FACT AND FIGURE: THE RHETORICITY OF THE DOCUMENT 

By 

3AN S. PLECASH 
B.A., The University of British Columbia, 1980 

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF 
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF 

MASTER OF ARTS 

in 
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES 

Department of Sociology 

We accept this thesis as conforming 
to the required standard 

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA 
August 1986 

0 3 a n S. Plecash, 1986 



In presenting t h i s thesis i n p a r t i a l f u l f i l m e n t of the 
requirements for an advanced degree at the University 
of B r i t i s h Columbia, I agree that the Library s h a l l make 
i t f r e e l y available for reference and study. ,1 further 
agree that permission for extensive copying of t h i s thesis 
for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my 
department or by his or her representatives. I t i s 
understood that copying or publication of t h i s thesis 
for f i n a n c i a l gain s h a l l not be allowed without my written 
permission. 

Department of A n t h r o p o l o g y a n d S o c i o l o g y 

The University of B r i t i s h Columbia 
1956 Main Mall 
Vancouver, Canada 
V6T 1Y3 

Date 2 S e p t e m b e r 1 9 8 6 



11 

A B S T R A C T 

The least remarked of sociological practices is the one without which its 

investigations would come to a standstill: the writing up of research results, both 

theoretical and substantive. This inattention is dependent upon a widely held view of 

writing as a technical apparatus which is more or less competently employed by 

researchers to represent those features of the social world with which they are 

concerned. The question addressed is whether and to what extent this commonplace 

commits sociology to a very old version of representation and a companion account of 

the true, which when expressed in other idioms are readily identified as problematic. 

With the aid of a type of analysis known as deconstruction, it is shown that a 

technical construal of writing is inseparable from and indispensable to the 

construction of fact, and thus to the very idea of documentation as a sheerly mimetic 

or descriptive relation of writing to a referent. The idea of a document is 

accordingly treated as the most powerful expression of a largely unacknowledged 

system of sense-making organizing sociological discourse. 



iii 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Page 

Abstract ii 

Acknowledgement iv 

Introduction 

The Rhetoricity of the Document 1 

Chapter One 
Beginnings that have already Begun 5 
I. A Persistent Malaise 7 
II. A Version of Deconstruction 15 
III. Sociological Sense-Making 21 
Notes 24 

Chapter Two 

Facts, Figures and the Principles of Accounting 26 

I. The Facts (in Two Figures) 28 
II. The Figuring 33 
III. The Principle in Practice 37 

1. 40 
2. 41 
3. 42 

IV. The Practice 'in Principle' 43 
Notes 51 

Chapter Three 

Readings that have yet to be Done 53 

I. An Old Story 53 
II. Readings that will always need Doing: 

Some Last Remarks 59 
Notes 61 

Bibliography 62 



iv 

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T 

Many thanks are due R o y Turner and the remaining members of the thesis 

c o m m i t t e e : to R o y Turner more particularly for many years of provocative, 

stimulating and highly engaging instruction; and to A d r i a n Marriage for generous and 

attentive comments on the work-in-progress, including a very timely reminder that 

although agreement per se is never the issue, commensuration always i s . Thanks are 

also due Martha F o s c h i , for an unstinting vote of confidence which has extended over 

the past eight years, and for the intellectual exchanges and material support which 

have been generously given during the course of my graduate programme. F i n a l l y , to 

Jan Johnson, for a trying and often inconvenient job of word-processing, and for the 

truly rare friendship out of which it was undertaken. 



1 

I N T R O D U C T I O N 

The R h e t o r i c i t y of the Document 

B u t , it is said, melody is merely a succession of sounds. No 
doubt. And drawing is only an arrangement of colors. A n orator 
uses ink to write out his compositions: does that mean ink is a 
very eloquent liquid? (Rousseau, in D e r r i d a 1976:209) 

It will be the task of the thesis as a whole to rise in a particular way to the 

occasion of Rousseau's epigrammatic reminder that there is more to composition than 

meets the e y e . T h e following must therefore content itself with giving brief 

indications of the value of such a consideration for sociology. C e r t a i n l y questions 

concerning the premises and e f f e c t s of scholarly writing have been providing material 

for a variety of analyses, and lively debate, elsewhere. The A m e r i c a n philosopher 

R i c h a r d R o r t y for example has taken analytic philosophy to task for organizing its 

accounts around a naive 'foundationalism' which promotes an equally naive 

correspondence version of truth and representation (e.g. R o r t y 1979, 1980, 1982, 

1984b, 1985a, 1985b). With others' analyses (e.g. C a v e l l 1985; D a n i e l 1982; Danto 

1980, 1982, 1985; Davidson 1978; H a c k i n g 1984, 1985; L a n g 1983; Maclntyre 1977, 

1984; R o r t y 1983; Taylor 1984b) this attention to the production of philosophical 

accounts has found counterparts in studies of economic argument (Gudeman 1984; 

M c C l o s k e y 1985), historiography (Boucher 1985; C a n a r y and K o z i c k i 1978; Condren 

1982; Dover 1983; White 1973, 1978, 1980, 1982) and political theory (Connolly 1983; 

Sandel 1984; Shapiro 1984), among others. Taken together, such works argue 

forcefully for attending more closely to the letters of our respective laws. It is a 

recent exercise in sociological composition, however, which brings these issues into 

focus on more familiar territory. 



2 

In his Matters of Fact (1979), the sociologist Stanley Raffel poses a number 

of questions concerning the routine conduct of sociological investigation and the 

equally routinized assumptions which support it. These questions take on particular 

significance in relation to two recent developments. The first is a widely diagnosed 

malaise within the discipline which has been finding expression in the use of such 

terms as 'crisis', 'indirection', 'chronic disagreement', 'cross-talk', 'non-

communication' and the like. The second, not unrelated, is the increasing use of such 

phrases as 'post-empiricism', 'post-positivism' and 'the postmodern', along with such 

designations as 'metatheory' and 'meta-analysis', to indicate if not the deed then the 

desirability of leaving behind what has been ailing us and getting on with more 

important matters: matters of fact, which as Raffel points out have come largely to 

define sociology's self-understanding. 

Crediting this compelling sense of malaise (as well as the desire to rectify 

it) Raffel makes a strong case for its being, not an accident that befalls sociology 

from outside, but a consequence that is built into its routines and thus a function of 

their very exercise. In what is an extremely fine-grained analysis, Raffel applies to 

sociology one of sociology's most productive insights, namely, that it is in the most 

obvious and taken-for-granted of practices and artifacts that one is apt to find the 

most powerful and unexamined workings of a tradition or institutional arrangement 

that would elsewhere elicit questioning. Sociology's is a peculiar self-understanding, 

Raffel suggests, for if its world is liberally, perhaps even too liberally populated with 

phenomena, there is also one phenomenon which is supposed to be absent from it at 

all times: the sociologist, in his capacity as an observer. "We need", says Raffel, 

a rendering of the standard normative order of social science 
which methodically selects and distinguishes truth-producing 
scientific recording, apparently on the basis of presence and 
absence (1979:13) 

It is in the routine practice of observation and its artifact, the record or the 



3 

document, that this system of presence and absence is most powerfully operative, 

expressing and perpetuating a very old idea that representation is a relation of words 

to things. 

Raffel's analysis converges in a potentially instructive way with those of a 

school of contemporary French philosophy which has come to be known as 

"deconstruction". Its chief practitioner, Jacques Derrida, has suggested that the 

common construal of writing as mere notation or as a technical apparatus is the last 

and most powerful of Western ethnocentrisms (Derrida 1976). This is a provocative 

challenge to the interests of the social sciences in accounting for the institutional 

configurations of modern societies. 

For present purposes, the connexion the thesis intends to explore is that 

between a technical or notational view of writing and what Raffel terms "truth-

producing scientific recording" as embodied in the document. Observation as the 

process of documentation of phenomena would then depend upon an opposition that 

the idea of a record already implies - - the opposition of literal or technical, and 

literary representation. The question to be addressed is how the truth value of a 

document is made to depend upon the maintenance of this opposition, and at what 

cost. 

Some of the most powerful deconstructive analyses have been directed at 

the uses of this opposition of the literal and the literary, or of technical versus 

metaphorical language, in the non-literary disciplines (e.g., n. 3, pp. 24-25 infra). 

These works ultimately offer a difficult and extensive redirection of the concept of 

writing which in complexity passes well beyond the scope of the thesis to present. It 

will therefore be concerned with developing a context in which the need for such a 



4 

reconceptualization would have sense, in terms of the question given above. It should 

be noted only, as a variety of orienting device, that deconstructive analyses often 

proceed by juxtaposing what is ordinarily taken as the primary signification of a given 

term with 'subsidiary' connotations which may disturb this meaning, place it in a 

different relation with its surrounding text, or call up unusual associations which are 

also to be given argumentive value. This is not an easily accommodated practice, a 

circumstance the following takes into account as best it can without sacrificing the 

insights this type of analysis can bring to bear. 



5 

C H A P T E R O N E 

Beginnings that have already Begun 

However the topic is considered, the problem of language has 
never been simply one problem among others (Derrida 1976:6) 

If the d i f f i c u l t y of finding alternative formulations is any indication, the 

problem of language is indeed conceived in sociology as a technical one: a problem of 

securing adequate descriptions, for which methodological prescriptions abound. 

Similarly it is a description which the following purports to offer: "If sociology could 

speak" says J e f f r e y A l e x a n d e r , "it would say, 'I am tired' " (1984:xiii). 

This interesting construction occurs at the beginning of an introduction, as 

the first f o r m a l utterance of a scholarly text which announces its disciplinary 

filiation in its title: T h e o r e t i c a l L o g i c in Sociology, Volume One . . . . Its interest 

lies in its adumbrating a certain reception, or counting on an audience which can be 

expected to know, and very probably assent to, 'what it means'. While the latter is no 

simple question, it has with respect to this probable audience a simple, i.e. 

conventional, answer: it is 'just' a figure of speech. If sociology could speak it might 

say any number of things, but of course sociology does not speak: its objects do. 

Both author and audience, in this sense, already begin by subordinating the language 

of the document to the language of the documented. 

Nonetheless, this mere metaphor does a considerable amount of work, 

permitting some operations that may well occasion recognition. Because sociology 

does not speak, it tells us, it is necessary that someone speak on its behalf. T h a t i s , 

as itself an object of sociological interest, sociology requires like any other 



6 

sociological object an independent observer to record the verities of its condition. 

The figure consequently comes to assert a fact, a transubstantiation which would 

seem to disturb its conventional disposition as an inessential extra. Sociology, in the 

manner of exemplary facts, is currently informing all qualified or sufficiently 

attentive observers that it is suffering from a sort of fatigue. In particular, it is 

suffering from the sort of fatigue which requires a remedy: "Sociology is tired. It 

must be revived, or revivified" (Alexander 1984:xv). 

This 'mere figure' consequently (or from the start) warrants a remedial 

project whose urgency and imperative it serves to locate 'in the object itself. Nor 

does it leave untouched possibilities concerning the nature of the remedy, trading on 

the situation's being known or knowable as an ill(ness) per se (or from the start). It 

seems reasonably certain that the recommended treatment will not be a good night's 

sleep. The very idea seems trivial or frivolous, calculated to offend, whereas the 

figure under consideration above all delineates a terrain which could be called 

serious — a habitation or a property to which the text and its project may lay claim. 

It is because such a response is so easily envisioned that its occasion 

deserves closer scrutiny than it usually receives; and it is because the response speaks 

precisely to a natural and obvious understanding of its occasion that such scrutiny 

proves difficult to negotiate. What is to be made, when writing already has a place in 

sociology, of the place of writing in sociology? If the introduction has sought to give 

some sense of the pertinence of this question, it will be the task of the first chapter 

to begin to give it a context: first, by asking whether the relation between the 

literary and the literal which is being asserted in Alexander's figures does not draw 

upon a largely unexamined history for its effectiveness; second, by considering an 

instance of its effectiveness in the way it has prefigured a particular reception of 



7 

deconstructive analyses among A n g l o - A m e r i c a n scholars; and third, by preparing for 

a closer consideration of its sociological uses in the construction of 'matters of f a c t ' . 

I. A Persistent Malaise 

T h u s , while it might rather seem that the introduction has answered the 

question in terms of a pervasive rhetoric or ideology and that the first chapter now 

inexplicably threatens some species of literary analysis, it is worth considering that 

the opposition of content and form which such a gloss assumes, or the stability of 

opposition it requires, speaks again to the already-constructed place of writing in 

sociology. Alexander's figures are invoked not as objects of aesthetic appreciation 

but for their evocation of and c o m p l i c i t y in a familiar convention of introductions. 

They refer us to a f a c t , in this case to the presence of a malaise whose meaning, qua 

malaise, is s e l f - e v i d e n t . T h e convention thus entails the construction of 

acquaintance being e f f e c t e d in a 'now' to which both author and audience are 

typically party. T h e r e is no reason to suppose that this p r a c t i c e is any less 

determinate in its end and powerful in its operation than the familiar and 

complementary closure of conclusions (the figuration of an acquaintance made: of a 

knowledge duly revealed, finally fixed or completely captured). 

