Hum Stud (2010) 33:253–269 DOI 10.1007/s10746-010-9150-0 MEMORIAL PAPER
Peter McHugh and Analysis: The One and the Many, the Universal and the Particular, the Whole and the Part Kieran M. Bonner
Published online: 28 September 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract This paper takes the passing of Peter McHugh as an occasion to examine the intellectual development of his work. The paper is mainly focused on the product of his collaboration with his colleague and friend, Alan Blum. As such, it addresses the tradition of social inquiry, Analysis, which they cofounded. It traces the influence of Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology on McHugh and on the beginning of Analysis. The collaboration with Blum is examined through a variety of coauthored works but most especially in the two books On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (1974) and Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (1984). It also examines the relation of his independent writing before 1974, and since 1984 to the expression of the tradition of inquiry as exemplified in those two texts. The paper builds on some interview material with Peter McHugh and reflects on the influence of Peter the teacher as well as the theorist McHugh. Most especially, through its engagement with this material, it seeks to exemplify the dialectic and living nature of the program called Analysis. Keywords Peter McHugh Alan Blum Analysis Harold Garfinkel Ethnomethodology Foucault Postmodernism Hannah Arendt Reflexivity Rules and Principles
‘‘Two Things’’ ‘‘And in a way, you know, some of the stuff like when Alan and I were writing together: it still showed up, you know, the two kinds; the two things that were in the work, it seems to me, were the things that are still in the work, but separately now.’’ K. M. Bonner (&) Department of Sociology, St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G3, Canada e-mail:
[email protected]
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(Interview 5 Peter McHugh, interview with Kieran Bonner on the ‘‘History of Analysis’’, New York, Feb, 2007, unpublished.) In the first half of 2007, I conducted a series of separate interviews with Stanley Raffel, Peter McHugh, and Alan Blum.1 I received a small grant from St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo to research the history of ‘‘the work’’ begun by Alan Blum and Peter McHugh, a grant that allowed me to visit to New York for a series of interviews with Peter McHugh. The above quotation is from one of those interviews, and it says something about Peter and about Peter’s understanding of ‘‘the work,’’ the colloquial reference for the tradition of social inquiry he and Alan Blum, his friend and collaborator, cofounded. Analysis,2 as it was called in On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (1974) and in graduate school at York, shows at least ‘‘two things’’ that were in the work when they were writing together and that are ‘‘still in the work, but separately now.’’ [Interview 5, above]3 Analysis is composed of ‘things’ that, in turn, reflect the interests (passions, beliefs, influence, knowledge, understanding) of Blum and McHugh. Indeed, in the way Heritage (1984) notes how the work called Ethnomethodology is inextricably tied to the person/theorist named as Garfinkel, it seems the work called Analysis is tied in significant ways to the theorists Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. McHugh talks about the idea of a work as composed of ‘things’ that reveal a trace of its creators. The ‘‘work’’ has a unity that, as with all unities, reveals tensions and negations. ‘‘The work,’’ it appears, is a one and a many at the same time. In important ways, this is illustrated by the book that ‘launched’ the work, On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (1974), a work that begins with the meaning and practice of collaboration, which in turn is embodied by the collaboration between Blum and McHugh and their students, Stanley Raffel and Daniel Foss. This idea of the one and many (in this case, the whatness of ‘‘the work’’ and the whoness of its embodiers) is also suggested in one of McHugh’s (2010: 1) last papers, How the Dead Circulate (in Life): Coming together/separating is not merely the gathering and dissolution of singularities but… a continuing anticipation of transitivity, an oriented coming together into a collective oneness of onenesses as well as an oriented separating into distinct onenesses, then coming together again and separating again…but always within the ambit of circulation.
1
I would like to thank Stanley Raffel, Peter McHugh, and Alan Blum for their willing participation in my eccentric interview project. The occasion for this paper, written in his honor, is Peter’s passing in January, 2010. I would like to thank St. Jerome’s University, John Faichney for his knowledgeable transcriptions of these interviews and Margaret O’ Shea Bonner for her comments on a first draft. I would also like to thank Ryan Devitt for his very helpful edit.
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This work has also been called Analytic Theory (York University in the 1990s); Self Reflection (University of Edinburgh); and Radical Interpretive Inquiry (Augustana University College, University of Waterloo).
3
This was an aside in a longer conversation about finding one’s place in the work and, as a result, the nature of two things did not get described. See the ‘McHugh and Peter’ section of this paper.
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The collaboration between Alan Blum and Peter McHugh, a collaboration that involved many students and an intellectual community,4 is one example of an oriented coming together and separating that created the ‘‘collective oneness of onenesses’’ that is embodied in what we know of as ‘‘the work.’’ What is the nature of this ‘‘work’’ that seems to be composed of both ‘whoness’ and ‘whatness’?5
Who and What Peter McHugh in Insomnia and the (t)error of lost foundationalism in postmodernism takes up Foucault’s claim in What is an Author?: ‘‘What difference does it make who is speaking, so long as we know the conditions of the discourse.’’ (Foucault, as quoted in McHugh 1996: 37). In reply, McHugh states: Rather, a who that is speaking is the one who works through the always ambiguous flux of sign-signified relations, across the whole spectrum of meaning, limitation, morality, and so on in any one encounter. So: a who not only has a life in life, but now in theorizing too, as a one (collective, person) that labors as the specific and visible embodiment–the what-embodier–of the conditions of discourse and their various realizations in conduct, and this [is] a one who can be said not only to produce and make whatever any actual discourse turns out to be but to demonstrate the need for whatness that turns up on any and all whatever. Only through life speakers speaking and through the implicit histories and traditions this speech embodies (such as the need for interpretation), will the ‘conditions of discourse’ be realized. Here, McHugh seems to be claiming something similar to what he stated in the interview. If ‘‘only through life speakers speaking and through the implicit histories and traditions this speech embodies (such as the need for interpretation), will the ‘conditions of discourse’ be realized,’’ then the work called Analysis will at some level embody the implicit histories and traditions of the life speakers named as Blum and McHugh, along with their collaborators and students. Most of all, the who is one who demonstrates ‘‘the need for whatness that turns up on and all whatever.’’ The who shows through the demonstration of ‘‘the need for whatness’’ and ‘‘the need for interpretation.’’ If need refers to love or passion (1996: 34), then whoness shows through a love of the particular (‘‘any and all whatever’’) and a love of the universal (‘‘the need for interpretation’’). Of course, Analysis recognizes that the ‘‘conditions of discourse’’ can be, and often are, analyzed independent of a care for who is speaking. In many ways, the beginning of Analysis gives one example of what an analysis of the ‘‘conditions of discourse’’ could look like. Blum and McHugh’s ‘‘Motive’’ paper (1971) can be seen as an analysis of the conditions of the discourse of motive talk. As such, it is 4
In the way that Analysis was known as ‘‘the work’’ so too were the students and teachers called ‘‘the community.’’.
