerous work was
performed by Chinese men (Glenn 1991). Another prominent piece of the railroad story
in the museum is the promotion of “brotherhood” between the railroad workers through
their unions (the unions were formally called Brotherhoods”). However, what is not
mentioned is that Black men and presumably other men of color as well as women were
not allowed to join these organizations (Arnesen 1994).
Moreover, unions were generally unfriendly toward one another; workers of
different trades belonged to different unions, and this generally contributed to diminished
effectiveness in bargaining for workers’ rights. In the wake of this divisiveness,
however, another union formed: the American Railway Union, which was open to all rail
workers, regardless of trade.8 Although it also excluded Blacks, its occupationally
8
For a discussion of railroad Brotherhoods and the formation of the American Railway Union, see
McMurry (1953).
22
diverse membership provided widespread and vital support of the Pullman boycott and
subsequent general strike in 1894.9 As part of the strike, the Sacramento railroad depot
was the site of a 3,000-person occupation that lasted two weeks, and included the
surrendering of the state militia (Deverell 1996). The small display of the Pullman strike
that exists in the CSRM is presented separately from the display on labor unions, which
serves to discursively separate the strike from its labor context. The more radical union
action is overshadowed by a presentation of the unions’ positive impacts on labor reforms
such as worker’s safety laws.
A Rosie the Riveter display occupies a noticeable place in the railroad museum,
and several Rosie the Riveter items are for sale in the gift shop. Rosie the Riveter and
other advertising campaigns are seen today as symbolizing women’s strength and power,
and this is the message of the CSRM display. Although the railroads did hire women out
of necessity during both World Wars, the prevailing attitude remained that the hard labor
should be left to men. This was especially true following World War I. In 1919, the
manager of the Women’s Service Section of the U.S. railroad administration wrote that,
although women’s work proved to be invaluable during wartime, about 70 percent of the
women were involved in clerical jobs. Moreover, as Maureen Honey (1980) points out,
Rosie the Riveter propaganda was not actually directed at changing ideas about gender
roles or gendered abilities. Instead, these ads paradoxically emphasized women’s
strength and ability, as well as their weaknesses and ultimate dependence on men for
9
See Deverell (1996) for a discussion of the significance and impacts of the Pullman strike in California.
23
protection.
The CSRM discursively connects the past to the present. A central message is
that the railroad helped usher in the diversity that is present in workplaces today.
However, it is easy to see that attitudes have not changed much about the gendered
division of labor, especially attitudes about women railroaders. In her memoirs about
time spent as a brakeman for the railroad in the late 20th century, Linda Niemann writes
that she was still looked down upon by her mail coworkers and notes about one
experience, “I was the only woman on the ground in the whole yard, and I got to hear
about the few other women that had been run off. The implication was that they were
finks, sissies, and cowards” (1990:25). Yet there is no mention of such realities in the
museum.
From these observations of missing historical elements where the subject matter is
included but incomplete, I concluded that the CSRM allowed history to be told in a
certain way. Specifically, the permitted stories were those that highlighted the railroad as
a locus of a nation’s overcoming race and sex differences; aspects of historical racism
and sexism had to be left out. To test this hypothesis, I conducted an experiment. During
docent training, the class was given an assignment to practice “interpretation” of some
display inside the museum. We had to choose a display in the museum and give a talk
about it, in a manner that we would use to lead a tour for visitors. There were a variety of
existing scripts available, but I chose to research a topic that I had not seen or heard
described in detail in the CSRM. I planned to breach the norms I had perceived by
presenting a version of truth of history that I felt being repressed.
24
I developed a presentation on the Pullman porters that included many details that
did not conform to the generally conflict-free tone of the museum displays. As Jack
Santino explains:
The Pullman Company hired blacks for a relatively well-paying job, but at the same time,
Pullman institutionalized inequity and discrimination in many of its rules and regulations.
So a young black man in the early years of [the twentieth] century was locked into a
frustrating and particular set of circumstances in which most of society’s prestigious
paths were closed to him, many of its institutions actively hostile, while others, although
they shared in the general social evil, at least had something to offer black men. The
Pullman Company was not altruistic; it was pragmatic. Black labor sold Pullman: the
service that the porters rendered was the single most important selling point for the
Pullman Company. It was in the company’s interest to hire blacks as service employees.