A c c o r d i n g l y , there may be no better way of broaching the strangeness of 

introducing than by acknowledging a point of entry as the fruit of already having 

entered that to which it is to give a c c e s s . Such an acknowledgement is pertinent, a 

propos Alexander's figures, to the extent that it raises the possibility of their 

belonging somewhere rather than nowhere, that i s , to a structure or system of deeply 

sedimented practices rather than to a curious insubstantiality 'given' by the f a c t that 

they are mere signs. If there is a very powerful sense in which their meaning is 



8 

known before their meaning becomes a question, surely it is because the c a l l for 

renewal has already been heard. 

One such c a l l was offered some 350 years ago and retains a good deal of 

the forcefulness with which it diagnoses a similar malaise. "I will say nothing of 

philosophy," says Descartes in the D i s c o u r s e , "except that it has been studied for 

many centuries by the most outstanding minds without having produced anything 

which is not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain" (1960:8). The whole 

of Descartes' introduction is bent on demonstrating the inevitability of this diagnosis 

to an audience for whom it would not have had the self-evidence Alexander can 

assume. T h a t i s , Descartes must produce, in a way that Alexander need not, the 

'self-evidence' of the f a c t he wishes to secure. It is therefore worth paying close 

attention to the rhetorical operations of his text: we are not only a c t i v e l y persuaded 

to the f a c t of this malaise but to those assumptions concerning the nature and 

purpose of inquiry which make it one, and accordingly to the sort of remedy they 

underwrite. This is of no small importance in beginning to get a grip on what 

Alexander (or sociology) must assume about the l i t e r a l and the literary in order to 

assume the self-evidence of its 'current' malaise. 

"I will say nothing of philosophy except that it has been studied for many 

centuries by the most outstanding minds without having produced anything which is 

not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain" (ibid.). This pronouncement 

also occurs in an introduction, then, near its e n d , and after a great deal has been said 

or intimated concerning philosophy, the school and the departments of knowledge. 

Descartes' 'now' is like Alexander's a recapitulation of something known or knowable, 

something to which assent could be envisioned: "Good sense is mankind's most 

equitably divided endowment . . . " (1960:3). So far is this the case that even the 



9 

"most d i f f i c u l t to please . . . do not usually want more than they have of this," which 

goes to show 

that the ability to judge c o r r e c t l y , and to distinguish the true 
from the false — which is really what is meant by good sense or 
reason - - is the same by innate nature in all men; and that 
differences of opinion are not due to differences in intelligence, 
but merely to the f a c t that we use different approaches and 
consider different things (1960:3-4). 

In consequence, only incredulity and disaffection can greet philosophy's failure to 

recuperate in its proceedings the original unity of reason which is its (true) 

foundation. 

T h e vehicle of this assessment is the personal history Descartes relates 

following his assertion of the universality of reason ("I only propose this writing as an 

autobiography, or, if you prefer, as a story in which you may possibly find some 

examples of conduct which you might see fit to imitate . . . " 1960:5). T h e 

disingenuousness of this construction is a complex one. Since the unity of reason is a 

unity repeated in every man (that "most equitably divided endowment"), and its 

community accordingly the aggregate of such unities, the (true) experience of any 

m a n , properly apprehended and reported, will be the (true) representation of this 

whole. Descartes' disillusionment with the "world of books" then becomes a 

disillusion grounded in R e a s o n . It is Reason's disillusionment, revealed in and by 

means of D e s c a r t e s . T h e emptiness of the school's promise to provide by means of 

books "a clear and assured knowledge of everything useful in life"; its resultant 

culpability for the f a c t that Descartes reports himself at the end of his course 

saddled with so many doubts and errors that I seemed to have 
gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to 
discover more and more fully how ignorant I was (1960:3); 

all of this becomes Reason's indictment of a fallen philosophy, its characterization of 

the history of philosophy 'until now' as a repository of quarrelsome misadventure. 



10 

Reason has, therefore, very definite opinions as to the proper place of 

philosophy, its proper t i m e , and the corresponding propriety of its (true) knowledge. 

D e s c a r t e s / R e a s o n grants that there is some purpose to the study of languages, f i c t i o n 

and history. T h e first gives access to "the works of the ancients", the second in its 

"delicacy . . . refines and enlivens the mind", while the third, provided it is "read with 

understanding", may not only "ennoble" the mind but help quicken its judgement 

(1960:6). Reading the greats "is like conversing with the best people of earlier times: 

it is even a studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their 

thoughts". "Eloquence" likewise "has incomparable powers and beauties", poetry 

"enchanting delicacy and sweetness" and ethical argument "very useful teachings and 

exhortations to virtue", while theology secures heaven for the latter's many 

supplicants. Mathematics receives the least summary treatment in this almost 

affable catalogue, offering "very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy 

the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor", while a tone of 

faint praise becomes sharp with respect to philosophy 'until now', which in its primary 

value "teaches us to talk with an appearance of truth about all things, and to make 

ourselves admired by the less learned". The catalogue concludes, or nearly s o , with 

"law, medicine and the other sciences", which "bring honors and wealth to those who 

pursue them", but remain as conspicuously removed from generating truth(s) as any 

other aspirant on the l i s t , including m a t h e m a t i c s , whose 'subtle processes' are invoked 

as a potential yet to be r e a l i z e d , or as the adumbration of a promise. In the end, 

then, the value of the school lies in its revealing the absence of Descartes'/Reason's 

desideratum in any of its departments. What is "finally . . . desirable" about the 

disciplines is "to have examined them a l l , even to the most superstitious and f a l s e , in 

order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby" (1960:6). 

T o "read with understanding", that i s , to exercise the judgement quickened 



11 

in the most urgent sense by the disastrous history of all previous philosophy, is 

consequently to accept the partition and reconstruction of philosophy already 

underway in this carefully disposed tribute. It will come as no surprise that while it 

is good to study languages and the thought of the ancients, as well as their fictions 

and histories, it is not a good proper to Reason: 

F o r conversing with the ancients is much like traveling. It is 
good to know something of the customs of various peoples, in 
order to judge our own more objectively, and so that we do not 
make the mistake of the untraveled in supposing that everything 
contrary to our customs is ridiculous and i r r a t i o n a l . But when 
one spends too much time traveling, one becomes at last a 
stranger at home; and those who are too interested in things 
which occurred in past centuries are often remarkably ignorant 
of what is going on today (1960:6-7). 

T h a t engagement with the past is 'like travel' suggests that the past is 

essentially rather than accidentally or contingently foreign to the present. What 

could be more foreign than the customs of other peoples, since their otherness is 

what forces a conception of the own-ness of one's own into sharpest relief? It is not 

interest in philosophy 'until now' which is wanted, but attention to philosophy 'from 

now on'. Since the past does not communicate essentially with the present, since it is 

essentially other than the present, why indeed spend more time there than is 

necessary to discover or confirm this truth? Nevertheless there is talk of judging our 

own customs by means of this essentially alien(ated) past, which suggests equally that 

the home to which travelers are urged in no way coincides with the mundane present 

of a l i t e r a l reading of "what is going on today". O n the contrary, the figure of travel 

reacts as much on existing arrangements within and beyond the school as it does on 

past c u s t o m . What is wanted above all is that the addressees of Descartes' 

autobiography should not remain strangers to their true home, the community of 

R e a s o n . T h e past is not invoked to corroborate a difference already realized in the 

present but to justify a project ~ a homecoming — beginning 'now' and entailing the 



12 

repudiation of both past and present. L i k e the pursuits of the ancients, then, those of 

the existing school (and of s o c i e t y , seen as the larger embodiment of custom) are to 

be found good only on condition that their goods are essentially rather than 

contingently foreign to the Good of R e a s o n . So it happens that every subject of the 

syllabus reappears (with favourable dispensation again reserved, not for the existing 

but for a potential 'mathematics') accompanied by the "but . . . " which, excluding it 

from the discourse of R e a s o n , defines and re-defines the latter's p r o p e r t y . ! j h e 

incitement is to 'remedy', i.e. the recuperation of this property in a reality which, 

though always secured by i t , has always been disposed to it in the wrong way. 

Convention or custom in its several guises thus invokes a villain against 

which all of Descartes' writing is m o b i l i z e d . One learns from travel that the essence 

of custom is that it can always have been otherwise, that it is in this sense 'arbitrary', 

while it is the very property of the true that it cannot have been, and can never be, 

other than what it i s . In its mundane course in the world, custom d i f f e r s , from itself 

viewed from the pivot of its own history and from other equally mutable customs 

with which it may be juxtaposed from time to t i m e , while it is the very property of 

the true that it is always the same, i.e. remains the same in its self-sameness. The 

whole of existing philosophy has been an offense and a corruption ('false', consigned 

to 'appearances') because it has permitted dispute, while it is the very task of Reason 

to regain or return in its accounts to its original unity, an imperative supplied and 

secured by the f a c t of this unity (or this origin) i t s e l f . Nothing need be said of 

philosophy for its history is replete with examples of its cardinal error: the "many 

different opinions learned men may hold on the same subject, despite the f a c t that no  

more than one of them can ever be right" (1960:8, emphasis added). Similarly 

s o c i e t y , for one finds there "just about as much difference of opinion" as is to be 

"remarked among philosophers" (1960:9). 



13 

T h e error of custom with respect to its true ground is consequently that it 

has always constituted a corruption of its proper representational f u n c t i o n . T h e 

community of Reason will eschew the time and place of custom altogether so as to 

be(come) the perfect representation, the complete picture, the proper copy in all of 

its parts, of the unity from which it springs. The true place of this community is 

therefore to be removed from the particulars (differences) of any particular place, 

and its true time is to be removed from the particulars (differences) of any particular 

t i m e . The timeless, placeless unity out of which this community will proceed is 

already known, for we are told at the beginning of Descartes' story that differences 

are so many accidental accretions or impingements on a self which is defined 

essentially by the f a c t that Reason is "fully present" within it (1960:4). D e s c a r t e s -

the-traveler attains this ground at the end of the introduction ("I eventually reached 

the decision to study my own self, and to employ all my abilities to try to choose the 

right path" 1960:9) but his pilgrimage is related by the reconstituted Descartes 

(Reason), "possibly" for imitation (1960:5). The right path is consequently also 

available from the start. Since "differences of opinion" are purely a c c i d e n t a l , "not 

due to differences in intelligence, but merely to the f a c t that we use different 

approaches and consider different things" (1960:4), we should use the same approach 

and consider the same things. That i s , we should adopt a m i m e t i c approach, since the 

right relation of the community of Reason to its ground is one of faithful 

reproduction (imitation), and consider the things proper to this relation: only such 

things as present themselves with the same unity or presence as the universal subject 

of R e a s o n . So begins the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason  

and Seeking the T r u t h in the F i e l d of S c i e n c e . 

N o w , questions of 'method' (proper representation or adequate description) 

have become perhaps as familiar to sociological p r a c t i c e as questions of 'rhetoric' or 



14 

of the 'literary' have become f o r e i g n . T h a t they have become in this sense such 

familiar opposites, so obviously foreign to each other as to go without saying, is very 

much to the point. Alexander's figures depend upon this opposition of the l i t e r a l and 

the literary for their ultimate or commonly supposed 'literality', i.e. for their 

propriety in evoking a situation which disposes not only an object but an audience, not 

only a f a c t but knowledge of what to do about i t . Reading them through Descartes is 

one way of recalling how extensively situated they already a r e , i.e. how they utilize 

and recapitulate a history of signifying practices to which they belong. T o be sure, 

Descartes' story proceeds out of and returns to a 'subject' c a l l e d the self or reason 

while that of sociology stakes itself on regaining an 'object' called the s o c i a l , but the 

name of the homecoming in each case is 'method'; the imperative of the return an 

impaired correspondence with its origin or ground; the means of return a reproduction 

of that with which proper correspondence is to be restored; and the moment of 

restoration envisioned as an identity established once and for all: an imitation so 

perfect that it will cease to be i m i t a t i o n , not a picture or a story but the picture or 

the story, the p i c t u r e - b e c o m e - l i t e r a l and the s t o r y - b e c o m e - d o c u m e n t . Both claim 

the l i t e r a l as their proper domain, mutatis mutandis, by asking not to be taken as 

writing: rather the record of a purer form of speech or perhaps the purest speech, 

v i z . the presence of that of which they are the re-presentation. 

Sociology already positions writing, then, within and among its situating 

p r a c t i c e s . Writing already has a value and a particular e f f i c a c y in its production of 

knowledge, one expression of which is the belief that one can always come 'now' or 

'newly' to a text or a body of work. In this belief, Descartes' essentially reasonable 

subjects and sociology's essentially communicable objects meet in that timeless, 

placeless essence of a text or corpus called its meaning, faithful to a mode of reading 

which believes itself fundamentally innocent of any determination or construction of 



15 

what it reads. Meaning, like a f a c t , is supposed already to be present or self-evident 

in the text, and reading, like observation, only a matter so to speak of receiving it 

'without distortion'. It is not infrequently with this expectation, and at its least 

remarked or d i f f e r e n t i a t e d , that deconstructive analyses have been approached. 

II. A Version of Deconstruction 

In his c r i t i c a l and descriptive account of contemporary F r e n c h philosophy, 

commissioned specifically for English-speaking readers, the F r e n c h philosopher 

Vincent Descombes remarks: 

It should not be believed that the authority a work may carry is 
the result of its having been read, studied and finally judged 
convincing. T h e reverse is true: reading derives from a prior 
c o n v i c t i o n . Works are preceded by rumour (1980:4). 