5
If I can be forgiven for sounding too Dr. Seuss-like, Analysis, it seems, is the production of ‘thing one’ and ‘thing two’!
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comprehensive and deep. In this first collaboration, they show affinity with, and difference from, Ethnomethodology. Here, we have a first example of both a separation (from Ethnomethodology) and a coming together in a collective oneness (Analysis). ‘‘Motive talk’’ shows how members, in a taken for granted, everyday way, are formulating themselves and their environment. Since the taken for granted theoretic work of members is a necessary but unexplicated resource for social science, Blum and McHugh in this first collaboration show that a thorough sociological analysis of motive needs to make member’s theorizing a topic. ‘‘We shall suggest,’’ they say, ‘‘that all sociological conceptions require some version of the common sense member (of his practical knowledge)’’ (McHugh et al. 1974: 21). This interest clearly shows the influence of Ethnomethodology. This beginning, for both Blum and McHugh, shattered the idea that there is an ontological difference between the academy and everyday life, high life and low life, philosophy and sociology, idealism and realism, theory and practice, in a word between Culture and culture.6 This beginning always remained part of the oneness of the work in their coming together as a collective oneness and in their separation as two onenesses, an initiative that, for me at least, was an important element in attracting collaborators and students. Yet, even at this very early stage and before the Addendum (published with the re-printed Motive paper in 1974), Analysis showed a radical departure from the empiricism of ethnomethodological research. Their analysis of the deep structure of ‘‘motive talk,’’ an analysis that still holds true nearly 40 years later, was not based on extensive empirical research. Rather, and as Foucault was to work out in another context, empirical research itself relies on and reproduces one very particular discourse. That is, empiricism as the basis for knowledge creation is only one (if dominant) interpretive paradigm (Bonner 1997: 71–82). For example, the very recognition that motive talk has taken place, a recognition that is a requirement for any and all empirical research on motive, is made possible by the lifeworld of the commonsense member. ‘‘The surface performance which is displayed in the use of motive might be that of offering a reason, goal, or intention, but to provide an account of motive in these terms is to ignore the deep structure which makes the surface display possible’’ (1974: 30). It is the deep structure (or in Foucault’s terms, the conditions of discourse) that makes the recognition of motive talk as just that, a kind of recognition that the Motive paper describes. Yet, as I have addressed elsewhere (2001: 273–276) that initial beginning in Analysis was almost immediately self-critiqued as not reflexive enough. Blum and McHugh, in electing to formulate the conditions for the recognition of motive talk, did not address their ‘‘own interest in motive talk,’’ their own interest in the ‘‘fact that we find such talk interesting’’ (McHugh et al. 1974: 43–44). They had ‘‘preserved through explication the ordinary member’s notion of origin, but [their] interest in origin…is quite different’’ (1974: 44). That is, they had shown that the interest in motive talk was an interest in collectability (for example, collecting a
6
We can see how this realization has worked itself out in Blum’s most recent book (2003), a work on the culture of the city.
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person’s biography with an event), a collectability that implicitly privileges cause as what is first. This in turn privileges the lifeworld of modern science, a lifeworld in need of critical theorizing. Here, with the Addendum, we can see one way a ‘‘who’’ has a life in theorizing is through the idea that the theorist’s interest in theorizing must itself be theorized. The interest in the subject matter, in this case the interest in motive talk (as against just the fact of motive talk), needs to be addressed by a theorist who seeks to be reflexively accountable for his/her own theorizing. Those of us who were students of Peter remember being asked often, ‘‘what is the interest behind that statement (question, claim, description)?’’ Our interest in a given statement, in other words, needed to be accounted for in the talk. Peter, moreover, often made answering this question challenging.7 Yet, though they recognize that, as theorists, they failed to show themselves in their analysis, they nevertheless showed how interest in persons is a core feature of the way motive talk is made sensible to and by members theorizing. That is, members formulate motives as constructing a type of person; for example, to say ‘‘he killed his wife because he was jealous’’ can be understood as collecting an event (the killing) with a biography (a person who is formulated as owning experiences that includes, in this case, a history of jealously). Here, the competent commonsense member, as motive ascriber, is following the conditions of the discourse of
7
KB: So do you want me to elaborate on what I mean by the question [what schools of thought is Analysis close to?] PM: Yes, if you would help me out, because KB: It’sPM: I mean, what is it close toKB: Now, it’s my- it’s partly my thing, and it’s partly my own relation to the work, but it’s clearly part of the phenomenological movement in general. But then, that has had it’s different resistances, et cetera. So you’d have post-structuralism; you’d have hermeneutics; you have ethnomethodology, you know, andPM: I see what you’re after. WellKB: -so that they’re- if- I’m trying to imaginePM: Go ahead. KB: I’m trying to imagine the ’deadworld’, in the future, where not only this work doesn’t {01} have a voice, but what would be close to it doesn’t have a voice. Do you see work that’s close to analysis? PM: Not particularly. KB: No? PM: No, I don’t. I don’t think so. I mean, of course; of course. Hermeneutics is closer than structuralism. I mean, is phenomenology closer to it than hermeneutics? God knows. I mean, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know whether- Maybe if you could tell me the interest of the question. Now you did start by saying, ‘‘You know, well, suppose something falls apart; what would survive?’’, or what wouldn’t survive, if I understand the question. Maybe you can help me a lot by saying, well, I mean, why be interested in such a question? KB: Well, it relates to some of my broader interests. For example, there’s a certain area where poststructuralism has intersections with hermeneutics, and, as I have written, hermeneutics has intersections with analysis. PM: Well, that’s what they have; it’s like a grid. It’s like- to me, it’s like a grid. And so is 56th street closer than 57th street? Than 55th street? The answer is yes. But those are numbers, you know what I mean? And I guess-I have to answer this. (Peter McHugh, interview with Kieran Bonner on the ‘‘History of Analysis’’, New York, Feb, 2007, unpublished.).