(1989:13)
The existing CSRM display of the Black porters is silent about discrimination in the daily
lives of the porters as well as the larger racist context of their employment; instead, the
display provides a neat narrative that ends up praising the Pullman Company for
providing jobs. My presentation, on the other hand, explicitly portrayed the Pullman
Company as a racist institution, and I provided many details about the company’s unfair
labor practices. When I gave my talk, I fully expected to be stopped or reprimanded.
Contrary to my expectation, however, the museum supervisor assigned to critique the
presentations praised it and thanked me for presenting information that she had not
known before.
Had I not conducted the experiment that I described above, I could have gone on
believing that my suspicions were confirmed, and that the railroad museum represses the
history of racism allowing it to continue in the present. However, had I done so, I would
have been no closer to understanding how the relations of oppression actually worked. In
reality, there was no censorship. Once again, I had approached seeing the CSRM with
25
preconceived ideas about power relationships and placed what I saw into preexisting
categories. If nobody was preventing such stories from being told, why did I not find
more examples of similar kinds of “corrections” by other docents? When I began my
research, I assumed that the museum would not let other discourses come into play,
especially ones that would potentially expose the museum’s omissions. I had assumed
that there would be censorship that did not come to fruition.
The Master Discourse
Eventually I came to see a “master discourse” at work, which ordered the story in
a way that is largely free of conflict, conspicuously multicultural, and highlights progress.
The “master discourse” includes the unquestioned relevance/importance of
history/genealogy, as well as an emphasis on a linear progression to where we are now.
But the mater discourse shaped more than just the museum’s side of the story: one reason
why I was allowed to present my version of the Pullman porters’ story was that I shared
many of the same values, such as inclusion and multiculturalism, as the rules that guided
the museum’s discourse, but I could not see that I held these values.
Sometimes we can see these invisible value orientations by a disruption or a
breach; in my case, I saw my own values because an action I thought would cause a
disruption did not. These components of the master discourse, however, are not under
the control of some ruling class. Rather, these are almost universally accepted. Even
when there is critique of “color blindness” the undertone of what reform is needed is
always about some kind of democratic pluralism. This was what my vision of the
museum was at the beginning; I equated “truth” with this kind of pluralism, not realizing
26
that my vision was shaped by certain notions of “fairness” that are problematic but are
taken for granted. By seeing the museum outside of my preexisting categories, I was
able to see a commonality between what I believed should be displayed and what was
actually there, and therefore begin to break down a constructed dualism that had been
impeding my thought.
The problem with such dualisms is that they implicitly define a “solution” to the
“problem.” If the problem is that historically oppressed people are denied voice, then the
solution is to un-silence these voices, which I was trying to do.10 My point is not that
people’s voices are silenced or they are not. Rather, my point is that this should be
problematized. What do we mean when we say people have no voice? Why do we think
that these certain people should have voice and what do we think they should be saying
that they are not currently? And what do we think would change if voices were suddenly
permitted? That the same discursive limitations that guide the museum’s story about
railroad history are the same ones that I wanted to use to be critical presents a problem.
At the heart of what I wanted to say about the museum in the first place was the notion
that some people are not portrayed fairly. On the other hand, the CSRM’s story is
explicitly constructed to “give voice” to many people that have traditionally been left out.
Ultimately though, these issues were not actually what I was interested in; my problem
10
My attempt to “give voice” to the Black porters is representative of a problematic academic practice. See
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” She notes, “the ventriloquism of the
speaking subaltern is the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade” ([1999] 2006:28).
27
was with liberation and I found that there is no clear path from past to future.
Liberatory History
Now that I knew that there was something other than an identifiable repressive
force preventing the truth of history from being told, and I had begun to see the
similarities between my idea of what the museum should be and what was actually there,
I began to question my own motivation for seeking such a truth in the first place.
Certainly, I did not make up this idea; “the truth will set you free” is a common phrase.