Although its immediate context is the reception and circulation of philosophical 

utterance in F r a n c e from 1930 onward, the character of its publicity inside the 

university and out in its pedagogical, professional and everyday appropriations, the 

remark also has application to the itinerary of the work in question, elaborated in 

F r e n c h philosophical c i r c l e s during the 1960s and, since roughly 1970, finding its way 

in translation to and through the institutional configurations of A n g l o - A m e r i c a n 

universities. 'Rumour' in particular offers an apt characterization of the situation of 

its reception. 

Descombes quotes Maurice Blanchot: " 'What I learn from rumour, I have 

necessarily heard already' . . . . the text with which we fall in love will be the one 

wherein what we already know can be learned and relearned" (ibid.). One implication 

of Blanchot's remark is that reliance on rumour both expresses and requires the 

conviction that nothing regarding the parameters of its givens is in need of 

a r t i c u l a t i o n . Descartes writes with the utmost assurance of rumour in this sense. He 



16 

already 'knows' what inquiry is, what it is f o r , whence it comes and that it in no way 

a f f e c t s the fundamental nature of its objects: quite the contrary, if the Discourse is 

read with the understanding it solicits. 

H e r e it is intended that 'rumour' should capture the peculiar availability of 

this conviction as it informs responses to deconstruction. In its ordinary uses, 

'rumour' always implies a context which is never self-evident: while it is known to 

arise 'somewhere', this is typically acknowledged in the phrase that it appears 'out of 

nowhere'. We 'just know' what rumour has to tell us: its message is as palpable, in 

the form of the already known, as its context is e f f a c e d . We might therefore speak 

of a rumour of readerly innocence or of unconditional receptivity which at once 

accomplishes the highly s p e c i f i c prefigurations of meaning considered in Descartes' 

and sociology's malaise, and effaces the accomplishment, submerging the 

expectations and the tradition which give it f o r c e . 

Jacques D e r r i d a has given an instructive characterization of the way in 

which, as commonly p r a c t i c e d , c r i t i c a l commentary no less than exegesis subscribes 

to this tradition: 

T h e security with which the commentary considers the self- 
identity of the text, the confidence with which it carves out its  
contour, goes hand in hand with the tranquil assurance that leaps  
over the text toward its presumed content, in the direction of  
the pure signified (1976:158^1 

In this assurance it is not too d i f f i c u l t to find traces of Descartes' and sociology's 

m i m e t i c aspirations. One can 'leap over the text' only on condition that the text is 

believed to be essentially rather than contingently foreign to the content it conveys. 

T h u s , rumour already knows what (there is) to look for in its reading m a t e r i a l . That 

i s , it already knows that reading is a matter of looking, or rather, of leaping. In 

relation to its being conceived as a picture or a r e c o r d , ideally a species of mirror for 



17 

the presence which precedes and secures its r e f e r e n c e , such features of a text as its 

m a t e r i a l i t y , the workings and history of its form(al devices), its language or its 

belonging to language, in a word its 'textuality' or its 'written-ness', take on a 

decidedly marginal c a s t , presenting themselves, if at a l l , precisely as things to look 

over. N o t that these are unimportant as such, it may readily be admitted by 

philosophers and sociologists alike, but such considerations are, w e l l , literary or at 

best a matter for literary history. A n d literature is foreign to the language of the 

r e a l . 

It is thus worth considering, and a circumstance which sits rather poorly 

with the conviction of unconditional r e c e p t i v i t y , that while D e r r i d a is by training, 

proclivity and profession what would ordinarily be c a l l e d a philosopher, native to the 

linguistic and scholarly tradition Descombes undertakes to make accessible, his work 

has nevertheless entered the institutions of A n g l o - A m e r i c a n scholarship by way of 

literature: literary theory and c r i t i c i s m . A m o n g the works introduced under this 

entry, or assigned this heading, the first paper published in English translation 

(Derrida 1970) deals not with what would ordinarily be understood as a literary topic 

but rather with the place of a certain problematic, v i z . interpretation, in ethnology 

and more generally in those disciplines designated in F r a n c e as the 'human sciences'. 

S i m i l a r l y , and again in terms of quite conventional classifications of subject m a t t e r , 

the remark c i t e d above occurs in the course of a sustained analysis of the way in 

which a complex valorization of speech in relation to writing (or of presence vs. 

absence) deeply informs Saussure's reform of linguistics and its more recent variants, 

L e v i - S t r a u s s ' anthropology, and Rousseau's husbandry of the idea and the absolute 

value of a natural, spontaneous subject in a range of his writings (a project L e v i -

Strauss' indebtedness to which is examined in detail). P l a t o , A r i s t o t l e , D e s c a r t e s , 

L e i b n i t z , C o n d i l l a c , K a n t , H e g e l , H u s s e r l , Heidegger, N i e t z s c h e , F r e u d , P i e r c e , 



18 

Austin and Searle number among still others drawn into the engagement pursued in 

these and other texts, an engagement which continually crosses paths with and 

examines its own rootedness in the history of the latter valorization (see e . g . D e r r i d a 

1973, 1977, 1978a, 1978b, 1981a, 1981b, 1981c, 1982b, 1982c, 1984b). 

This is not to suggest that D e r r i d a has not treated of literary matters. 

Indeed he has, not infrequently in the same texts which address philosophical matters 

(e.g. 1978b, 1980, 1981a, 1981d, 1984a, 1985b), but cohabitation of the literary and 

the l i t e r a l in one text is not unprecedented. Many of the thinkers noted above have 

written on such literary matters as aesthetics, theatre, poetry and the n o v e l , without 

it ceasing thereby to go without saying that they are engaged in a serious or 

consequential undertaking. Derrida's supposed literarity on the other hand, seems to 

have marked for a decade and more a certain dubiousness or unease, precisely as 

regards the seriousness or consequentiality of his work 'outside of literature'. 

Similarly it is in a typical reading that Alexander's figures no less than Descartes' 

pass without c o m m e n t . This is the most interesting thing about t h e m , if in f a c t it 

should be the figures themselves which are credited with the e f f e c t . 

Perhaps a warrant for identifying Derrida's work with the literary should 

therefore be sought in some explicit statement or manifesto? H e r e rumour might 

suppose itself c o n f i r m e d in its conviction for many utterances could be thought to 

secure i t , for example the comment in a recent paper that 

my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical 
interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed toward 
l i t e r a t u r e , toward that writing which is called literary 
(1983b:37).2 

It is not inconceivable, however, that an interest in literature, in writing which comes  

to be c a l l e d l i t e r a r y , could as readily designate a p o l i t i c a l , h i s t o r i c a l , philosophical or 

sociological question as it could a literary one: and again even with reference to its 



19 

own experience rumour would be obliged to admit that it has. The text above 

continues, giving some sense of the scope of Derrida's interest: 

What is literature? A n d first of all what is it 'to write'? 
How is it that the f a c t of writing can disturb the very question 
'what is?' and even 'what does it mean?' T o say this in other 
words — and here is the saying otherwise that was of importance 
to me — when and how does an inscription become literature and 
what takes place when it does? T o what and to whom is this 
due? What takes place between philosophy and l i t e r a t u r e , 
science and l i t e r a t u r e , theology and l i t e r a t u r e , psychoanalysis 
and literature? (1983b:37-38). 

It is not d i f f i c u l t within the terms of rumour, or of a mode of reading with 

aspirations to l i t e r a l i t y , to reconstruct the offending 'implication' here. It might run 

a little as follows: ' A n interest in literature is f i n e , but this interest has nihilistic 

tendencies. It promises not a philosophy or sociology or history of l i t e r a t u r e , not a 

politics or theology or psychology of l i t e r a t u r e , and least of all a science of 

literature. Instead it proposes to combine, indeed to mix up these obviously distinct 

undertakings and concerns. Since the consequences of such a leveling are well known, 

how can a body of work proposing it be taken seriously in the final analysis?' What 

this response fails to take into consideration is that the reception of deconstruction 

(or any other body of writing) already implicates a complex institution, a structure or 

a signifying practice in which philosophical, s c i e n t i f i c , s o c i o l o g i c a l , h i s t o r i c a l , 

p o l i t i c a l , theological, psychological and literary questions are not in danger of 

merging, but already have, in the form of a particular ensemble or arrangement 

which has become too obvious for words. 

Within this institution, then, whose form like Alexander's figures might also 

be seen to belong somewhere rather than nowhere, i.e. to the mode of reading 

espoused in its several departments rather than to a curious immanence 'given' by the 

f a c t that the world has obligingly divided itself into subject matters, the name like 



20 

writing already has a p l a c e , value and situating c a p a c i t y . If there is a principle 

governing the self-identity of the disciplines, for example, perhaps it is the belief 

that they should be essentially rather than contingently foreign to each other, and 

that any with a claim to serious or consequential status should certainly stand in this 

relation to literature. Posed in this c o n t e x t , the question "What is literature?" 

offers at least this much for consideration: however one may seek to define the 

presence or essence it too may be thought to name, it has what would appear to be an 

essential (irreducible) function in securing the identity of other names. Philosophy, 

sociology, history and the like have been defined or ascribed essence by their 

opposition to literature; which is to say that writing, or the l i t e r a r y , has a very 

powerful role in the espousal and negotiation of identity, property and propriety, that 

i s , in the construction and maintenance of boundaries, both of disciplines and of sense 

and in both senses of discipline and sense. 

If there is a principle which has guided much of the reading of 

deconstruction within the disciplines, then, perhaps it is the belief that there should 

be an essential (impermeable) boundary between the essential and the contingent, the 

literal and the l i t e r a r y , f a c t and figure, the documented and the document, content 

and f o r m , i.e. between presence and absence (non-presence), whatever their proxies. 

The construction of deconstruction as yet another, and faulty or improper, name is 

then a consequence of rumour. Though D e r r i d a himself now employs 'deconstruction' 

(" . . . a word I have never liked and one whose fortunes have disagreeably surprised 

me" 1983b:44) as an ellipsis, it is not as an ellipsis for the essence or meaning rumour 

anticipates and finds l a c k i n g . Rather it remains in his work and that of some other 

very able practitioners one of many reminders (with, e . g . 'de-constituting', 'de-

sedimenting', 'undoing', 'disassembling', 'unravelling', 'displacing', 'de-posing') of the 

situation and task of analysis which necessarily begins by already having begun.3 



21 

III. Sociological Sense-Making 

It seems not inconceivable, even quite evident, that an undoing must differ 

a little from what it undoes. This need has nevertheless proved perhaps the major 

stalling point in attempted appropriations of Derrida's work, often serving as the 

fulcrum around which prior knowledge turns to c o n v i c t i o n . A reason suggests itself 

as w e l l , for a typical reading does not conceive of itself as doing anything. The 

presumption of readerly innocence or of unconditional receptivity is at the same time 

the presumption that the object of reading is s e l f - c o m m u n i c a t i n g . A f o r t i o r i , 

therefore, reading itself is not doing anything that needs undoing, and it is 

inconceivable that the object of reading (meaning, content) could do other than what 

it does, or be other than what it is, in presenting itself. In this c o n t e x t , which is 

always inexplicit or e f f a c e d by the very guidance of its presumption, differing or 

undoing would imply at the least what Descartes found intolerable in the essentially 

'literary' departments of his school — a l i c e n c e to "embroider" (1960:7) or to make 

inaccurate representations. A t the l i m i t , it would be seen to threaten the complete 

collapse of representation, as was noted above. 

Put otherwise, the collapse of representation would imply the permanent 

exile from truth that it is precisely the destiny of Reason to o v e r c o m e . Taken as the 

emblem of both the homecoming and the home announced in the Discourse, the idea 

of representation (imitation) sediments a very complex inheritance. T h a t it is not an 

inheritance to which sociology is too foreign on the one hand may be gathered from 

Alexander's c a l l to remedy: Descartes' method is above all conceived and executed 

as remedy, and with reference to the same ill(ness). T h a t it remains an inheritance 

not yet too f a m i l i a r , on the other hand, may also be gathered from Alexander's c a l l to 

remedy: like Descartes' it foregoes or forecloses any queries as to the possibility of 



22 

the remedy's belonging to the ill(ness) it seeks to c u r e . 

In sociology, as R a f f e l shows, 'matters of fact' are taken to define the l i m i t 

of inquiry and the truth of its instances independently of its conduct. T h a t f a c t is 

s e l f - s u f f i c i e n t or capable of revealing itself in its entirety, that as meaning or 

presence it persists in a 'before' or a 'beyond' of its cursive or discursive presentation, 

is what makes it the guarantor of the latter imitations, i.e. the property which 

secures their propriety (truth) — in other words, a ground. Here the more s p e c i f i c 

expectations apt to be brought to reading material concerned with inquiry find their 

p l a c e . T o be expected is a fully justified set of procedures for a right relation to the 

facts (a method), or at least the justification (a theory), i.e. a properly m i m e t i c 

account of the facts to which procedures for a right relation remain to be elaborated. 