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motive talk (as required, if he/she is to be seen as doing intelligible motive talk) and, by so doing, is formulating a type of person (McHugh et al. 1974: 37–39). The notion of a ‘‘type of person’’ is itself one of the conditions of discourse that make motive talk the ordinary and recognizable activity it is. However, in this specific analysis, the ‘‘who’’ as a ‘‘type of person’’ is an object of talk, which in turn shows the pervasiveness of the idea of persons in social life. And yet in McHugh’s terms, this same tendency points to the way that, through discourse, the person has ‘‘a life in life’’ but not yet ‘‘a life in theorizing.’’ Theorizing, though of necessity an abstract enterprise, also reveals a ‘‘who’’ who, as McHugh (1996: 38) says, ‘‘has a life in theorizing, as a one that labors as the specific embodiment of the conditions of discourse.’’ The ‘‘who’’ is the author who speaks when the ‘‘profound ambiguity of language’’ means that ‘‘demonstrative work cannot be laid down in advance and could not be accomplished by a mechanistic dummy.’’ If Analysis is the kind of work that ‘‘cannot be laid out in advance,’’ if the method of analysis cannot be predicted, and if this method is more than mechanically followed (mechanistic dummy), then it seems that the one who would self consciously undertake such work must become necessarily intertwined with the product. McHugh’s ‘‘who’’ is not ‘‘personality.’’ The ‘‘who’’ who has a life in theory is not like the way members talk about each other, if that is captured by Garfinkel’s ‘‘just like Harry’’ comment. I remember in one of the many graduate courses I took from Peter and Alan, both separately and together, Peter referred to that phrase from Garfinkel’s chapter on the Documentary Method (1967: 76–103). Peter had worked with Garfinkel as a graduate assistant on this research that became the basis of the latter’s first book, Defining the Situation (1968). Garfinkel (1965: 95) illustrated the process of the documentary method with the following: The documentary method is used to epitomize the object. For example, just as the lay person may say of something that ‘Harry’ says, ‘Isn’t that just like Harry?’ the investigator may use some observed feature of the thing he is referring to as a characterizing indicator of the intended matter. While acknowledging the inescapable nature of the documentary method,8 for Peter, this claim also indicated a kind of death comment. If one was beyond surprise, if one could no longer re-imagine an other and therefore themselves, or if one was living in a community where one was beyond surprise, then is one fully alive to the surprise whoness can bring? In other words, what does it mean when Harry cannot do something that would call on the ‘‘lay person’’ to re-think their knowledge of Harry?9 It was this series of questions that were influential in the Analysis transformation of the ethnomethodological initiative. In the interviews cited above, Peter talks about a crucial development in ‘‘the work’’: the idea of the ‘‘Ideal Speaker.’’ 8
A process of understanding that, for me, Gadamer (1975) has more productively (for the purposes of inquiry) called the hermeneutic circle.
9
Anyone who encountered Garfinkel after a familiarity with Peter could not help but be struck by the influence he had on Peter. As he said about his encounter with Garfinkel, ‘he got it right away,’ as if that was unusual.