However, Foucault pointed out that the discipline of history was not always aimed toward
studying understanding the conditions possible for social or political revolution; on the
contrary:
History was a discipline by means of which the bourgeoisie showed, first, that its reign
was only the result, the product, the fruit, of a slow maturation, and that this reign was
thus perfectly justified, since it came from the mists of time; next, the bourgeoisie both
established its right to hold power and warded off the threats of a rising revolution, and
history was indeed what Jules Michelet called the “resurrection of the past.” History
assigned itself the task of bringing the whole national past back to life. This calling and
role of history now must be reconsidered if history is to be detached from the ideological
system in which it originated and developed. ([1972] 1998:423)
What can we take from this? Knowledge obtained through historical analysis can be used
for a number of purposes: it is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. It is a
discourse that can be wielded and deployed in a variety of ways. This point seems to be
lost on some historical sociologists who fail to problematize their positions in the pursuit
of historical knowledge. Walton writes that people want to know their history, but what
about him? Why was he so interested in finding other people’s history? Although he
theorizes history making as a process of collective action with a multiplicity of actors
who fight over which version becomes the dominant narrative, in realty, Walton’s theory
28
places the most power in the hands of the researcher. This is revealed briefly near the
end of his book where he notes: “The great opportunity presented to those who study
collective memory and its social construction lies in recovering the peoples’ history, and
perhaps a bit of their sanity” (2001:301). He identifies his role and purpose as a rescuer
of people’s history, as a kind of savior. Then I turned the question toward myself: what
was I so interested in?
Because I linked the repression of historical discourse to a lack of personal
freedom, my personal freedom, I had assumed that just being able to speak the truth of
history would lead to it. In short, I defined freedom backwardly as the opposite of what I
imagined is oppressing us, but as Nietzsche warned, “It might even be possible that what
constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being
insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—
perhaps even in being essentially identical with them” ([1885] 1997:2). The trouble with
the methods I was using was not only in their lack of ability to find a true history, it was
in the significance I attributed to doing so and in my failure to sufficiently problematize
the process. The consequences were far greater than being unable to find an answer to
my problem: the methods were in fact limiting my idea of freedom; they were stifling my
sociological imagination.
29
Chapter 5
KNOWLEDGE
So far I have explained the roots of my position statement, The California State Railroad
Museum is an ideological apparatus deployed by the state in pursuit of its interest to
perpetuate existing social conditions by repressing the truth of history, which prevents
our freedom. However, the statement is silent about my own position and intentions; the
goal of this chapter is to describe my place in the project.
Clarifying My Objective: Unpacking the Relationship between Knowledge and Freedom
I have noted that the goal of my work was to gain knowledge about the ways in
which power operates in society, but I never contemplated what I meant by knowledge. I
also never considered what I was going to do with the knowledge once I had it. Over the
course of my project, I began to see that the reason that I wanted to understand power
relations was because I was interested in freedom, especially my own. Earlier I discussed
how my idea of freedom was constructed backwardly though my preexisting ideas about
the state and history. My position statement outlines a constellation of power relations
that I imagined prevented my freedom, and I held this understanding before I ever walked
into the railroad museum. Since the state and the CSRM were powerful forces that
prevented my freedom by repressing history, I could take back my freedom by telling the
truth about history. My ideas about the state and its relationship to freedom were
influenced by the sociological concepts of civil society and the public sphere. As Craig
Calhoun explains:
The idea of civil society entered political philosophy and social theory as a way of
describing the capacity of a political community to organize itself, independent of the
30
specific direction of state power. Claims to such capacity were linked—notably in
Locke—to rejections of the absolute authority of monarchs and assertions of the rights of
popular sovereignty. Such arguments placed a new emphasis on the social integration of
a people, on society as such rather than on merely the aggregate of subjects. (1993:270)
Although civil society is positioned as a force that keeps government in check, and is
therefore fundamental to democracy and freedom, Habermas’ ([1962] 1989) concept of
the public sphere is somewhat more restrictive. It is “an arena of deliberative exchange
in which rational-critical arguments rather than mere inherited ideas or personal statuses
could determine agreements or actions” (Calhoun 1993:273). For Habermas, the goal of
the rational communicative action is for people to set aside their social differences (class,
status, and the like) to get closer and closer to the truth, which would bring about a state
of utopic freedom. Yet, as Bent Flyvbjerg notes, “The basic weakness of Habermas’s
project is its lack of agreement between ideal and reality, between intentions and their
implementation” (1998:215).
