Barry Sandywell - Problems of Reflexivity and Dialectics in Sociological Inquiry

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: SOCIAL THEORY

Volume 54

PROBLEMS OF REFLEXIVITY AND DIALECTICS IN SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY

First published in 1975

This edition first published in 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
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1975 Barry Sandywell, David Silverman, Maurice Roche, Paul Filmer and Michael Phillipson

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ISBN: 978-0-415-72731-0 (Set)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76997-4 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-138-78412-3 (Volume 54)
eISBN: 978-1-315-76345-3 (Volume 54)

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First published in 1975
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
Broadway House, 6874, Carter Lane
London EC4V 5EL and
9 Park Street
Boston, Mass. 02108 USA
Typed by Pam Pope
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Unwin Brothers Limited
The Greshani Press, Old Woking, Surrey
a member of the Staples Printing Group
Barry Sandywell, David Silverman, Maurice Roche,
Paul Filmer and Michael Phillipson 1975
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form without permission from the
publisher, except for the quotation of brief
passages in criticism

ISBN 0 7100 8304 1

Barry Sandywell

Barry Sandywell

David Silverman

Maurice Roche

Paul Filmer

Michael Phillipson

Doing prefacing, introducing a text and acknowledging inspirations are far too dangerous enterprises to escape reflection, especially given the commitments which the following papers manifest. In place of the conventional preface, then, it would be circumspect to explicate why we cannot blithely follow the standard practice of supplying readingrules, thumbnail sketches or instructions to the papers which the preface chases. We would like to assure the reader that this vacuum is not intended as irreverence on our part toward him, but rather the reverse. In fact our explorations focus heterogeneously on the problem of respectfully constituting notions of Reader and Readership where prefaces would at best become redundant, at worst moral insults, concretely understood as denials of competence (ours as well as the readers).

Let us have no doubts: supplying prefaces to a work is tanta mount to the provision of recipes for the social construction of worlds; more accurately, prefaces are sets of instructions cajoling the reader to construe the world in this or that way by turning the text about an authoritative version of what it is to read. Within the practice of differentiating the authors Genius from the readers projected incompetence, the reader is concretely collected as being one in need of tuition (supplied by the preface); a community, as it were, is present in the innocent location practices of prefacing.

The felt need of supplying such reading rules is an indication of the shallow understanding of identity and difference (the community of Reader and Writer) behind conventional texts. These delaying tactics which attempt to give the gist of the grounds of a piece of work inadvertently transform the grounds of the writing into a gistable thing. Unfortunately the heuristic practice of doingprefacing (often understood as a positive aid for the unknowledgeable reader) stands for us a symbol of how the intended readership is absolutely preempted from entering the text in his full authorial capacity as one, in other words, whose destiny hangs on the way he rewrites the authors work for himself. Reading, then, is nothing if it is not a rewriting; sadly most prefaces set off with the timeworn assumption that reading is nothing if it is not reading. Upon that distinction hinges a tradition, the darker side of which emerges in the mundane speech of positive exchange and the market which is analysed at various places in the contributions that follow.

The prefaces of traditional texts locate the work as a whole, a finished totality or completed thing. To be more precise, the preface finishes a text by totalizing an object thereby doing the impossible: bringing to fulfilment what is basically incompletable. The feature to be drawn out here is that this enterprise is possible only given a convention commonly accepted amongst a readership the rule that texts can be treated as products to be prefixed and suffixed into a tidy package without loose ends, wayward locutions and the ambivalence of dialectic.

What escapes our attention here is the feature that the preface acts not as a set of instructions for reading a work as the authors writing but as instructions for reading the work as the authors reading of his own writing. But should we not warn the reader of this seduction and supply him with the tools for rewriting the work as his reading? After all, taken to its logical conclusion these instructions of the author would delay the reader at the preface. He need go no further if the essence is palpably in the preface. Not surprisingly, authors do (privately) advocate grasping the preface and conclusion and ignoring the circuitry of the middle; again, obsession with the etiquette of beginnings and closings, with the problem of saying precisely the problem at the beginning and articulating a summary and prospect at the conclusion is symptomatic of deeper issues here.

When we stop and think further we find ourselves in a topsyturvy world. How is it that we never pay attention to the paradoxes of writing introductions and prefaces? For instance, we raise the difficulty of beginning before the beginning deciding precisely when we actually do begin in writingreading. The Introduction to these papers can have only one message:that the reader has already begun better, that he had better disregard the seductions of the authors preface. Let us retrieve the peculiar thing that a Book is. Where indeed is the correct entry to a Book? For as all authors privately know (and as we here exemplify), the preface is the last item to be written but it is the first item to appear as the guiding hand that moves the pen of the reader through the labyrinths of the authors Conception; or so it goes. Yet the moving finger having writ moves on This applies to author as well as reader. We must give up the image of the author as a translucent guidebook to his own work. That is a transcendental (in its religious meaning) image which we could well do without. Inverting the temporality of the writing by placing the preface at the front means that the author is hiding something, covering up something that ought to be said, namely, how he went about generating a work. Should we not place the preface at the back where it belongs? Better still, why not abandon the desire to send the reader somewhereorother and let the reader himself control his life, discover the work by writing himself into the work as he rewrites the work in his practice of reading? This is nothing more mysterious than letting the reader see behind the masks of the writing in order that he be intoxicated with the Idea of reflexively providing for that work, the grounds which sustain it and which are the real subject of writing.