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KB: So what did you find in Plato (1945) that helped address what you were working on? PM: Just, kind of- knowledge: you know, the idea of knowledge? I mean- see, basically, you’ve got to have an actor - an endowed actor - that’s an ideal speaker. We got ‘ideal’ speaker from Chomsky. An ideal speaker is one who may not know everything, but thinks so, meaning- I mean, I put that crassly, but you know- who does know. And knows that he’s participating in the world, in ways that might be otherwise. Now, you get that from Wittgenstein (1958), I’d say. Whereas, in ethnomethodology, there was never any of that about ‘might be otherwise’. Ever. ‘Might be otherwise’ - for me, anyway (and I think, for everyone, but maybe not in that term) was crucial. It opens up all the descriptive work to an actor who could choose, and might, as well, be conceived to have chosen, even out of ignorance. Ignorance itself then becomes a kind of a choice, in a certain sense, and so on, and so forth. So that created an actor who could ground his or her own orientation in something other than the world itself- of common sense; it gives you a chance to have an actor who can kind of imagine something else. It gives you an actor with {73} imagination, let’s put it that way. ‘It might- could be otherwise’. KB: And clearly, then, this idea moves you away - decisively, analytically from empiricism. PM: Sure. Sure. So that was crucial - that was absolutely crucial. And thatsee, the knowledge part comes with the Greeks, but then the ‘it might be otherwise’ comes from what we were beginning to see anyway in Wittgenstein and, you know, all that stuff. (Peter McHugh, interview with Kieran Bonner on the ‘‘History of Analysis’’, New York, Feb, 2007, unpublished.) The idea of an Ideal Speaker conceptualizes an actor who had imagination, who could do something different, who could think in terms of what might be otherwise. As Peter (above) says, ‘‘that created an actor who could ground his or her own orientation in something other than the world itself- of common sense…. it gives you an actor with imagination.’’ To those of us who were taught by Alan and Peter, this idea is associated with the term ‘‘the oriented actor.’’ Analysis formulates an actor who has the capacity to formulate his/her own actions by providing reasons for choosing the action, given that he/she could have chosen otherwise. In some ways, we can recognize that Peter was already working out this idea in his article, ‘‘Common sense conceptions of deviance’’. Deviance needs to fulfill the requirements of conventionality and theoreticity. ‘‘To be deviant, in other words, an act must occur in a situation where it is conceived that there were alternatives, and then by one who knows what the alternatives were’’ (McHugh 1970: 152). Here is another way we can see a ‘‘who’’ in theorizing. Who is one who is formulated as choosing an action for reasons, who could do otherwise, and yet who nevertheless chooses to do this action. Analysis calls on theorists to do more than describe an action (thus making the ‘‘who’’ an object of discourse) by requiring the theorist sociologist to take reflexive responsibility for describing the actor named by
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that action. This requirement is met by formulating that actor as choosing the action given that he/she could have done otherwise. As Peter says above, this requirement ‘‘was crucial…absolutely crucial.’’
Reason and Spirit If the ‘‘ideal speaker’’ is one who could do otherwise, one could ask what necessity moves such a speaker. If the actor is seen as someone who could do otherwise, what compelling reason can be provided for doing what he/she does? In the Insomnia paper (1996: 20), McHugh takes up that issue in addressing the postmodern interest in both ‘‘aimless and unprofitable travel,’’ and wandering with ‘‘neither fixed course nor certain end.’’ As he formulates it, ‘‘if a design is ‘no fixed course’ we also discover this to be limited in some way, fixed in that sense–for example to be limited in that it excludes fixing.’’ That is, even ‘‘no fixed course’’ is fixed in some sense in so far as it is an action recognizably different than other actions. Here, the postmodern actor is held reflexively to account as an actor who could do otherwise, yet in choosing ‘‘no fixed course,’’ is implicitly affirming a particular course. McHugh asks, what is necessary about the choice of ‘‘no fixed course’’? Here, postmodern theorizing (as this is recognizably constituted in and through McHugh’s discourse) is challenged to address the paradox in what it means to make a claim for ‘‘aimless travel.’’ For that claim to be intelligible, it must accept that it is subject to the conditions of discourse for aimless travel. A refusal to accept this reflexive implication is a refusal to take one’s own talk seriously, the serious implications of which McHugh takes up in this article. Reflexively recognizing the principle that grounds one’s theorizing means that an ideal speaker must be formulated as one oriented to providing grounds for the necessity of whatever is chosen. For Analysis, theorizing needs to take responsibility for what grounds its speech if it desires reflexive integrity. Theorizing accomplishes this by taking responsibility for the principle implicit in the grounds of one’s speech. ‘‘What an inquiry inquires about (its concrete topic) is not its analytic end, because we locate that end in its aim to create acceptance for its principles’’ (Blum and McHugh 1984: 3). Refusing to address the grounds that one’s theorizing/understanding necessarily rests on is what McHugh et al. (1974: 23) call ‘‘a failure of analytic nerve.’’ That is, refusing to recognize the implications the grounds of one’s own knowledge claims raise for that very knowledge is not just a cognitive weakness but also an ethical concern, a failure of spirit. While this is a charge that was first laid against ethnomethodology, it is a charge that the oneness of Analysis makes possible. As Dallmayr (1988: 9) noted in his review of Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences, ‘‘a further strength of the study–perhaps the most significant–is the linkage of reflection and ethics and the re-valorization of excellence and virtue.…Blum and McHugh emphasize an aspect of moral consciousness that is perhaps understated in Arendt’s work: the fact that virtue requires not only reflectiveness (which it does) but also frequently a good deal of tenacity, courage and ‘spiritedness’.’’ Again, we see a ‘‘work’’ that requires an