I began to recognize the manner in which I had connected freedom, the state, and
truth was problematic when I began to see a problem with the idea of giving voice. Why
was it so important to me to unsilence voices? I saw freedom and democracy as
identical, and the result of this was that the state was ultimately responsible for my
freedom or lack thereof. Furthermore, a way I could observe I was free or bring about
my freedom was by ensuring that everybody was able to participate or have a voice in
speaking the truth. Foucault indicated that there are two types of questions that can be
asked regarding the truth. Beginning in the fifth century the concept of the truth became
recognizable as a problem. The problematization of the truth has two sides: “One side is
concerned with ensuring that the process of reasoning is correct in determining whether a
31
statement is true (or concerns itself with our ability to gain access to the truth). And the
other side is concerned with the question: What is the importance for the individual and
for the society of telling the truth, of knowing the truth, of having people who tell the
truth, as well as knowing how to recognize them” (Foucault [1983] 2001:170). The first
side, Foucault noted, lives on in Western philosophy today. The second side is the basis
for the critical tradition.
A problem that I encountered during my study is that originally I wanted to study
the first type of truth; that is: I wanted to subject the CSRM’s truth claims, to
verification. In retrospect, I understand why I thought that my investigation would
somehow lead me to freedom. The concept of democracy in our society is basically
identical with freedom. Being able to speak one’s mind, to speak the truth, was an
important part of being a Greek citizen, and we still value this component of citizenship
today (such as in the emphasis on free speech). Additionally, part of my conception of
freedom inherited from the idea of democracy concerns inclusive participation and
equality. I mapped this preexisting concept onto an idea of inclusive and equal
representation. These combined to form my implicit ideal of the way the museum
should be, the attainment of which equated to freedom.
I essentially wanted to replace the museum’s truth claims with my own, but in
being able to problematize the truth, that is, no longer take it for granted, I can see that
what I was actually doing was separating “good” knowledge claims from “bad”
knowledge through the use of a taken for granted category called truth which had been
linked in a preexisting relationship to my goal. Whether my claims or the CSRM’s
32
claims are more verifiable turned out to be of little import to me.
Problematizing Method
Much has been written about the negative effects of positivism, and the scientific
method in particular, on social research. Ben Agger (2007), for example, implicates the
practice of a positivist research framework as the primary source of sociology’s troubles.
This, however, is not a new argument; more than fifty years ago, C. Wright Mills wrote
about the consequences of a tendency toward positivist methods: “the kinds of problems
that will be taken up and the way in which they are formulated are quite severely limited
by The Scientific Method. Methodology, in short seems to determine the problems”
([1959] 2000:57). In my case, in order to set up an inquiry, as well as in my idea of how
I would acquire knowledge I relied on a positivist model, even though at the same time I
was being critical of positivism. Furthermore, in my project, methodology delimited my
definition of freedom by restricting what counted as freedom to include only preexisting
concepts that I could observe positively in the CSRM. The tendencies of the scientific
method lead to a particular epistemology that pretends the world can be accurately and
externally perceived by a researcher. What is observed or “found” becomes enshrined in
an ever-growing, self-expanding body of knowledge, science, which becomes the basis
for asking more and more questions, without reference to the purpose such pursuits serve.
A reading of Weber at a crucial point in my process provided what I needed to be
able to see this. Economics was considered a merely a technique, a means:
It was on the other hand, from the very beginning, more than a ‘technique’ since it was
integrated into the great scheme of natural law and the rationalistic Weltanschauung of
the eighteenth century. The nature of that Weltanschauung with its optimistic faith in the
theoretical and practical rationalizability of reality had an important consequence insofar
33
as it obstructed the discovery of the problematic character of that standpoint which had
been assumed as self-evident. As the rational analysis of society arose in close connection
with the modern development of natural science, so it remained related to it in its whole
method of approach. (Weber [1904] 1949:85, my emphasis)
Not only do concepts and relationships need to be problematized and situated, but so do
the tools and the reason for the pursuit of knowledge in the first place. In going about my
investigation of power relations, I often used existing concepts to organize what I was
seeing, the consequence of which being that I ignored, or at least could not immediately
see, things as they actually were. I assumed that there was a goal that the museum was
trying to accomplish, and that goal belonged to the state. Notably, however, my position
contains another assumption: that what the museum was pursuing was the wrong goal.