It is proposed to differ a little from the way in which method and theory so 

construed seem to exhaust the possibilities for such talk. R a t h e r than passing to a 

catalogue of rights and wrongs and thence to c o r r e c t i o n s , the following chapter will 

attempt to trace how f a c t belongs to the system at work in Descartes' investiture of 

reason and in the reception of deconstruction, first in a general way and then as 

regards a case of sociological sense-making which is not yet finished, though it has 

produced a battery of conclusions. 

A s R a f f e l reconstructs t h e m , 'matters of fact' are above a l l a set of 

representational requirements whose e f f e c t s and whose roots extend well beyond the 

assumed boundaries of theory and method. Sociology's preoccupation with matters of 

f a c t , then, is already a preoccupation with a c e r t a i n kind of writing. The reception 

of T . S. Kuhn's work may offer a more compelling consideration of the way this 

foreknowledge of 'writing' passes into 'reading'. Perhaps it is significant, for 



23 

e x a m p l e , t h a t o n e o f t h e ' d i f f i c u l t i e s ' o f h i s w o r k s e e m s t o h a v e b e e n t h e s u g g e s t i o n 

t h a t a ' p a r a d i g m ' i s n o t , s t r i c t l y s p e a k i n g , a t h e o r y . If t h e t e r m h a s b e c o m e c o m m o n 

c o i n a g e , a p r o c e s s ' d e c o n s t r u c t i o n ' i s a l s o u n d e r g o i n g , p e r h a p s i t i s l e s s t h e r e s u l t o f 

a n i m p r o v e d u n d e r s t a n d i n g t h a n o f a n a p p r o v e d i n c o r p o r a t i o n . ^ A t i t s m o s t i n c l u s i v e , 

a n d as i t h a s a l r e a d y b e e n i n t r o d u c e d , t h e i t i n e r a r y o f c o n c e r n t o t h e t h e s i s i s 

c o n s e q u e n t l y t h e w a y i n w h i c h s o c i o l o g y ' s p r e o c c u p a t i o n w i t h f a c t (or i t s t r e a t m e n t 

o f w r i t i n g ) i s a l s o a p r e o c c u p a t i o n w i t h a v e r y o l d a n d v e r y p o w e r f u l s t o r y a b o u t t h e 

t r u e . 



24 

N O T E S 

1 Thus for example, Reason's habitation in the true is marked by its 
difference from f i c t i o n , which "makes us imagine a number of events as possible 
which are really impossible"; from history, which inevitably falls short of accurate 
representation either by augmenting the real with the imaginary or by failing to 
attain completeness, omitting "the meanest and least illustrious circumstances so 
that the remainder is distorted"; from 'eloquence' and poetry, which subsist on the 
order of "gifts of nature rather than fruits of study" (1960:7). T h e extrusion of 
rhetoric from (true) philosophy is particularly interesting. In juxtaposition with 
poetry it becomes possible to intimate to good e f f e c t that the former is as essentially 
superfluous to Reason as the latter is foreign by virtue of belonging to the 
imagination, and to align both with convention qua art(ifice) — i.e. to promote an 
ironic reading of 'gifts of nature': 

Those who reason most cogently, and work over their thoughts to 
make them clear and intelligible, are always the most 
persuasive, even if they speak only a provincial dialect and have  
never studied r h e t o r i c . Those who have the most agreeable 
imaginations . . . cannot fail to be the best poets, even if the 
poetic art is unknown to them (1960:7, emphasis added). 

1 This paper is one of the contributions to an anthology conceived in the 
same spirit of communicative exchange between two latterly 'separate' or for the 
most part inwardly elaborated scholarly traditions as is Descombes (1980). It is 
especially noteworthy in its departure from the anthologizing convention which would 
divide the field ('French philosophy') by topic or controversy and solicit 
comprehensive reviews under each heading. The eleven contributors were instead 
requested "to present to the English-speaking reader their own view of their own 
work as they now see it in relation to the context in which they are working and, 
perhaps, to the reactions which they might expect it to provoke" (Montefiore 
1983:viii). T h e result is an exceedingly provocative representation covering in its 
way much the same historical terrain as Descombes' account, and recurring with 
equally instructive diversity to the analytic challenges posed by the institutional 
imbeddedness of the conventional idea of representation and its correlates. See in 
addition to Montefiore's introduction the contributions of E m m a n u e l L e v i n a s , J e a n -
F r a n c o i s L y o t a r d , Pierre Bourdieu, and again D e s c o m b e s . 

3 Only brief indications can be given of an indebtedness which the thesis will 
not be able to discharge. It follows from much of the preceding discussion that an 
important consequence of deconstruction's long sojourn in the 'literary' departments 
(literary c r i t i c i s m , l i t e r a t u r e , comparative l i t e r a t u r e , languages), where it has been 
elaborated into a considerably differentiated set of discourses, is that its 
practitioners are apt to be overlooked by virtue of their 'belonging' there. See 
therefore, for a sense of the shape of this work and its internal debates, but also for 
the way in which it continually and often provocatively addresses its 'outside' 
(philosophy, history, the social sciences), Jonathan C u l l e r (1982, which remains 



25 

perhaps the most accessible point of entry for the unfamiliar; also his 1981 and 1975 
on structuralisms and semiotics); Paul de Man (1978, 1979, 1982a, 1983a); David 
Carroll (1978, 1982); Barbara Johnson (1980a, 1982); Timothy Bahti (1979a, 1979b, 
1981a, 1981b, 1985); Suzanne Gearhart (1983, 1984); Gerald Bruns (1980, 1984); 
Eugenio Donato (1977, 1984); Davis & Schleifer (1985); Krupnick (1983, which includes 
a contribution from Michael Ryan: "Deconstruction and Social Theory: The Case of 
Liberalism"); and finally, the symposium in which Derrida's (1970) occurs. 

* Raffel is not the only sociologist to have made inroads into this territory. 
In very different ways, the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies' work on the 
construction of disciplinary identities (see in particular his 1984; also Graham, 
Lepenies & Weingart 1983), and the British sociologist Ricca Edmonson's formal study 
of rhetorical construction in sociological argument (1984), speak to the need of 
undoing or resituating what we routinely do. The American sociologist Charles 
Lemert has also been indefatigible in undertaking both to familiarize Anglo-American 
social scientists with their French counterparts and to make fruitful appropriations of 
Derrida's and others' work (see e.g. Lemert 1979a, 1979b, 1979c, 1981 and Lemert & 
Gillan 1982). Finally, Derrida's 1982c occurs in a special issue of the journal Social  
Research devoted to contemporary French philosophy (see there, among others, the 
articles of Rosset, Michaud, Le Doeuff and Descombes). 



26 

C H A P T E R T W O 

F a c t s , Figures and the Principles of A c c o u n t i n g 

N o w , "everyday language" is not innocent or neutral. It is the 
language of Western metaphysics, and it carries with it not only 
a considerable number of presuppositions of all types, but also 
presuppositions inseparable from metaphysics, which, although 
little attended to, are knotted into a system (Derrida 1981c:19) 

It was not very d i f f i c u l t , either, to decide where we should look 
for a beginning, for I already knew that one begins with the 
simplest and easiest to know (Descartes 1960:16) 

In one sense it could be said that an appreciation of the non-neutrality of 

everyday language stands at the very core of sociology, finding expression in each of 

its subject areas and generating an immense volume of work concerned with its 

consequences. Derrida's linkage of everyday language and the history implied by 

"Western metaphysics" could thus easily be read as a commonplace that sociology has 

long since installed among its givens. If there is one thing that we all know, for 

example, it is that there is no presuppositionless knowledge. 

T h e instruction to be drawn from Derrida's remark, however, is less the 

reassurance that we know this than a reminder that our knowing takes place within a 

system which generates such 'knowings' and accords t h e m " a particular and 

consequential value in the production of our accounts. It is not that we know, but 

how we know which is of interest here, and more particularly how what we know 

takes the f o r m of a f a c t . The metaphysics to which D e r r i d a attends in all of his 

works is the metaphysics of this ' f o r m ' , in which being or any consequentiality is 

equated with presence. This metaphysics of presence is not l o c a l i z e d to any 

particular "ism" but drawn upon by even the most acrimoniously opposed of "isms", 



27 

learned long before it is a question of (professional) philosophy. S i m i l a r l y , R a f f e l 

traces how an identification of f a c t with presence organizes not only the mundane 

production of hospital records but of sociological methodologies for the uses of 

records and its own activity of recording. 

"I already knew," Descartes tells us, "that one begins with the simplest and 

easiest to know" (ibid.). The 'simple' is a term Descartes uses repeatedly in the 

Discourse to invoke presence, most often in conjunction with generality, that i s , both 

ease and completeness, of apprehension. H e also provides there a figure of its 

phenomenality in repeated identifications of the true with the 'clear and distinct', a 

figure which interestingly retains currency as a metaphor of good writing. 

It deserves emphasis that it is good writing which is somehow clear and 

distinct: what ordinarily passes for a description of technical writing is at the same 

time a criterion or an evaluative standard. T h a t writing is good which offers a 'clear' 

view of what it represents; bad, which 'obscures' what it should rather be describing. 

C l e a r or 'literal' writing issues in a document. By the same token, writing becomes 

'literary' in proportion as it becomes d i f f i c u l t to treat it as a picture of something 

else, which is precisely what a document is thought to be. So far as the production of 

sociological accounts is c o n c e r n e d , then, the opposition of the l i t e r a l and the literary 

functions less as a description of two kinds of writing than as a means of ensuring 

that description is what sociological writing will amount to: that we will concern 

ourselves with the f a c t s . 

T h e preceding chapter has sought to give some sense of the plasticity with 

which this concern finds expression, how it permeates the least remarked of sense-

making operations qua valorization of presence. Here h" is not a matter of 



28 

summarizing but of letting these instances resonate, so to speak, in an examination of 

the system of this concern on home territory. It is being suggested that in the 

p r a c t i c e of documentation form already implies a particular content in that 'contents' 

are known and required to take a s p e c i f i c f o r m , in aid of realizing the promise or 

desire iterated (not for the first time) in Descartes' story. Speaking of f a c t , then, we 

will necessarily be speaking of writing and of the particular relation to the true which 

'good' writing is supposed to institute. T h e r e is every reason to proceed- slowly in 

this, and so we shall. 

I. T h e F a c t s (in T w o Figures) 

It may prove useful to begin with a version of R a f f e l ' s question as to 

whether in its accounting procedures sociology does not participate in the 

construction of its own maladies. Here the question is whether it is not so w e l l -

subscribed a feature of recent sociological p r a c t i c e to situate our accounts of social 

inquiry in terms of the concerns they speak to, as it is to acquiesce in one such 

concern in particular. This is the i d e a , which has both metaleptic and proleptic f o r c e 

or suasion, that our accounts should present us with a history of successively better 

or more comprehensive stories of what inquiry i s , its nature or its fundamental 

lineaments. Such a history could potentially come to an end, since the best story of 

inquiry would also be the final story, the story which could divest itself of what we 

take to be the more disquieting susceptibilities of stories (such as their liability to 

hearsay, e r r o r , idiosyncrasy, ambiguity or indeterminacy of meaning) and become 

instead a statement — of the truth of the matter. 

It is not at all d i f f i c u l t to see what this concern might in the first instance 

express: among other things a desire for positive acknowledgement or vindication of 



29 

the intellectual labour expended in the production of our accounts over an entire 

virtual history of such endeavours. Its form is such as to provide us with, or provide 

us with a warrant for c o n s t r u c t i n g , a 'past' which because it locates us and our work 

as the cumulation and best resolution so far of the work begun by our predecessors, 

simultaneously justifies a construal of the 'future', of the continuation of inquiry, as 

going 'further' rather than, say, 'going on'. 

S i m i l a r l y , it is not at all d i f f i c u l t to identify this concern as a reiteration 

or retelling of a very old story underwriting nearly all of our intellectual history. 

Appearing here (as in a good many other realms of social practice) as a teleology of 

progress/redemption, the story is perhaps best c h a r a c t e r i z e d as a story about 

foundations. T h a t i s , not a story about the way things are (in this c a s e , perhaps, 

about what history looks like), but a story whose object has been to render intelligible 

(inform and give persuasive f o r c e to) the intellectual end of securing the certitude 

and immanent sense of our inquiry, to give it a centre or point of referral which is 

f i x e d . Such a centre or ground would be in a particular way external to the 

mutability of our formulations, and thereby (as we seem to want to hope) the 

guarantor of some transhistorical value nonetheless lodged in or conveyed through 

this same mutability. 

What might be d i f f i c u l t to entertain, however, given the f a m i l i a r i t y of this 

version of the story and the f a c t that its shortcomings and insufficiencies are 

routinely rehearsed as a matter of professional training in sociology, is the possibility 

that we may still subscribe to it in a non-trivial way. E v e r y t h i n g about recent 

characterizations of the state of social theory which stress e.g. the plurality of 

'paradigms', 'perspectives' or 'theoretical frameworks' on o f f e r , seems to push for a 

reception of the question of this possibility, its placement within and by means of our 



30 

current readings of 'the problem of inquiry' in the social sciences, as a species of 

a r c h a i s m . We are no longer so naive as to really believe, the story may run 

nowadays, in 'progress' as a function of the cumulative subsumption without residue 

of earlier by later theories-and-Weltanschauungen. The notion that progress is 

vouchsafed by the simple expedient of the linear succession of such structures 

belongs to simpler times if not to simpler minds, and 'times' are no longer so simple. 