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investment of self, in this case, composed of thing one—reason, dialogue, analysis—and thing two—courage, tenacity, spirit. The theme or idea of principle runs through McHugh’s ‘‘Shared being, old promises and the just necessity of affirmative action’’ (2005) and also through the Insomnia paper (1996). In both, acting and theorizing are formulated as affirming principle. In Insomnia, for example, the ‘‘play of interpretation’’ is ‘‘possible as a consequence of the profound ambiguity of the limit [of language]; necessary if language is to be a part of human practice, if we are to enjoy our situation rather than suffer it as a sentence’’ (1996: 31). Or, in reflexive reference to his own work of interpretation in this very paper, he says that the profound ambiguity of the limit of language is also ‘‘an offer of interpretation which needs to be affirmed, of a need which we do affirm as a matter of fact and commitment’’ (1996: 34). In ‘‘Shared being’’ (152) he further points out that ‘‘what affirms principle…is action; affirming action is necessary for principle to make an appearance in the life-world as one element of the common place.’’ This notion of principle will be recognized as one of the ‘‘things’’ that is a shared element of ‘‘the work.’’ ‘‘The work’’ offers principled action as a solution to the need for reflexive accountability. The distinction between Rules and Principles, moreover, is central to Blum and McHugh’s last collaborative work, Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (1984). Principle provides a way for thinking about an actor who, though he/she could do otherwise, can provide the strongest possible ground for doing what he/ she has chosen to do. ‘‘What is unconditional about principle,’’ they say, ‘‘is that it always raises the question of the relation between self and rule as a necessary question’’ (1984: 136). Do we glimpse here a formulation of a life speaker, as an Ideal Speaker, ‘‘who not only has a life in life but now in theorizing too’’? The ‘‘who’’ is not a decorative addition to whatness nor a submerged and hidden author who needs a biographer in order to appear, but rather a ‘‘what embodier.’’ To see the who only in the biography and not in the work is to return to the kind of liberal humanism that Foucault effectively critiques. Rather, McHugh’s criticism of Foucault here is focused on the latter’s failure to imagine another relation to whoness, a relation shown in a theorist’s (Foucault’s) election to theorize in this way and not that. That is, if to understand action, we need to understand what the action is oriented to–and if that action is to be understood in its particularity–then it needs to be formulated as being chosen for oriented reasons. The whatness of the action at the same time reveals an actor who shows him/herself as one who recognizes the principle being affirmed in the action. ‘‘The work’’ calls for a reflexivity that acknowledges the necessary principle that one’s theorizing affirms as one seeks to articulate the principle being affirmed by the action being theorized. Principle, in this sense, is both subject to discourse and affirmed in its subjectivity. This is part of the ‘‘oneness’’ that we recognize as the work. It can be seen in Blum’s Socrates; The Original and its Images (1978) and in McHugh’s ‘‘Shared Being’’ (2005). The ‘‘who’’ reveals a particular (‘‘histories and traditions’’) speech of whatness: as the theorist recovers the principle that implicitly grounds the particular whatness, he/she needs to take responsibility for the principle that implicitly grounds that theorizing. It is this opportunity that is ‘‘joyously affirmed’’ in Insomnia, and, perhaps, it is the inability
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for the dead to take up this opportunity that accounts for the poignancy in one of Peter’s very last papers, ‘‘How the dead circulate in life.’’10 We are now in a position to specify further the way ‘‘whoness’’ has a life in ‘‘the work.’’ Hannah Arendt, whose work11 became influential in ‘‘the work’’ in the 1980s, is another contemporary theorist for whom ‘‘the who’’ became an important figure in theory. ‘‘The disclosure ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide–is implicit in everything someone says or does. It can only be hidden in complete silence or in perfect passivity’’ (1958: 179). For Arendt, the appearance of the who is a feature of the revelatory quality of speech. ‘‘The affinity between speech and revelation,’’ she says ‘‘is much closer than that between action and revelation, just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer than that between speech and beginning’’ (1958: 178). We see here that Arendt’s work has an affinity with McHugh’s more than with Foucault’s. However, given her concern with developing a phenomenology of human activity, it is with the integration of action and speech that she is most concerned. ‘‘In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world’’ (1958: 179). However, ‘‘the manifestation of who the speaker and doer unexchangeably is, though plainly visible, retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression. The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is’’ (1958: 181). For Arendt, whoness refers to the ‘‘unique personal identities’’ of people, an identity that possesses a ‘‘curious intangibility’’ about it. This ‘‘curious intangibility’’ creates a problem for the language we use to describe a unique personal identity since ‘‘our vocabulary’’ leads us to describe identity in terms of the qualities of a person, that is, what he/she is. Thus, in the appearance of ‘‘the who,’’ Arendt locates a tension between ‘‘the who’’ and ‘‘the what.’’ However, for McHugh, the ‘‘who’’ reveals ‘‘what necessity moves the speaker.’’ As he explicitly states (1996: 41n.23): ‘‘it should be noted here that the idea of a who as speaker is not limited to persons. Collectives, too, may speak as interested participants in community, e.g., governments, cultures, social classes, musics [sic], traditions.’’ Where for Arendt, the ‘‘who’’ is revealed by the appearance (in public) of the personal identity of the agent through his/her words and deeds, for McHugh, the who is revealed in terms of what moves the speaker; more than that, it is the way the speaker assembles whatever is at hand—‘‘the ambiguous flux of sign signifier relations’’—to show the necessity that moves the speaker. Far from leading us astray, whatness, when formulated as a necessity, reveals who an author is. In this case, what is revealed through a speech (of a person or a collective) is not an ‘‘unexchangeable identity,’’ 10
‘‘Any circulation of the dead is generated by those who are living, those able to presuppose and to act, and so the contents of this asymmetry in coming and going will depend on their particular projects, memories, reminders, coincidents. The dead, of course, can no longer make their own entrance’’ (2010: 5). 11
Peter McHugh introduced me to The Human Condition, when I was his teaching assistant in 1982–1983. I believe (if I recall correctly) that Joan Allen was one of the first members of ‘‘the community,’’ to start to use Arendt. Mostly, I remember that Arendt was one of the smaller group of contemporary authors whose work was recognized by Alan and Peter to have an affinity with Analysis.