Thus, my position statement embeds a value judgment—an idea about what should be.
I read Donna Haraway’s (1988) essay about situational knowledge many years
before I could clearly see its relevance for my thinking. I think I know why now: in order
to process knowledge claims, we need not only the end-product, but we also need to see
clearly the way the author came to them as well as have a clear understanding of where
we are coming from. Haraway situates her piece very clearly as the result of her
experiences, her biography, her situation at the point when she wrote it. When I read it
the first time, all I could take from what she wrote was that there was no point at which
we could understand the world in total. Reading it again later, I understood her point as
being that if authors situate their thought for readers, we can try to see with them, not as
them. Preserving links between authors and knowledge claims keeps us from attempting
to make universalizing theory. In the end we can never see from another’s identical
position, what we take from another author will always be something different from what
34
is written.
How are we to do what Haraway suggests and say what our situation is so that we
may be accountable? Our values color every aspect of our research. Just as the concepts
that we use to ask our research questions have embedded values, so do the concepts that
we use to try to explain our situations. If I say that I am a late-20s working mother high
school dropout living in California and that is the perspective from which I make my
inquiries and knowledge claims, what does that mean? It might mean one thing to some
people, and that might even be the same thing it means to me. Talking about your “social
position as a researcher” is important, but it also implies that such things are fixed
objects, which they are not. Further, it implies that researchers can see all of it and that
they are outside of the discourse that constrains the people they are studying. We do not
often think of the contexts of our own thinking. We know that there are certain
contingencies and contexts to social processes, but sometimes we forget that our thinking
is subject to contexts and constraints too.
At the outset of my project, I sought to understand power relations, to develop
knowledge about power relations, but I did not understand the processes and methods I
was to undertake already embedded an idea about them. Therefore, to gain knowledge, I
actually had to “unlearn” what was already there, but which I could not see.
Decentering Knowledge
In my intention to add to the sociological body of knowledge about power, I
treated knowledge as an object. In particular, I imagined my work would build on other
people’s work by filling in gaps or previously unidentified issues. Many of the authors I
35
read situated their own work in terms of “correcting problems” in existing theory. One
such approach is a “research programme,” which is described by Burawoy (1989) as a
methodological framework that takes “hard core postulates” and examines cases against
them. This process is consistent with the general methods and understanding of science
as a cumulative endeavor. Thus, it builds in an idea of progress and creates an incentive
for sociology to retain traditions, even those that become ultimately obsolete. The idea is
that knowledge is produced by creating new theory when exceptions arise that cannot be
explained by existing theory. The problem with this approach is that when something
cannot be explained by existing theory, the primary assumptions that underlie the theory
need to be subjected to a critical analysis instead of inventing new ways to explain
exceptions. “Exceptions” are only exceptions if you hold an idea to be universally valid,
hence the “hard core postulates,” but these are problematic in the same way as “social
facts.” The reality from which concepts originate is located in a particular time and
place, and these situations change. To use such concepts uncritically leads to the
production of ideology rather than knowledge. Hard core postulates also embed power
relationships making an investigation of actual power relationships pointless: you are
already presupposing them so what is there to investigate?
Going about theory making (and breaking) as if you can just build upon what
somebody else already did is a flawed practice because it imagines individual researchers
as cogs in a great rationality machine. Knowledge is subject to all of the contexts in
which it is developed. I assumed that there was a relationship between history and
liberation in the path I took to arrive at my question in the first place. I did not really
36
have to think about why because there were existing texts in line with these ideas.
Deconstructing taken for granted knowledge claims can have a destabilizing effect, which
can open space for new thought, but this does not automatically create a path to social
change. We do not have direct access to incite social change, which I believe is implied
in a great deal of social research—that the “results” of the study will be “used” for some
beneficial purpose, as is the case in Walton’s (2001) work: the results of social research
can help people maintain their sanity. Furthermore, the effect of this reasoning is that
knowledge becomes a goal, an end.