T h e sheer f a c t of multiple frameworks is ample argument, if any is needed, against a 

retreat or regression to what we all recognize as a pseudo-explanatory notion of 

progress. 

This seems a fair rendition of the kind of story that a sizable community of 

practitioners might marshall in reply to the question posed above. Though it would 

seldom be considered in terms of the way temporality is used and enters into the 

persuasive f o r c e of the reply it is worth noting that the ' f a c t i c i t y ' of multiple 

frameworks receives almost all of its punch from their contemporaneity (or presumed 

contemporaneity). It is not the f a c t that there are many accounts that works to 

dismiss the question before it can be further f o r m u l a t e d , but the f a c t that there are 

many now. In a rhetorical structure of some c o m p l e x i t y , this 'now' (this 'fact') serves 

to posit and oppose an intellectual present to a past whose dimensions are given by 

what this present is not. It is not (we take it) a present in which univocality of 

thought is readily a c c e s s i b l e , not a present c h a r a c t e r i z e d by agreement as to 

fundamentals, and consequently not a present in which a question arising out of such 

conditions (virtual, s o - c o n c e i v e d , or both) has significance. H e r e , then, is a familiar 

sounding deployment of a matter of f a c t . L i k e Alexander's and Descartes' f a c t s , it 

goes about its work by opposing a presence (diversity) to an absence (unity), or a 'now' 

to a 'then', in this case with intent to set us straight regarding what it views as a 

rather simplistic question. 



31 

It will take some development to see why the particular relation this reply 

establishes between itself and the initial question should m a t t e r . Perhaps the first 

requirement is to resist what is apt to be a very strong temptation to treat the 

relation between the reply and the question in the same way that the reply treats the 

question (or the way that the second story treats the first), namely, as presenting, 

and only presenting, a problem of documentation. Despite the possibility, already 

noted, that the first story is more and other than (or does more and other than tell) a 

story about the way things a r e , the second gains its plausibility, and justifies its 

documentary operations, by reading it in just this way, i.e. as a factual c l a i m , a 

statement about the way things a r e . 

T h e task that follows from the presence of such claims (anywhere, at any 

t i m e , in terms it should be noted of either story) is that of deciding their truth v a l u e . 

T r u t h value is to be adjudicated and resolved on the basis of 'evidence', that i s , 

adduced in the end in one or more factual claims taken to c o r r e c t or confirm the 

original(s). T h i s adjudication is the only task the second story sees itself confronted 

with (or perhaps, the only task it is willing or able to acknowledge) and this is the 

task it p e r f o r m s , it was suggested, through the vehicle of a rhetorical figure which 

establishes two domains of f a c t i c i t y ('evidence' in the form of a history) by opposing 

and hierarchizing a complex present and a simple past. 

It would seem an i l l - f a t e d job, then, that would attempt to put the 

legislative operations of this story in question by adopting them s i m p l i c i t e r . If 

operations associated with what is here being called documentation and this or 

similar figural uses of history are intimately c o n n e c t e d , one could hardly do worse 

than to proceed to formulate the relative truth value of both stories, perhaps with 

respect to a third possibility defined by hypothetical access to an ideally complete 



32 

body of evidence. T h e first story (which, it will be remembered, is already a 

repetition or citation as given here) can be read as a presentation of the project of 

such documentation, thus read as being as dependent on figural uses of history for its 

persuasion to a desire for univocality as the second. T h e second story, in turn, can be 

read as an enactment of the project, thus as another c i t a t i o n , recurring to the first in 

more ways than it e f f e c t s to differ from i t . In this connexion it may be noted that 

the multiplicity of frameworks adduced to differentiate it from the past (the first 

story) does not function so much to open a question about the desire for univocality 

as it does to restate the problem of securing it 'under changed conditions'. If, then, 

the seemingly natural course of further documentation were adopted, as it has been 

in recent social theory with a few notable exceptions, we might justifiably expect 

ourselves to be caught up in yet another reiteration of this structure of concerns, 

contributing both to its workings and its history, without gaining any especial analytic 

purchase on either of these. 

Since some insight of the latter kind is the object of the following, we must 

proceed a little d i f f e r e n t l y . This is not an easily articulated d i f f e r e n c e , since 

whatever else occasions disagreement among sociologists, there is near unanimity (to 

be found in their productions if not their pronouncements about these, though often 

here as well) that sociological writing is writing that documents: documents 

problems, solutions, the appearance and disappearance of c h a r a c t e r i s t i c positions and 

styles, e m p i r i c a l and theoretical findings or breakthroughs, methodological 

controversies and the l i k e . 

We can put the matter this way: the disciplinary history sociology thus 

documents for itself may prove a peculiar guide to the history it makes, exercising its 

documentary concerns. T h a t the second story works in such a way as to e f f a c e its 



33 

c o m m i t m e n t to a very old concern in the very a c t of exercising it is not available as 

a self-description within the terms of its own p r a c t i c e , i.e. is not a constituent in its 

own particular mode of r e f l e x i v i t y . A c c o r d i n g l y , it is to this system of self-

description that we turn. 

II. T h e Figuring 

In terms of the latter understanding, what it is to document something is 

presumably to give a report, the giving of which does not (or does not essentially) 

a f f e c t the thing reported on, but merely represents or describes i t . A report, then, 

presents something (a theory, a finding, a problem, a development) but is not taken to 

be c o m p l i c i t in the presentation of what it brings into view. T h a t i s , reporting ' i t s e l f 

is not taken to have a history. T h e business of bringing things into view is not taken 

to speak to any end other than the one it ascribes to itself: representational 

a c c u r a c y or a best approximation (pro tempore) of the phenomena under review. 

Consequently, history subsists in the terms of this understanding as that 

history (purveyed in both stories) given by the succession and/or contemporaneity of 

the things brought into view. Put otherwise, the documentary understanding licences 

and requires a history of results, and not of the particular formulative p r a c t i c e (its 

own) which gives and has given us 'results' to arrange in such histories ('facts' to 

adjudicate, whether these bear, e . g . on the relative merits of two theories or the 

actual course of some historical development). This is to say that the documentary 

understanding licences and requires its own absence qua formulative p r a c t i c e from 

any instance of that p r a c t i c e . The formulation of evidence must appear on its view 

as something other than f o r m u l a t i o n , something without a history, for it holds that it 

cannot establish a claim to have adjudicated the facts if it is c o m p l i c i t in their 



34 

f o r m u l a t i o n . The f a c t s must be there before they are 'written down'. 

We can now begin to see that the rhetoricity of the report (the form in 

which adjudication is presented, or the form in which documentation presents itself 

to itself, v i z . as the 'mere' presentation of something else) is not peripheral to the 

question of what it may mean that inquiry is organized by and oriented to this 

c o n c e r n : in Rorty's evocative c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n , to speak "Nature's Own Language," 

or to reveal Nature by means of "Nature's Own Vocabulary" (Rorty 1982:194-195). 

The report, insofar as it aspires to document, just is and continually revives this 

project of getting the best story, the one the phenomena provide, the one the things 

present. It does so by treating what it speaks about as something securely other than 

itself. T h e report typically begins (and ends) this way, by inviting the reader to 

concur in the f a c t i c i t y of what it presents, or to concur in the f a c t i c i t y of what it 

presents itself as being about. Such beginnings (and endings) are already formulative 

achievements modelled on documentation's end. T h e y already f u l f i l the requirement 

that what is (which is always what a report is about) should coincide with what is 

present, with what is other and with what, being both present and other, presents 

itself, in such a way that the means of presentation — writing, the report itself — is a 

mere conduit or transparency. 

F r o m this vantage, the s e l f - e f f a c i n g character of documentary writing is 

not available within the terms of its p r a c t i c e because the desire for the invisibility or 

transparency of any writing which purports to inquire is available, and governs the 

practitioner's understanding of what he is doing. T h e royal road to truth is one which, 

analytically speaking, the documentary practitioner travels in reverse, in the hope 

that as he retreats the phenomenon will advance to f i l l the space he has vacated with 

its presence. His view (the writing responsive to this project) is always directed 



35 

'outward' (oriented to the constitution of f a c t , its presentation, and the truth that is 

held to obtain in the presence of things). 

A c c o r d i n g l y , we can begin to see why it is important not to take up the 

second story's invitation to be read as a report. This is after all what it asks of a 

reader, but to concur is to permit the achieved character of what it does to be 

covered over or suppressed by the typical mode in which it presents its achievement. 

It is to acquiesce in and repeat what documentation does from the other side, so to 

speak, by making oneself the reader required by its version of writing: the one who 

will read as if the writing ' i t s e l f is unachieved, 'Nature's Own' because it is merely 

allowing Nature to bring itself into view. T h e alternative is not simply to treat the 

story as a c h i e v e d , however, because it is perfectly possible (indeed, common recourse 

both in theory and what is sometimes now c a l l e d metatheory in the social sciences) to 

treat its achieved character as one more f a c t which is other than our interest 

(external to any possible concern of ours: this is what the 'mere' concern to 

document insists upon) and therefore itself the chief determinant of what there is to 

say about i t . This would amount to a failure to take into account that one of the 

chief requirements of the documentary orientation is that anything be formulable as 

a thing, f a c t u a l i z e d or c o n c r e t i z e d , in this manner. Documentation can no more 

exempt itself from this requirement than it can anything else (any other possible 

object) if it is continuously to realize its end (adjudicating so as to give the right 

answers). 

Consequently, our alternative is to treat the story, in any of its many 

versions and instances, as achieved in light of or with constant reference to this e n d , 

and ask about the possibilities it forecloses in so orienting itself (its achievement). 

T o treat documentation as achieved in light of this end is to undertake to restore it 



36 

to a history it denies or establishes itself against. We can give voice to the 

alternative, then, by treating documentation as historiography: a particular 

historiography, not of things, but of the desire that things and the real should be 

coextensive and self-disclosing. T h i s , it may not seem so odd to suggest, has a very 

lengthy history indeed. 

Within this history, we have seen that 'history' has a particular p l a c e , value 

or historiographic c a p a c i t y , as a figure by means of which f a c t is accomplished. If 

only those things are f a c t which are 'historied' or storied in the manner described 

above, it follows that what is not so storied is not a f a c t , not a thing, not an object or 

event, i.e. 'literally' nothing in terms of the figurality documentation requires of its 

f a c t s . It could then be said that history enters documentation so as to come to its 

(documentation's) end: to distinguish f a c t from n o n - f a c t , or the real f r o m what (not 

being present) is not even an eventuality, so that documentation can then present the 

d i f f e r e n c e , which means: need make no difference itself. Since 'it' is absent from 

the making of distinctions that history does, it is not even an eventuality that it could 

a f f e c t the way distinctions — facts ~ are made. We can thus restate the intimacy of 

the relationship between history and documentation. History enters the terms of the 

documentary project in such as way as to preserve the ahistoricity of reporting ' i t s e l f 

(its absence from what it talks about), and it does this precisely by entering as the 

possibility of asserting, among other things, that everything about reporting (for 

example, its possible objects, procedures and practitioners) is irreducibly h i s t o r i c a l , 

subject to historical influence or, as may be said, 'historical through and through'. 

History or historicity is just a f a c t about inquiry, that i s , supplies it with the 

meanings (facts) it presents — and when it presents itself, supplies it with its own 

meaning (facticity) to present — and this is where a good many treatments of the 

matter come to a c l o s e . T h e y come to a close here, one suspects, because to present 



37 

a f a c t is to give the right answer (is to inquire and to have concluded one's inquiry) in 

the only sense documentation can give to the undertaking. 

T h i s , on the c o n t r a r y , is where we begin. Endings of this sort, if more 

e l l i p t i c a l expression can now be given to the desire of which documentation is the 

historiography, speak to the imperative that whatever is said should 'have foundation'. 

If documentation is treated as a particular historiography, that i s , as a c h a r a c t e r i s t i c , 

interested mode of reading, what arises is not e . g . the need to rush immediately into 

the lists to resolve the question of whether history is in f a c t the ground of inquiry. It 

becomes a question what 'the lists' are; what it is to be 'about' something (it might be 

more or other than this reading characteristically provides for); what it is to report, 

describe, present, document, assert, deny or inquire into something; what it is to 

ground something — whether grounds or foundations (no less f a c t s , things, objects, 

events, histories or history) must or even can answer to the imperative which shapes 

their discursive configuration in documentary reading — and so on. T h e image of 

rebuilding the boat one is floating in is in some respects serviceable, provided it is 

recognized that there is no drydock available for the purpose, and that the building is 

in aid of retrieving our need for building rather than the c l a i m , ultimately, to have 

produced a new and better boat. We turn, then, to our 'case'. A s it accounts for 

quite a bit of recent disciplinary historiography, the second story will do n i c e l y . 

III. T h e Principle in P r a c t i c e 

Versions of this story, which concur in adducing the polyvocalic present for 

the social sciences noted e a r l i e r , invariably locate themselves in relation to the work 

of Thomas K u h n (particularly if not only T h e Structure of S c i e n t i f i c Revolutions). 

Whether they then differ over the significance of having a discipline c h a r a c t e r i z e d by 



38 

multiplicity of orientation (theory and method), all such accounts treat Kuhn as 

something on the order of an honorary progenitor, i.e. as having brought to our 

attention, or as having given us the means to bring into view, this f a c t about our 

f i e l d . 