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but a conviction or commitment, whether reflexively grasped or implicitly and even unintentionally affirmed. The actor in Analysis is formulated as recognizing what could be otherwise, and in so far as he/she speaks rather than is silent, the necessity that moves him/her to speak reveals a ‘‘whoness’’ who needs to take reflexive responsibility for the grounds that makes his/her speech possible. While the assembling of whatever is at hand will be surprising in so far as it ‘‘could not be accomplished by a mechanistic dummy,’’ for McHugh, a speaker reveals a ‘‘whoness’’ through the way he/she shows the whatness that moves his/her speech, which when reflexively grasped is formulated in terms of its necessity. In Insomnia, it is the need to joyously affirm the need for interpretation, a need that is demonstrated through formulating a response to the problem of the ineradicably ambiguous sign-signifier relation (the ambiguity that postmodernism notes and celebrates). When one reflects on the ideas and practices that McHugh examined, particularly in his later papers, one sees a concern for intimacy, death in life, shared being, and principle –subjects that have that intangible quality that Arendt refers to in her idea of ‘‘whoness.’’ In our era, these subjects tend to be seen as either private and insignificant or else commonplace or trivial and banal. They seem insubstantial in relation to matters of global governance, the problem of terrorism, or the global recession. In the case of principle or affirmative action, these are often seen not as intangible subjects, but rather as weapons in an ideological battle and thus as misleadingly clear but inflexible. They divide society into a ‘‘them’’ and an ‘‘us,’’ a ‘‘for us’’ and an ‘‘against us’’. However, all of McHugh’s subjects, whether principle or intimacy, have an intangible or ‘‘grey zone’’12 element to them. As such, they point to an element of ‘‘whoness’’ stronger than interest– passion. ‘‘All in all, then, joyous affirmation–love of interpretation–has two parts, or rather one whole from which one part may be separated: (1) Love of the whole body of interpretadon [sic], of ambiguity-artifice-demonstration-freedom-need-pleasure-enjoyment; (2) love of the particular which is the pleasure of artifice (1996: 34).’’ Here again, we see two things that come together and separate, a oneness that is the whole (love of interpretation) and a part that can be separated from the oneness of the whole, love of the particular. Here, ‘‘whoness’’ reveals itself through both the whatness that is loved and the theoretic ambition to try to formulate what one loves, even though this is deeply and fundamentally an impossible task.
Peter and McHugh Peter’s ‘‘whoness’’ was always larger than life, and it showed itself not only in his work, his collaboration with his friend Alan Blum but also in what warranted contempt in his eyes. While Peter was a very civil person, he did not hide his contempt for actions that warranted scorn—cowardice, pitiful requests for inclusion regardless of qualification, banal attempts at peacemaking, choosing to fill silence 12 City Life and Well Being: The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, a CIHR-funded project under Principal Investigator, Alan Blum.
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with chatter—are all examples of actions that, for him, warranted a calling for an account. A failure in nerve to do what one should or needs to do must be named as such. As we have seen, this trait can also be gleaned in his writing, both early and late. In both ‘‘On the failure of positivism’’ (McHugh 1971) and ‘‘Insomnia: On the (t)error of lost foundations in postmodernism’’ (1996), we see a challenge to the positions that the interlocutors that science and postmodernism represent. We note the terms ‘‘failure’’ and ‘‘error’’ used to characterize the subject matter being examined. Positivistic science produces truths seeking to stand as claims that are independent of the process by which these truths were produced. The failure of positivism is not its inability to verify its conclusions or prove its results; it is not its inability to be productive or to even provide some information on the object under its gaze. On the contrary, its failure is its obliviousness or even denial of the ground of its own production. ‘‘Truth resides in the rule-guided institutional procedures for conceding it. A fundamental consequence of the failure of positivism: nothing–no object, event or circumstance–determines its own status as truth, either to the scientist or to science. No sign automatically attaches a referent, no fact speaks for itself, no proposition for its value’’ (1971: 332). Positivism fails because its procedures contradict its truth claims. Similarly, as we have seen, McHugh (1996: 39) talks about the freedom in postmodernism as ‘‘a vast and palpable emptiness…. It is filled first with the worm of our losses…and second with dread…of living through each night and day in thrall to our insomnias…The horrible silence of talk that could never become conversation…. The horrible monotony of a world in which everything is recognizable but nothing is significant.’’ Whether with the positivists in his early paper or the postmodernists in his later paper, his problem is their reflexive contradiction. Whether affirming a principle or producing a truth on the basis of procedural grounds, each deny what they are doing and so are self contradictory through the denial of their whatness that shows through what they do. The response (action) of scorn13 asks the question of why one would want to act in this contradictory way (positivism) or why would one want to affirm such a life (postmodernism). When I was Peter McHugh’s teaching assistant, I came to recognize with full force what for him was involved in the commitment to teach theorizing. Peter was prepared to, and did, walk out of a class if he felt the students were not taking the seriousness of the enterprise strongly enough. His walking out in the middle or the beginning of a class was to serve as a reminder of the seriousness of the enterprise the student and teacher were both involved in, a seriousness that sometimes meant violating role expectations. This often shocked students (and even colleagues who experienced this), but for Peter, the ‘‘walk out’’ was a move in the conversation, a move that sought to raise the deep import of the matter that he saw was being treated lightly.14 Peter could also be extremely funny. He, like his friend Alan Blum, had a great talent in making a point through a story. I have a vivid memory of one of the many 13
In another similarity with Arendt, the scorn shown through McHugh’s writing is not unlike the scorn Arendt shows for almost all the participants, apart from the judges, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Arendt 1965). 14 Of course, some thought to treat a ‘‘walk out’’ as merely a move in a conversation itself treated the impact of the ‘‘walk out’’ lightly.