As Weber wrote, the “laws” are not the goals (“ends”) of research, but they are
the analytical tools (“means”); nevertheless, “there emerges from this the
meaninglessness of the idea which prevails occasionally even among historians, namely
that the goal of the cultural sciences, however far it may be from realization, is to
construct a closed system of concepts, in which reality is synthesized in some sort of
permanently and universally valid classification and from which it can again be deduced”
([1904] 1949:84). This idea presents a problem since we can never see anything in a
way that would allow for the creation of a universal classification, and social reality
changes over time in ways that are nonlinear and unpredictable. Moreover, it says
nothing of what such a classification system is expected to do. Perhaps what we will find
is that entire bodies of work are flawed and we should discard them. We should ask
ourselves why it is so troubling to be faced with the possibility that our work is all for
naught. The pursuit of knowledge must be fearless and prepared to abandon everything
that has come before. Knowing something new does not add to the knowledge that one
37
already posseses, it must be reconciled with what was there before and what one knows
then is something different. Knowing something new should be recognized as being
possible only through a fundamental change in understanding. If it is not, we tend to
cover up and be blind to the realities in front of us.
Knowledge comes from inside of one’s subjective position as much as it comes
from the external world, and this is the main problem with positivist research: the
absence of the process of looking in leads to the uncritical reproduction of what is already
thought to be known rather than knowledge. Science and sociology and the research that
comes from their practices should always be situated as strains of discourse; they are not
necessarily truer than others are. To view them as such is to bind questions, hypotheses,
and values into a web of ideology. In that ideological space, the real potential for
knowing dies. At points during this process I often asked myself why I wanted to know
things, and I was finally able to be accountable and say that I thought that knowledge was
a means to freedom. But as that was revealed, I realized the path from knowledge to
freedom was something I had no understanding of; I had merely taken it for granted.
38
Chapter 6
REFLEXIVITY, OR GAZING INTO THE ABYSS
What I have written is the result of my investigation of the research process. The results
of my study are that I have decentered the concept of knowledge and exposed it as other
than an end product that comes sequentially as the consequence of “doing research.” The
real end of this project was being able to formulate the position statement to which I have
referred throughout this thesis.
Social research often aims to uncover sources and relationships of oppression; this
is frequently attempted by relying on an existing framework handed down through the
accumulated body of scientific knowledge. Yet, if the existing framework contains
assumptions that are not thoroughly contextualized and problematized, it is easy to carry
the problematic assumptions over to subsequent projects. I needed to understand what
the implications of these methodological critiques were; I needed to problematize
method. This means that all of the concepts a researcher uses to explain what is seen
should be criticized. It also means that a researcher’s motivations and intentions should
be stated as clearly as possible, and kept in mind throughout the project. We should
always ask ourselves again and again: What am I doing? What do I think I am doing?
Why am I doing it? These questions should not be asked with the aim of finding an
answer, but trying to answer them clearly can reveal assumptions and intentions that are
not easily recognized. The position statement that I used to guide the writing of this
thesis was not something that I had in mind at the outset of my project. Rather, I was
only able to construct it after I had challenged some presupposed assumptions. Being
39
able to make the statement clearly allowed me recognize another problematic relationship
between knowledge and freedom. There was no way to know ahead of time what I
would find, but what I did find was there all along.
In Chapter 1, I explained that in the end, two purposes of this study emerged. The
main conclusion from the first purpose is that, following Foucault ([1971] 2003), we are
interested in history because of the assumption that we can trace ourselves back to it.
Social research, it is further supposed, can amend the wrongs of history through practices
such as “giving voice” to historically oppressed subjects, leading to positive social
change. My chief mistake was that I did not problematize this procession, and when I
began to do so, the entire foundation of my inquiry became unstable. My reflections on
this destabilization process became the second purpose, and it led me to an understanding
of why it was difficult to see my mistakes by using the tools given to me by sociology.
We researchers must imagine ourselves as having power through our presumed ability
and positions as discoverers/expositors/creators of knowledge, yet we often take our
values and the values and historical situation from which our discipline was born for
granted. I see this process as infinite and any decision to stop must be recognized as
arbitrary and contingent.
My approach initially contained a multiplicity of assumptions, which later came
undone. This necessitated the project be rethought repeatedly. In the beginning, I started
with existing concepts and went about seeing the museum with those in mind, but at
different points those concepts revealed themselves to be unstable. Once I could begin to
see and challenge my own assumptions, I could see how the same values that shaped the
40
museum actors shaped my thinking too, and this allowed me to problematize additional
ideological constructs. What if we take seriously the notion that new knowledge does not
come directly from empiricism? What if we instead imagine it as the process of being
able to raise new questions, to see new problems?