We are already, then, well within the purview of a documentary reading 

with these accounts. O f interest to us, though not, it seems, to the authors, many of 

whom do indeed profess allegiance to self-described schools of sociology, is that out 

of their multiplicitous orientations they agree on something. T h e y positively insist 

that there are many (or too many) paradigms in sociology. T h e r e 'are' many, but only 

i f , in accordance with the requirements of a documentary reading, one treats self-

description as f a c t (as the presence with reference to which a difference may be 

constituted, by means of another such presence). This is retrievable as a legislative 

a c t rather than the ostensive gesture it hopes to be, however. One need not accept 

the circumscription of p r a c t i c e to self-description accomplished by treating self-

description as present. We have already seen the form of this accomplishment: if 

self-description is present (fact), it can only be circumscribed by the absent (by non-

f a c t , by 'nothing'). If many self-descriptions are present, there is 'nothing' more to 

say (that is the f a c t , and the problem then becomes one of responding to it) ~ though 

we have already seen how elaborate are the operations which bring us to this 

conclusion, and how the conclusion is repeated or reaffirmed whenever the 'facts 

themselves' are looked upon. Indeed, if we were not so thoroughly accustomed to 

privileging the content of statements (again their f a c t i c i t y : the achievement of 

transparency such that content is the presence that a statement is 'about'), we would 

see this a c t and the one that establishes the notional history discussed earlier (the 

couple: 'uncomplicated p a s t / c o m p l i c a t e d present') as the same a c t . In other words, 

we would neither require sameness to be the unity or self-identity of what presents 



3 9 

itself, nor difference to be what obtains between two or more presences. 1 

Here, since we have some contingent grasp of the discursive structure of 

documentary accomplishments, we can reformulate what is at issue in the agreement 

these accounts display but fail to notice: not the fact which is presented again and 

again for review (assent), but the desire it speaks to, viz. that the facts should be 

secure (the limit of what we have to deal with), that we should get things right. 

Insofar as the accounts agree that this should be the accomplishment (i.e. perform or 

enact this agreement) their very agreement subverts the claim to 'differences'. 

Thus the latter result as a picture of the state of the social sciences cannot 

have been got 'from Kuhn's text' without Kuhn's text having been treated as itself an 

instance of documentation, as a presentation of facts and therefore itself readable as 

one more fact calling for documentation. It is in terms of this recognition that one 

can fashion a structural key to these readings which is other than the structure they 

adduce for themselves ('Nature's Own', i.e. analytically none, for what they claim for 

themselves is the structure — facticity — of the fact which 'produces' them). In 

much the pattern noted above, we may expect 'differences' to arise (as they with 

some notoriety have) over the proper definition of a paradigm (its proper or real 

constituents/content), but not over the presence (facticity) of paradigms as objects 

for documentation (for differences or difference-making of this kind): over the 

nature of normal and extraordinary science, crises and revolution, but not over the 

presence of these (or Kuhn's text generally) as objects for documentation. Debate 

may rage over the facts of facticity (the right definition, the best presentation of 

what there really is), but not over facticity 'itself (not over the commitment to a 

world conceived as independent of our conceptions as itself the only possible ground 

of knowledge: not therefore, over the commitment to a world which is available for 



40 

documentation in documentation's terms). T h e c o m m i t m e n t is already exemplified by 

these readings in their particular formulation of the givenness of polyvocality: as 

that which stands to their achievement as cause to e f f e c t , or as that which 

independently inaugurates (therefore cannot already embody) their achievement, 

where achievement is taken in the now familiar sense of 'whatever follows' — both 

'comes after' and 'is determined by' or 'a consequence o f . The solutions to our 

differences proposed in these readings then also remain, from our perspective by 

means of rather than despite their differences (their facts), true to their 

historiographic tasks. Whether the c a l l is for resignation to the supposed babel of 

sociological paradigms, for their integration or synthesis, or for optimism in the form 

of the assertion that paradigmatic diversity has potential fruitfulness, their self-

ascribed sense lies in their being able successfully to sustain some articulation of 

f a c t i c i t y ' i t s e l f as a l i m i t / g r o u n d . Since articulations under the auspices of these 

solutions can (and do) take any number of f o r m s , the concern here is with the system 

which permits them to do so rather than with a sampling of 'what they c o n t a i n ' . 2 

1. Thus resignation, for instance, has reference to a conception of univocality 

or f a c t as presence. This conception (requirement) is made weighty by, and gives 

weight to, the apparent absence of a single self-description in the discipline. T h e 

need to resign would have no sense (would not arise) without this requirement because 

its a c c e p t a n c e is what generates the 'many' (the differences) as a problem. T h a t the 

many are 'seen' (that i s , seen to m a t t e r , endowed with factual status) means that they 

are seen as frustrating its achievement. What is interesting about this response is 

that it declines recourse to the documentary version of the old saw that 'there are 

different ways of saying the same thing'. S p e c i f i c a l l y , it refrains from an attempt to 

resolve the differences (the problem) by making another difference (by adducing 

another f a c t , in this case either by inflecting or projecting the given f a c t such that a 



41 

'new' c l a i m to have stated the f a c t of the m a t t e r , to have uncovered the 'real' unity 

of the social sciences, can be presented). This is neither a departure nor a lapse, 

though the resigned and the community which reads their work may find it an acutely 

uncomfortable posture. R a t h e r , resignation's documentary coherence resides 

precisely in its withdrawing before the f a c t which is seen to determine its starting 

point. T h a t it ends where it begins is not only l e g i t i m a t e , provided that the f a c t 

provides for i t , but speaks to a c h a r a c t e r i s t i c relation of beginnings and endings 

which has already been noted. 

2. Where resignation's coherence consists in this withdrawal before its 

'inaugural' f a c t , that of integration consists in differentiating it (presenting the f a c t s 

of the f a c t ) . It therefore speaks to the same requirement, articulated in the 

necessity that interrelations of f a c t take the form of aggregation. T h e formulation 

of f a c t as presence licences only the proliferation of discrete essents (more f a c t s ) , 

whether 'internal' or 'external' to the f a c t with which one begins. T h a t i s , a part of a 

f a c t is analytically identical to that of which it is a part in that its status as essent 

resides solely in its presence (and presence is what is indivisible, offering only its 

complete temporal and spatial self-containment to view). Integration, and with it a 

well-established vocabulary — of 'parts' and 'wholes', 'components', 'elements', 

'combinations', 'structures', 'composites' and so on — expresses and perpetuates this 

s p e c i f i c discursive fecundity of f a c t (its supra- and intra-numerability as f a c t ) , but it 

does not 'follow' from it as something necessitated by a world in which parts and 

wholes disclose themselves. T h e need for integration only has sense in relation to the 

prior c o m m i t m e n t to such a world, i.e. to the prior commitment to a discursive 

distinction of internality and externality such that the latter may be secured as the 

proper provenance of truth. It would not arise (as a problem of aggregation, of 

making distinctions among undifferentiated differences) if presence were not the 



42 

l i m i t of f a c t and f a c t thereby the domain of this externality (the domain of what is 

other than and i m m i s c i b l e with any effort expended by us in its coming into view). 

Integration, insofar as it accepts its problem, must then trade on relations of 

isomorphy and replacement, for its acceptance of the problem means that there are 

no other relations in which the facts may stand to each other without ceasing to be 

f a c t s . T h e r e will be nothing to say of a f a c t whose f a c t s have been reallocated 

except that it is no longer present (is therefore nothing, or: nothing for the present, 

therefore past, passed o n , passed beyond or replaced), while the 'new' one is present 

(is therefore something, or: something for the present, therefore present, h e r e - a n d -

now, c u r r e n t , proximate, i m m e d i a t e , evident, evidence, and so on). 'That's history', 

as the saying goes: one must attend to 'what is going on today'. Integration is then as 

much a citation of history as resignation (from point of view of practitioners it is the 

preferred citation or citation form) for what it accomplishes in its reallocation of 

f a c t is the very substance of 'subsumption without residue'. T h a t i s , like resignation, 

it permits no hint or remnant of 'non-fact' to enter its presentation (which here 

consists of the replacement of one collocation of 'parts' with another which claims to 

be 'whole'). 

3. O p t i m i s m , f i n a l l y , displays its c o m m i t m e n t neither by 'ceasing' to 

document, nor by 'proceeding' to document, but by calling attention to the 

inevitability of documentation. T h a t i s , it displays its allegiance to a figure of unity 

as presence by calling attention to the inevitability of a state of affairs coming about 

which will make itself available as the optimal solution of our current differences, 

and so 'will' be there to document in the same way that facts 'are' and 'have been' 

available for documentation. By holding in e f f e c t that something will bubble up out 

of the paradigmatic stew, optimism offers an undiluted affirmation of the promissory 

history which drives and is continually reinvigorated by any instance of 



43 

documentation: it makes of any practitioner the potential conduit, not for more of 

the same (for if it were the case that differences were all he could foresee, the 

optimist would hardly consider that he had cause for optimism), but for a final unity 

which will come from the things themselves. Optimism then places complete faith in 

the rather o c c u l t ambulatory capacities required of facts and says (reaffirming one of 

many versions of the documentary conception of ground or limit) 'it's only a matter of 

time'. Since history (the f a c t of the workings of the things themselves) has provided 

for the current facts of the m a t t e r , it will also provide for their replacement 

(supercession), and we need only wait in readiness to document the moment of 

a r r i v a l . T h i s response seems capable of occasioning as much discomfort as 

resignation, sometimes expressed as stemming from its lack of analytic vigour. The 

lack is as responsive to documentary requirements as vigour (presumably integration) 

i s , however, and it is not inconceivable that its responsiveness rather than its 

purported deficiency accounts for some measure of the uneasiness expressed in like 

c r i t i c i s m s . Further demonstration may not add to our c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n of these 

responses as articulations of a discursive system organized by the c o m m i t m e n t to a 

determination of f a c t as presence. 

IV. The P r a c t i c e 'in Principle' 

Thus f a r , the system of the documentary reading of Kuhn has only been 

considered from point of view of its enabling the production of a ' f a c t out of Kuhn's 

text' which is simultaneously the production of Kuhn's text as a 'fact' (as a presence 

or unity of meaning which comprises an aggregate of facts available for a potentially 

inexhaustible array of documentary operations and responses). What needs to be 

considered, if only b r i e f l y , is the way in which the success of this reading also 

constitutes its limitation.3 



44 

By requiring that Kuhn's text be appropriable as f a c t , each of the three 

responses discussed above establishes a relation with Kuhn's text which makes of the 

latter not a text (not a discursive accomplishment) but a pretext — that i s , an 

occasion for the exercise of the project to which, as moments of documentary 

reading, they are already c o m m i t t e d (and already committing). Documentation will 

not itself see this as l i m i t i n g : on the contrary, it will consider itself in a position (of 

disengagement or removal from the discursive) to say everything there is to say about 

Kuhn's text. A s pre-text it is before or other than the discursive and so, just what is 

wanted, for it will say what there is to say in the way that the 'facts always speak for 

themselves'. It is for us to give this positioning a twist it cannot help providing f o r , 

by retrieving what 'Kuhn's text' so constituted has to say about documentation. It 

says a great deal in the l i m i t because it is constituted precisely and only as what 

documentation is prepared to say. Thus documentation will 'take' from Kuhn 

(attribute to 'Kuhn's text*) only so much as already belongs to its project, which 

means, it will make of 'Kuhn's text' an exercise in f a c t which shows greater or lesser 

f e l i c i t y to its own requirements (on its own reading of these). Where 'Kuhn's text' 

shows signs of escaping propriety — that i s , where documentation in its own 

engagement with Kuhn finds itself in danger of having to acknowledge the discursive 

character of its engagement — that is where 'Kuhn's text' will be arraigned on 

charges of 'implications': plainly intolerable, ambiguous, incoherent or error-ridden 

implications (in view of the f a c t s , which is to say, in view of what is wanted of the 

facts). 

If there is one feature of Kuhn's work which has been subject to more 

frequent characterizations of this kind than any other (or, in a parallel t a c t i c from 

point of view of its e f f i c a c y as a means of suppression, more urgently ignored: see 

R i t z e r 1980) it is his attempts to come to grips with what he calls the 



45 

incommensurability of paradigms. This is when, to give the figure its due, 'Kuhn's 

text' strikes back. T h e r e is nothing in principle to prevent documentation from 

formulating incommensurability as one more f a c t about paradigms, in much the same 

way as the paradigm is formulated as a f a c t about the success of the natural sciences 

in generating knowledge (results). O n its principles this is just what it should be 

doing, but instead it 'modifies' their application. It makes of incommensurability an 

hypothesis (a possible fact) and thinks (warrants the sense of) something like the 

following: if incommensurability were a f a c t , we would be unable to compare 

paradigms because they would have nothing in c o m m o n . Kuhn is then charged with 

promoting a thesis of 'extreme relativism'. T h e charge at least is c o m m o n : as may 

have been a n t i c i p a t e d , it is not only compatible with but produced by each of the 

three responses. 