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social occasions that emerged after some seminar, conference, or defense. We were in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Toronto. Peter was sitting at a table with several students and an Englishman who was a social acquaintance of ‘‘the community.’’ Peter and his family lived in England for a year between his Hunter College days and coming to York University in Toronto and he was asked: ‘‘What was your year like in England?’’ ‘‘It was awful,’’ he replied, and he immediately launched into a story: when they lived in London, every day a dog came by and would shit on their front lawn. After suffering this frustration for several weeks, Peter followed the dog to the house of its owner in the neighborhood. He knocked on the door, and when a woman answered, Peter complained about the dog’s daily routine. The woman of the house immediately called ‘‘Charles, Charles, come here,’’ as Peter proclaimed in his best imitation of a British accent. ‘‘I thought she was calling her husband,’’ Peter said. Then a small British terrier appeared and the woman of the house proceeded to admonish him. ‘‘Charles, you naughty boy: you should not do your business in this gentleman’s garden,’’ imitated Peter, noticing the dog puzzlingly staring at his owner. Peter concluded, almost adding emphasis because of the presence of this English acquaintance, that his stay in England was awful because ‘‘the English treat their dogs like people, and their people like dogs.’’ His craft in telling this tale drew laughter from the table and even a smuggled chuckle from the guest who attempted to maintain a disapproving look. The community that gathered around Alan and Peter saw teachers who worked hard and enjoyed themselves heartily. On social and celebratory occasions, it was a great pleasure to see them play off one another with their great wit, talent at storytelling, love of argument, and most of all, the comedic standpoint they both took to the world and to life. In these occasions, Alan and Peter displayed a banter that was also a performance. While all was subject to theorizing, both play and work had a sacred substance that needed to be brought to life in each appropriate occasion.15 Their shared talent at raillery, banter, and the sharp exercise of wit (whether Jewish American or Irish American) added an intensity to sociable and celebratory occasions that matched the intensity to the work of theorizing each displayed in seminars, courses, and conferences. To those of us who had the privilege of being Peter’s students, he provided a vivid exemplification of the integrity of the relation between teaching and theorizing. He embodied the demand of the standard, the demand that the teacher-theorist choose to do what his/her commitment to teaching theorizing demands of him/her. This commitment was both theoretic and practical, embodying what needed to be worked out in an analysis and what needed to be practiced in the class. Peter demanded that the analyst face the difficult implications implied in a practice and courageously wrestle with them. Peter practiced the speaking that his Insomnia paper called for, showing his commitment through the work of both teaching and theorizing. And while his Irish American heritage, his training and interest in drama and the stage, his appreciation and practice of the craft of the good tale all contributed to a larger than life presence, the passionate embodiment of the 15 It was also a great pleasure to witness that take place again, after a long and severe break in their friendship.
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integration of principle in the theory and practice of teaching gave this larger than life quality an intimidating transcontextual feel. It made being a student both an intimidating and an exciting prospect.
McHugh and Peter Returning to the interview about the nature of the work and who undertakes it, Peter said the following in response to my hypothesis that Analysis cannot be mechanically practiced, but rather, one needs to find one’s place in it. PM: I think that’s a good point. I had never thought of that. And when you started here, I thought I don’t know if we’re going to–if I’m going to understand this. But yeah, I think that’s right, so–and that itself is part of the work–is finding your place; finding your place. Knowingly. Knowing what you don’t know–you know, all that stuff [about] finding your place. So I guess that’s right. I guess that’s right: that that’s a good way of accounting for the differences. I’d never really thought in any detail, until you mentioned it yesterday, I think, about the differences between those- among those of us who were in the work before. But the finding one’s place is probably- I mean, you don’t want to attribute it to personality, although that’s in there too- I mean, [any idiot is] a different person, you know what I mean. But yes, I think so. (Peter McHugh, interview with Kieran Bonner on the ‘‘History of Analysis’’, New York, Feb, 2007, unpublished. Interview 5) When reviewing McHugh’s ‘‘A letter of resignation’’ (1992), ‘‘Shared being’’ (2005), and ‘‘Insomnia’’ (1996), one gleans a ‘‘what-embodier’’ oriented to the need to reflexively grasp the principle that affirms action. In the case of his letter of resignation, it is the clear if unarticulated (because, as he says, it is just a description and not an analysis) principle of teaching that grounds his decision to resign from a particular teaching position. Raffel (1999) has shown that the sociological concept of role needs to draw on Blum and McHugh’s distinction between rules and principles if sociologists are to recognize and formulate the possibility that the performance of a role can also reveal a self. He demonstrates this by way of a casestudy of a teacher who goes beyond expectations of his role (spending extra time with a student who was having difficulty) and so whose actions can be formulated as revealing a commitment to the principle of teaching. I have used this paper in my undergraduate theory courses as one introduction to ‘‘the work.’’ In this course, I have also included McHugh’s ‘‘A letter of resignation’’ to illustrate the case of one who resigns from the situation of teaching because he came to see the concrete expectations with regard to teaching in a particular situation as violating the principle of teaching.16 In a situation where the expectations of the role are to deliver content and grades rather than nurture the desire to learn, the teaching 16
Of course, in any particular action and any particular situation, a judgment is also being made about what needs to be demonstrated and so what is also revealed is not only an affirmation of a principle but also an exercise of phronesis. The theory and practice of phronesis has been one of the ways I found my own place in ‘‘the work’’ (Bonner 1998).
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situation came to characterize his actions as that of a ‘‘reluctant supplier’’ (1992: 106–111). Here, the self (the who) is shown through the risk taken to demonstrate a commitment to the whatness (principle) of teaching, a demonstration that sought to exemplify as well as express the principle being demonstrated. If we recognize the idea that understanding what someone is committed to (what they believe in, what they think is worthwhile) is one important way we come to know who somebody is, then Analysis provides an approach to social inquiry that privileges–nay, makes a necessity of–that interest. The polis, according to Arendt (1958: 192–199), is the Greek solution to the problem of the possible appearance of human uniqueness as a worldly reality. The most intangible of matters (our human uniqueness), and therefore the matter most easily dismissed as an illusion, can nevertheless have a worldly reality that is shared under polis-like conditions. The polis in this sense gives us a solution to the grey zone of the appearance of our personal uniqueness, a solution that provides an alter to the uniform behaviour imposed on modern society with the rise of the social realm (38–50). For the oneness that is the coming together of the onenesses of Blum and McHugh, the question of whoness is a response to a different question and a different problem. ‘‘‘Who cares who is speaking?’ Who cares, ask the futile, because alter cannot be heard and cannot be seen. Who could care in such a world…? Me, Me I say and that’s enough’’ (McHugh 1996: 39). The interest in whoness, in this case, is a response to the question of ‘‘why are you speaking,’’ a response to the question ‘‘what is your (deep, compelling, necessary) interest in what you are saying?’’ This interest is not an addendum but shows itself as grounding what is said. Whoness in this case speaks to, in McHugh’s words, a ‘‘what embodier.’’ The theorist shows him/herself through what is being said, and a reflexive grasp of theorizing orients to the need to subject the whatness to question as a way of demonstrating an answer to the question ‘‘why is he/she talking.’’ The oneness of the onenesses of the work called Analysis can be seen as a sustained theoretic response to that question, through an examination of how various theorists and traditions of inquiry, as well as everyday practices, can be seen to respond to that question. As we know, this is a question that raises the tension and integration between life and theorizing, a question that applies to our life situations as much as to our theoretic work, and it is this kind of question that makes the challenge of Analysis as much an existential calling as an intellectual project.