The crucial piece that I found to be missing was that I needed a method to
discover things about my perspective. The difficulty with trying to account for your own
perspective at the beginning is that you cannot see it, quite like you cannot see your own
face without a mirror. What is the mirror? What is the vehicle that allows for the selfrecognition? I think that you can access mirrors by looking to the external world. During
the course of this work, I learned to recognize that when I had strong feelings about
something I was seeing, the feelings were likely attached to a value that I held but of
which I was unaware. In other words, by gazing into the abyss long enough, and
allowing it to gaze back at you, two things happen. First, you notice something looking
at you; reminded of your own subjectivity, you become an object. Second, you realize
that what you see is your own reflection, it may not reveal what you thought you looked
like, but there it is. But there is not just one mirror: I imagine a whole (fun)house of
mirrors. Sometimes more than one reflection is visible, sometimes only part. Rather
than trying to aim or align the mirrors to solve the puzzle, why not break them?
It is worthwhile to consider whether it would not in fact be better not to break
mirrors, to instead hold on those that seem to provide accurate reflections. My first
answer is that it is better to remain skeptical, to resist settling for a mirror that appears to
be good enough when better ones may exist. As Weber noted, “Fundamental doubt is the
41
father of knowledge” (1949a:7). More important that this, however, is asking what
significance one places on the pursuit of the truest possible reflection. Should I aim to
find a perfect reflection? That would amount to treating myself as a social fact. Mirror
reflections are useful tools for the pursuit of knowledge, but knowledge requires them to
be temporary:
Now something that you formerly loved as a truth or probability strikes you as an error;
you shed it and fancy that this represents a victory for your reason. But perhaps this error
was as necessary for you then, when you were still a different person—you are always
different person—as all your present “truths,” being a skin, as it were, that concealed and
covered a great deal that you were not yet permitted to see. What killed that opinion for
you was your new life and not your reason: you no longer need it and now it collapses
and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize something,
this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is, at least very often, evidence of vital
energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because
something in us wants to live and affirm—something that we perhaps do not know or see
as yet.—This is said in favor of criticism. (Nietzsche [1887] 1974:245-246)
In short: knowing means becoming a different person.
My goal at the start of this project was to have something general to say about
power—to develop a theory of power. In order to do this, I set out to build on existing
theory by analyzing empirical evidence. I basically started with an idea, became
disillusioned, questioned the value of research, came to the conclusion it is worthwhile,
but also realized that it was almost a foregone conclusion to feel this way because it is
part of the archive I inherited since I was born during this age of science. As my
assumptions fell away, it changed what I saw and what meaning I gave to it. More
importantly, though, the foundation upon which I was standing also began to fall away.
That is, the sociological discipline that gave birth to my scientific curiosity was also
unstable. Thinking about the question of whether or not my project is ultimately
sociological allows me to pose a set of questions. What is sociology? Is it the form
42
(scientific method/positivism), is it the canon (Marx, Weber, Durkheim), is it a set of
methodological rules? It is none of these and all of these. It is a practice that exists in a
larger context. The boundaries of the discipline are transient and they have always been
that way. Moreover, they must remain this way. In recognition of this necessity, Mills
called upon social scientists to craft their own methods: “Avoid any rigid set of
procedures… .Avoid the fetishism of method and technique.… Let every man be his
own methodologist; let every man be his own theorist; let theory and method again
become part of the practice of a craft” ([1959] 2000:224).
When I was beginning to write the current version of this thesis, I attached a great
deal of meaning to the Nietzsche quotation included at the beginning of Chapter 1. I was
frustrated about the things that I had not considered before I started my project. Yet now
I experience no melancholia. As I have noted, I have come to understand that knowledge
projects are never “complete,” so it is not too late. Theory should not be an end, but that
is what I intended when I started this work. In light of this, rather than stating theoretical
conclusions, I have only new questions. For example, How do I reconcile the idea that
authors might not matter with insisting that researchers disclose their situations as part of
the knowledge process? The limits of my thought have only begun to be revealed to me,
and I will probably chase those limits forever.
43
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