F r o m point of view of the systematicity of the charge, then, there is here 

again no question of paradigms having the f a c t i c i t y required by documentation. T h e 

question is only whether incommensurability deserves to be a f a c t , i.e. in this 

inflection of 'about 1 , a component of paradigms. Since it is already formulated as 

f a c t , i.e. since all of the substitutive relations of presence have already been invoked, 

the question cannot be answered unless incommensurability is treated as a f a c t , and 

this is where documentation runs into problems (encounters its own l i m i t qua a thing 

that disrupts the stability of the known or knowable). A s facts go, that i s , in terms of 

the discursive system that generates relativism as a sensible response, 

incommensurability has a strange 'content' for it is about difference (there is no 

change of sense here; 'about' still has reference to the idea of mirroring a self-

subsistent thing in the world: predicating such a thing, thus 'the' world it is to come 

from). Worse s t i l l , it is about irreducible d i f f e r e n c e . T o predicate 

incommensurability of paradigms is to invite c a l a m i t y , not because the result will be 



4 6 

a multiplicity of paradigms. This f a c t is quite supportable under s p e c i f i c conditions, 

if the number of commentators who a c c e p t it is any indication. It is because, if 'the' 

f a c t about paradigms is their irreducible d i f f e r e n c e , the result will be a multiplicity 

of worlds, which we may translate as the loss in principle of the documentary 

conception (requirement) of ground or foundation. If paradigms 'are' 

incommensurable (if their difference rather than their presence is the fact) then what 

their difference will present is the absence of a single authorizing presence which 

could account for them a l l . T h e y will cease to have in common one ground and will 

thereby lose the possibility of discovering one v o i c e . T h e promise of univocality will 

be f o r f e i t e d if difference is permitted to matter. 

It is this chain of sense-making that the idea of relativism recapitulates, or 

what its urgency says. But then we must acknowledge that relativism belongs in the 

most thoroughgoing sense to documentation, not as a thing (for example, one of its 

components) but as an internal, discursively generated necessity: as one expression 

of its discursive l i m i t . T h e urgency of the warning that paradigms will cease to be 

'comparable' has point, for it is a way of saying that, if what is other than f a c t (the 

discursive) should become f a c t (should matter, make a difference to what f a c t is), 

then any f a c t will cease to be f a c t ; presence will cease to be the l i m i t of things or of 

the r e a l . Documentation sees its project jeopardized by such an eventuality, and 

relativism is its way of saying that such an eventuality is to be treated as 

inconceivable (in this, it says what every f a c t says). If the very best that can be 

imagined is unity, then the v e r y , very worst is multiplicity that cannot be aggregated 

on the formula 'unity in difference', multiplicity whose difference cannot be 

'reduced'. D i f f e r e n c e ^ are supportable - - that i s , many facts are supportable — 

because qua f a c t s they do not disturb the security of the realm of the f a c t u a l in the 

least: on the c o n t r a r y , they a f f i r m i t . Insofar as paradigms, for example, are 



47 

exemplary f a c t s , their difference does not m a t t e r . What it means that they are f a c t 

is that fundamentally they are the same. It is simply 'known' that they are proper 

objects (they do disclose their unity and will disclose their greater unity in due 

course). But to be confronted by this other sort of difference (a sort which persists in 

mattering or 'resists' assimilation to fact) is to verge on the meaningless, to come to 

the very l i m i t of meaning and so to be presented with the absolute imperative to 

retreat (reaffirm unity or reassert presence as all there is). Relativism says 'this far 

and no further: we must go back on pain of utter chaos'. 

That Kuhn's uses of incommensurability should occasion this response is not 

then a merit (or demerit) of Kuhn's text but a consequence and expression of its 

documentary readings. The charge of relativism brings with i t , so to speak, the 

entire system of that particular mode of reading, and to say this is not to consign 

Kuhn's text to oblivion. The latter would also be a documentary conclusion: if Kuhn's 

text is not f a c t , it is nothing; if not present, absent; if not indivisible or s e l f - s a m e , an 

offense against Nature; if not independent of us, unthinkable, and so o n . It is to say 

that there is nothing in the term 'incommensurability' which causes this response — 

that i s , makes for this response and no other, independently of the readings which 

invest it with the sense it has acquired for so many in sociology. R a t h e r , that sense 

enacts the prior provision, among others, that incommensurability can 'be' a t e r m , 

'have' a content, and insofar, 'cause' responses which, because they are caused 

(inaugurated from outside) 'are' v a l i d , real or themselves present (despite possible 

fluctuations in analytical vigour). What the canonical readings of Kuhn tell us is not 

that he bungled when he came to the relationships between paradigms (though 

certainly this is one version of what they say), but that the canon privileges (produces 

and limits itself by producing) relations of the sort we have been trying to retrieve 

from their more usual immersion in (construction of) the 'obvious'. 



48 

O r d i n a r i l y , efforts such as these would be expected to issue in a 

replacement account of Kuhn's text, in the most l i t e r a l sense of the documentary 

figure of replacement.^ Instead, we return to the rhetoricity of the report with at 

least the beginnings of a d i f f e r e n c e . 

It is an important c l a i m — whose basis is not Nature unless that figure too 

can be reinvested as an expression of the belonging to language instanced in both 

documentation and our discussion of it — that it is not immediately obvious what a 

truly alternative reading of Kuhn would consist i n , if it could 'consist' at a l l . This is 

because it is not immediately obvious what a truly alternative mode of reading in the 

social sciences would consist i n . Such a reading would not be presentable as f a c t (and 

might therefore be thought very unpresentable indeed) because it i m p l i e s , and takes 

shape as, an undoing of what f a c t has meant (accomplished) as an expression of the 

particular relation inquiry has traditionally established with the discursive. It 

therefore proceeds by means of the tradition though not by means of the end which 

comprises the tradition. If the canonical figurations of f a c t may be read as 

enactments of the relation to discourse that inquiry has preferentially stipulated for 

i t s e l f , v i z . the denial of the necessity of this relation, we can ask what it would be to 

inquire if f a c t enacted the affirmation of what it necessarily affirms by denying in 

any (every) case. 

It has not on the other hand similarly proved a necessity to stress 

throughout the preceding that 'facts are discursive accomplishments after a l l ' . 

T a k i n g f a c t s qua denials, this may seem more accessible than it may seem to have 

been elsewhere in our remarks, but this may only express the power the invitation to 

conclude has for us, since that in rhetorical terms is what repeated stress on 'the 

fact' would a c c o m p l i s h . 'Kuhn' (similarly 'history') has been used as an occasion in aid 



49 

not of 'new conclusions' but of making the question above available as one which 

could be taken seriously, where what is serious in the question will depend on our 

developing this implied shift in e n d , from denial of language as 'the' only means to 

truth or the intelligible, to its affirmation as our only means. A historiography of our 

accomplishments cannot require any other means than our historiography of things 

has, rather the elaboration of ways of making available a different relation to these. 

Thus it is not here a question of developing an alternative reading of K u h n , 

though it is nonetheless possible to indicate how one might begin (i.e. what we might 

require of ourselves in order to make a good start in relation to this shift in end). We 

would have to c o m m i t ourselves to treating statements like the following: 

T h e commitments that govern normal science specify not only 
what sorts of entities the universe does c o n t a i n , but also, by 
i m p l i c a t i o n , those it does not. It follows . . . that a discovery 
like that of oxygen or X - r a y s does not simply add one more item 
to the population of the scientist's world (1970:7), 

as something other than the provision of two more items for documentation's world: 

for the question 'Is it (immediately, obviously, clearly and of itself) true?' 

Put otherwise, we might begin to find it curious that an infinite capacity to 

generate truths (this is the promise Descartes makes on behalf of method: if we 

"follow the order necessary . . . there cannot be any propositions so abstruse that we 

cannot prove t h e m , nor so recondite that we cannot discover them" 1960:16) comes at 

the price of s t r i c t adherence to a version of the true which prefigures the proper 

form of questions and answers. T h e belief in the possibility of documentation, it is 

being suggested, is not other than that earlier exercise in belief which attempted to 

make the true a representation free from all opinion or custom — though to be sure it 

is not identical with i t , i.e. it does not look the same. 



50 

Perhaps it will have become less and less self-evident that looking is what 

sociology does in order to produce its documents. In this sense, the foregoing may 

suggest how Derrida's emphasis on the c h a r a c t e r i s t i c leap of reading is well-placed 

(p. 16 supra). Our considerations are certainly intended to represent something, but 

could they constitute a document, or the thing represented, a thing? Does one paint 

a principle (produce its 'genuine reproduction')? and if it were somehow less 

problematic to address a principle on this model of representation than it is a f a c t , 

would such a picture secure the commonly sought repose of a conclusion? 



51 

N O T E S 

1 We might obtain some leverage for asking what other uses history could be 
put t o , or for situating a 'paradox' stemming from its current employment: our need 
to rely on the 'words' in statements to tell us whether what they say is the 'same' or 
'different' — by 'looking', i.e. by themselves presenting the assertion or appearance 
that what they say is the same or different. This is less a paradox than a perfectly 
f a i t h f u l application of documentary principles, in light of which we might rather want 
to question the principles than rule on the propriety of the words. 

2 Appropriations of Kuhn in sociology include Barnes (1972, 1982); Bottomore 
(1975); D e n i s o f f , O r e l & L e v i n e (1974); Doppelt (1978); E c k b e r g & H i l l (1979); E f f r a t 
(1972); Eisenstadt & C u r e l a r u (1976); K u k l i c k (1973); Langsdorf & Reeder (1985); 
L e h m a n <3c Young (1974); Potter (1984); R i t z e r (1975, 1980); Westhues (1976). T o the 
extent that the boundary separating it from philosophy of science is one that 
sociology has not been averse to crossing, pedagogicaliy and in terms of publication, 
the assessments in Lakatos & Musgrave (1970) and G u t t i n g (1980) are pertinent. A 
not inappropriately extended use of 'publication' would include, perhaps most 
importantly, seminars and lectures given in methods courses and elsewhere, and the 
notes, sections and prefatory remarks found in theoretical and methodological texts 
of a variety of stripes, in which the f a c t under discussion is perhaps most e f f e c t i v e l y 
propagated, and the courses of action it is thought to necessitate argued or 
propounded. Paterson (1981) departs this company quite interestingly, for present 
purposes. 

This could be shown for each 'response to Kuhn' except that it can as 
readily be done 'jointly'. Here it might prove useful to consider resignation. It may 
be that neither the resigned nor a large part of the community which reads their work 
can find anything of positive value in this response, but this is only to say that it 
lacks value by the standards of documentation: where 'forward action' is wanted, 
ceaseless documentation of the differences, the resigned do nothing. This would be 
understood as a basis for reprisals (or would be understood to constitute one). But of 
course the resigned do something. T h e y r e f r a i n , and this restraint, hesitation or 
pause is precisely what, from our vantage, calls for formulation as a positive 
achievement: as speaking, not to the f a c t s , but to the promissory end of f a c t - f i n d i n g 
operations. Resignation can be read as having given itself pause, i.e. as having 
produced its own uncertainty about the viability of the documentary project in the 
very course of prosecuting i t . It is surely this relation which accounts for the 
harshness of reprisals when they o c c u r . It is not that the resigned do 'nothing', but 
that they come to hesitate by doing what they are supposed to d o . It could then be 
said that what gives them pause analytically is the f a c t that they produce for 
themselves the f a c t of their production: not a thing, but the necessity of their having 
a hand in the determination of the facts of the m a t t e r , which is then expressed in the 
worry that perhaps f a c t - f i n d i n g will not lead 'anywhere', i.e. to the real story, which 
ought not to be adulterated by such engagement. So also, mutatis mutandis, for the 
other responses. 



52 

* Components of such an account might include the assertions that the real 
unity of the social sciences has been under our noses all along, in the f a c t of its use 
of a discursive system based on a particular definition of f a c t , and that Kuhn or 
Kuhn's text in f a c t c r i t i c i z e s this very orientation. In i t , it might be said, the 
problems of an old view of s c i e n t i f i c inquiry in the philosophy of science are 
confronted and its c h a r a c t e r i s t i c claims r e f u t e d , so that Kuhn's text itself (what 
Kuhn really means) offers a replacement for the responses discussed, which 
misrepresent (or simply miss) the facts in their pretensions to objectivity, 
comprehensiveness, or whatever else may be adduced as the cause — the f a c t — of 
their f a i l u r e . In other words, we would see discursiveness 'raised' to the status of a 
f a c t about inquiry in the same way that history can be (p. 36 supra). We would be 
treated (again) to a conclusion, while by contrast, one expression of the questions our 
example could be used to raise would be some attention to the systematic foreclosure 
at work in 'conclusions', taken as the proper end of any report and the proper 
expository setting or orientation of any example. 