McHugh: Absent and Present All the same it came as a genuine surprise when in 1932 Jaspers published his major work, to which he gave the simple title Philosophie. A title is often a program. Even this, the most general and seemingly colorless title that a book of philosophy can possibly have, sounded like a program. Certainly it was not the program of a system, but it was a programmatic explanation of renunciation of the handed-down systematic of philosophy, and it was a centering of a proposed movement of thinking in the existence of the philosophizing person (Gadamer 1985: 163).
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The collective oneness of onenesses that is Analysis was publicly launched with On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (1974), a title that perhaps may connote more ambition and presumption than generality and colorlessness. But here too, we have a title that is also a program, ‘‘not the program of a system,’’ but rather one centered on the ‘‘thinking in the existence’’ of, in this case, a dynamic collaboration.17 Analysis is a work that is dynamic. It came into existence through the thinking of its generators in their existence, in New York and Columbia University, and subsequently in York University and in Perugia, Italy. Analysis is a collective oneness of onenesses who come together and separate, now within the ambit of the circulation of the work. Peter, sadly, is dead, but as he says in his last paper, the dead continue to circulate in life (2010: 10): ‘‘Passing is a movement to a secular place of great vulnerability, where the history belonging to what had been a living circulation will represent many directions already in play.’’ The centering of thinking ‘‘in the existence of the philosophizing person’’ is certainly vulnerable when the person no longer exists. And for that, among other reasons, I mourn the loss of Peter. Yet the work of Analysis, a oneness containing many onenesses, onenesses that themselves are composed of whonesses and whatnesses, is perhaps (and even hopefully) both a public object and a living program that can offer resistance to the ‘‘sheer contingent interests…drawn to the supra personal possibilities of the deceased as property’’ (2010: 10). Peter, I will miss you, but I also know that I have the benefit of your presence in your work, which has a place in the world, and in the influence you have exerted, and, crucially, which has a place in my life-work.
References Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1965). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books. Blum, A. (1978). Socrates: The original and its images. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Blum, A. (2003). The imaginative structure of the city. Montreal: McGill Queens University Press. Blum, A., & McHugh, P. (1971). The social ascription of motives. American Sociological Review, 36, 98–109. Blum, A., & McHugh, P. (1984). Self reflection in the arts and sciences. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Bonner, K. (1997). A great place to raise kids: Interpretation, science and the urban-rural debate. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bonner, K. (1998). Power and parenting: A hermeneutic of the human condition. London: Macmillan/ New York: St. Martin’s Press. Bonner, K. (2001). Reflexivity and interpretive sociology: The case of analysis and the problem of nihilism. Human Studies, 24, 267–292. Brown, M. (1988). A radical re-collection of sociology: Self-reflection in the arts and sciences. In M. Van Maanen (Ed.), Self reflection in the human sciences (pp. 24–40). Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions. Dallmayr, F. (1988). Praxis and reflection. In M. Van Maanen (Ed.), Self reflection in the human sciences (pp. 1–15). Edmonton: Lifeworld Editions. 17
The resonance with Gadamer’s review of Jaspers goes further with Michael Brown’s (1988: 27) formulation of Blum and McHugh’s 1984 book ‘‘as a radical intervention in something, call it the history of sociology.’’.
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Gadamer, H. G. (1975). Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward. Gadamer, H. G. (1985). Philosophical apprenticeships. Cambridge: MIT Press. Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heritage, J. (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McHugh, P. (1968). Defining of the situation: The organization of meaning in social interaction. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. McHugh, P. (1970). A common-sense perception of deviance. In H. P. Dreitzel (Ed.), Recent sociology no. 2 (pp. 151–180). London: Macmillan. McHugh, P. (1971). On the failure of positivism. In J. Douglas (Ed.), Understanding everyday life (pp. 320–335). London: Routledge. McHugh, P. (1992). A letter of resignation. Dianoia, 22, 106–111. McHugh, P. (1996). Insomnia and the (t)error of lost foundationalism in postmodernism. Human Studies, 19, 17–42. McHugh, P. (2005). Shared being, old promises, and the just necessity of affirmative action. Human Studies, 28, 129–156. McHugh, P. (2010). How the dead circulate (in life). In T. Connolly (Ed.), Spectacular death: Interdisciplinary perspectives on mortality and (un)representability (forthcoming). Bristol: Intellect Press. McHugh, P., Raffel, S., Foss, D., & Blum, A. (1974). On the beginning of social inquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Plato. (1945). The republic (F. M. Cornford, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press. Raffel, S. (1999) Revisiting role theory: Roles and the problem of the self. Sociological Research Online, 4.2, Retrieved on June 11, 2008, from http://www.socresonline.org.uk/socresonline/4/2/raffel.html. Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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