53 

C H A P T E R T H R E E 

Readings that have yet to be Done 

It is less a question of confiding new writings to the envelope of 
a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the 
lines in the volumes . . . . Because we are beginning to w r i t e , to 
write d i f f e r e n t l y , we must reread differently (Derrida 1976:86-
87) 

A n d , whatever else they may b e , texts are events in the history 
of language . . . . one must learn to pose anew the question of 
'what really happens' in them and in the reader who actually 
reads them ( L a C a p r a 1982:81) 

I. A n O l d Story 

It may prove instructive, on the way to a stock-taking and a necessary 

pause, not to leap over the text of the following conclusion: " F o r D e r r i d a all cats are 

grey in the night of 'writing'." O f f e r e d by no less authoritative a figure for the social 

sciences than Habermas (1985:85), it is the c l a i m of this utterance to report a 

conclusion whose implications speak for themselves. C e r t a i n that he has received 

Derrida's meaning, sure of the f a c t s of the m a t t e r , he informs us immediately 

following this deployment of the literary in aid of the l i t e r a l : "I would not wish to 

draw this conclusion" (ibid.). Perhaps sufficient context has been generated to 

suggest some of the irony of this erstwhile passage from f a c t (essence) to value 

(accident), or from a publicly available (self-communicating) object to a personal 

response (the purely supplementary remarks of a reasonable subject). T h e passage is 

worth quoting at length: 

We are now well aware, since Mary Hesse at the l a t e s t , that 
even the language of the sciences is shot through with 
metaphors; this is plainly true of the language of philosophy, 
which can never of course be entirely absorbed into its role as a 



5k 

stand-in for s c i e n t i f i c theories with strong universal c l a i m s . But 
one cannot, like D e r r i d a , conclude from the unavoidably 
rhetorical c h a r a c t e r of every kind of language, including 
philosophical language, that it is all one and the same — that the 
categories of everyday l i f e and l i t e r a t u r e , science and f i c t i o n , 
poetry and philosophy, collapse into each other. F o r D e r r i d a all 
cats are grey in the night of 'writing'. I would not wish to draw 
this conclusion. The use of language in the practices of everyday 
life stands under different restrictions from the language used in 
theory or art, which is specialized for the solving of problems, or 
for an innovative disclosure of the world (ibid.) 

R h e t o r i c i t y , it seems, is just a f a c t about inquiry. Somehow, Derrida's relation to 

this f a c t is a damning f a c t about D e r r i d a and what he does. Will it do to construe 

this text in turn as a f a c t about H a b e r m a s , damning or otherwise? 

The short answer is no. A more c o m p l i c a t e d answer, and in terms of the 

position taken here as regards deconstruction's i m p l i c a t i o n s , a more satisfactory one, 

is yes and no. Y e s , if one is willing to displace the requirements of f a c t so as to 

admit what they already admit by denying. It then becomes a highly consequential 

' f a c t about Habermas' that his assessment belongs in a profound way to the metaphor 

of drawing conclusions -r- that i s , to a history of citation which gives his particular 

restatement meaning and rhetorical f o r c e . N o , on the other hand, if this f a c t in turn 

is thought to settle matters. It would then already have become an exemplary f a c t 

for documentation and an espousal which it has been precisely the task of the thesis 

to p r o b l e m a t i z e . 

If we were to reread Habermas' text in light of its belonging to this history, 

a history as heterogeneous and non-linear as the tangle of c u s t o m , convention and 

language whose history it i s , we might come to appreciate that its message is not, as 

might appear on first reading, the f a c t that D e r r i d a has failed to tell us something we 

did not already know about the language of inquiry. Rather 'Derrida' i s being faulted 

for failing to tell us something (or some thing) that we desire to know, i.e. something 



55 

known or knowable in the manner to which we have become a c c u s t o m e d . It is not a 

f a c t at a l l , then, but a threat which is being addressed in this text. Its concluding 

utterance functions much less as a neutral description than as a restatement of the 

imperative the text performs and espouses v i a the rhetorical device of a catastrophe. 

"The use of language in the practices of everyday l i f e stands under different  

restrictions from the language used in theory or in art . . . " (1985:85, emphasis 

added). T h a t i s , it must so stand: "one cannot" explore the possibility that this 

opposition of theoretical and everyday language is not given but the tenuous issue of 

a problematic attempt to impose a standard; one "would not wish" to venture too near 

the foreign shores of such a possibility, lest the home urged by this standard should 

itself come to seem strange. 

But surely it is strange: a strange home that renounces the home to which 

it irremediably belongs; a strange necessity which requires this belonging to be 

renounced before anything meaningful can be said about it; a strange project which 

will accordingly accuse its adherents — 'when it shows' — of this same belonging; and 

a strange principle which betrays itself from the start by requiring for its 

renunciation the very belonging that it renounces. 

In this context, Habermas' insistence on the f a c t of rhetoricity ("we are 

now well aware . . .", "this is plainly true . . .") becomes explicable as a means of 

keeping a safe distance from a threat posed, not by 'Derrida' but by the very principle 

of a documentary c o m m i t m e n t . If inquiry can be made "unavoidably rhetorical" in 

the same way that it can be made unavoidably h i s t o r i c a l , v i z . in such a way that its 

rhetorical and historical elements will detach and present themselves from among 

'the rest', then the danger will be averted that the language one uses to describe them 

might not be their own — the one language exempt from "the unavoidably rhetorical 



56 

character of every kind of language" because it does not belong to language at all. 

It is presumably his commitment to this reserve of 'theoretical language' 

which leaves Habernias blind to the rhetoricity of his own text and more particularly 

to its complicity in the catastrophe it externalizes and mobilizes itself against. 

Elsewhere, and possibly unwittingly, we are given a very cogent statement of the 

stakes of this exercise: ". . . interests attached to the form of presentation should 

not be allowed to get the upper hand; otherwise one could become cynical about 

questions of truth" (1985:88, emphasis added). But is it not precisely an entailment of 

documentation's own interest in attaining its strange home that the "form of 

presentation" will always be threatening "to get the upper hand"? Could one be 

dismayed by the necessity of writing if one did not already wish to suppress it, or be 

appalled at the need to 'use' language if one did not already seek to reduce it to an 

instrument that might otherwise (ideally) be dispensed with? We are coming at last 

to the crux of the matter, which is: that the writ served on writing is always served 

in writing; charges brought against language are brought from within language, must 

always bring language to bear. This is not a condition, Derrida and Raffel suggest in 

different ways, concerning which it makes sense to act as if we had a choice of 

belonging or not belonging. 

For documentation, however, the 'possibility' of making just such a choice 

is crucial. The true does not belong to language and so one must insist on an 

impossible possibility in order to attain it. It is worth noting in this connexion that 

Habermas figures the threatened collapse of "every kind of language, including 

philosophical language" in pairs of terms, each couple opposing the literal and the 

literary: "the categories of everyday life and literature, science and fiction, poetry 

and philosophy, [will] collapse into each other" (1985:85). Two categories are to be 



57 

secured, in other words: belonging (to which one does not want to belong) and not 

belonging (to which one aspires). Speaking as if he had already attained the l i t e r a l , 

Habermas enjoins us to do the same. Put another way, denying the l i t e r a r y , 

Habermas seeks to enforce a boundary that he will necessarily violate in the a t t e m p t , 

and in every a t t e m p t . It is not that one "could become c y n i c a l about questions of 

truth" in this exercise (1985:88, emphasis added), but that 'cynicism' is so to speak 

built i n . 

Now this is not everything that writes itself between the lines of 

Habermas' text but it will serve to situate the question of whether he is 'right' or 

'wrong', for it is only in terms of the story endorsed there that such an exercise has 

meaning. It is R a f f el's and Derrida's merit to rigourously address the system of this 

meaning and its r a m i f i c a t i o n s . T h e ' f a c t about Habermas' to which they refer us is 

thus neither a f a c t nor about Habermas: no f a c t , because our belonging to language 

nowhere presents itself in its entirety, and no picture of Habermas for we all write 

out of this c o n d i t i o n . T h e suggestion is that like H a b e r m a s , we never more fully 

concur in a particular and problematic relation to language than when we are sure of 

having transcended the issue altogether, when we are sure that we are 'just writing' 

or 'just reading'. If it seems a d i f f i c u l t prospect to begin to examine how these ideas 

express and perpetuate the system to which they belong, and/or how the latter 

articulates a particular position, desire or principle as regards its condition, we might 

take heart from the likelihood that it will be no more d i f f i c u l t than securing the 

principle has been, and perhaps a good deal more salutary in its e f f e c t s . 

F o r suppose that documentation-should finally realize its principle, and 

good writing finally achieve the absolute transparency that would entitle it to treat 

itself as the (true and proper) utterance of the things themselves. Would it not in the 



58 

same moment lose all possibility of savouring its success? T h e r e would be nothing 

more to say, not because in fulfilment of its story documentation had finally clinched 

the last word, but because, having taken up habitation in the timeless, the placeless, 

the wordless, it would have deprived itself completely of the means of producing 

stories with this or any other i m p o r t . T h e end of the documentary story is not a 

triumphal return to pure communion with a world of pre-discursive meaning 

(presence), but rather a sad a f f a i r whose participants, if it would still make sense 

thus to evoke the human, would have no way of knowing even this. T h e y would have 

no way of knowing, or knowing would have no analogy for knowers in a social and 

h i s t o r i c a l , that is to say discursive, world. 

H a b e r m a s , then, is of interest not as an example of 'error' but for the way 

in which the message of his text exceeds and subverts his intention. H e is not 

dissembling or otherwise at fault when he tells us: "I do not regard the fully 

t r a n s p a r e n t - - l e t me add in this context: or indeed a homogenized or unified - -

society as an ideal . . . " (1985:94); nor in seeking to elaborate a "discourse theory of 

truth" (1985:85). The issues raised by our habituation to the system of documentation 

do not require, and are not well-served analytically by the production of, a villain in 

the form of a d o g m a t i c , suspect or reactionary writer, a discipline of such writers, or 

an ethnos of such writers (that i s , by the production of another f a c t , in any 

extension). 

This is precisely the point, for 'Habermas' conceives and conducts his 

action from start to finish as a documentary exercise, 'dispensing' with the 

transparent society by means of transparent writing and 'avowing' the need for a 

discourse theory by means of the same disavowal of the discursive. It is in this 

respect that his text propagates and circulates within the rhetorically invested world 



59 

and history of the document. Whatever may be the referents of "everyday l i f e and 

l i t e r a t u r e , science and f i c t i o n , poetry and philosophy" (1985:85), it is only their 

f a c t i c i t y which is in danger of collapsing, and only because, within the terms of this 

s y s t e m , the appearance of what appears will quite literally cease to be at the 

suggestion that it may be other than it appears: if presence is not identical with 

i t s e l f , as we have seen, it becomes an absence or a n o n - t h i n g - - i t disappears. The 

collapse is therefore catastrophic only because a c o m m i t m e n t to good or transparent 

writing already dictates the removal from language, custom and convention within 

which we might otherwise make more of the facts than the appearances they b e c o m e , 

not without irony, in this persistent attempt to secure the true or a solid foundation. 

We- say 'only', but not to minimize the very considerable a r t i f a c t this project has 

generated by way of routine practice and belief. There is no f a c t in documentation's 

sense to which this history might be r e f e r r e d , but if rumour is groundless, as is often 

said, it is equally remarked that it is no less e f f e c t i v e for all that. 

II. Readings that will always need Doing: Some L a s t Remarks 

Perhaps the need for a non-obvious rethinking of the idea(l) of technical 

writing will have been given some justification in the foregoing, and equally the 

suspicion that this would generate not another reading, but as many readings as there 

are ways to take up our belonging to the story and the system it sustains. This would 

only be an alarming prospect, it may not need emphasizing, in view of the idea that 

sense-making should come to an end. In the same way that we wish we could begin 

without having already begun, we would like to be finished before we start. T h e r e is 

no need to rehearse the problems of this l e g a c y , whose promise we know with all the 

f o r c e of rumour but whose requirements we are less familiar with even as we f u l f i l 

t h e m . When D e r r i d a says that "there is no nonmetaphoric language to oppose to 



60 

' metaphors here" (1976:67), he is saying for present purposes that there is no access to 

the workings of this story which is not made from within it and by means of its (our) 

history. There is not one 'word' in the thesis, for example, which has not been party 

to the telling of this story in many times and many places. If some sense is being 

made in the present instance, then, it would not be by e f f e c t i n g to speak in 'another' 

language which belongs to 'another' time or p l a c e , and no such c l a i m is being made. 

Put otherwise, it is indeed a matter of reading and of writing d i f f e r e n t l y . 

A propos Derrida's work, we might begin seriously to consider the 

possibility that 'reading' is already a 'writing': 

If 'writing' signifies inscription and especially the durable  
institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the 
concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of 
linguistic signs (1976:44, emphasis added). 

T h a t i s , 'writing' already encompasses spoken and notational or technical language in 

the colloquial sense of these t e r m s . What D e r r i d a reworks and redirects of the 

concept of writing is the i d e a , already at work in its uses and etymology, of making a 

mark or making a difference: 

. . . 'to scratch,' 'to engrave,' 'to scribble,' 'to scrape,' 'to incise,' 
'to trace,' 'to imprint,' e t c . A s if 'to write' in its metaphoric 
kernel'meant something else (1976:123). 

One could not ask, in a certain sense, for a more sociologically incisive 

c h a r a c t e r i z a t i o n of the action of institution(s).! 



61 

NOTES 

1 It is thus no accident that much deconstructive criticism concerns itself 
with reformulating in this light the conditions of reading, writing, translation, 
textuality, reception, formalisms and so on. In addition to sources cited in Chapter 
One, see also Graham (1985); Harrison (1985); Henning (1982); the particularly 
accessible work of the intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra (1978, 1982a, 1982b, 
1983, 1985); Melville (1986); and Staten (1984, 1986). 



62 

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63 

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