Incommensurability
Perhaps the problem that I am facing towards the middle, and leading up to the end, of the dissertation in trying to connect two ideas might be a problem of incommensurability. The idea of democratic centralism as a way of organizing is integral to the project because the SMO (social movement organization) I am working with has clearly adopted the Leninst style of organizing from the Communist Party to which it is affiliated. However, de Certeau’s ideas aren’t integral to this case. They sort of help me think through how SMOs work much better than “democratic centralism” does. But that isn’t this project and hence must be left for exploration in a different paper/ project.
Hence, disentangling is good. With me a part of the problem of writing clearly requires disentangling my messy brain. Yowzers! For this project, it’s going to be let’s think through this movement between ideology and structure (that is, organizing) using the case and the vocabulary of democratic centralism and what it stands to mean in this context. Period.
But…
I also end up wondering how do anthropologists do this movement(!)/dance between different frames/vocabularies of thinking in their writing? What am I missing? Both de Certeau’s framework and the language of democratic centralism give us a way of thinking about the relationship between ideology and structure (i. e., organizing). Some answers could be: (1) They are thinking at two different times about this relationship (2) They are addressing two different concerns about the movement- one seems to be focused more on the vanguard and its ideology, the other on “masses,” for lack of a better term, and their insertions into the ideology. But they both of them seem to help me understand and describe the SMO I am engaging with, which is why I can’t give either one up.
Well, I guess I’ll just go back to writing and hope for things to work themselves out. Because the most annoying thing would be to say that these two ideas come from two sociologically different paradigms and leave it at that. Shouldn’t be able to, using my case, do something about that exact incommensurability, whatever it entails! Why else did I sweat it out in the fucking field?! What’s the point of collecting any evidence/experience/data?
Filed under: Work, Writing | 2 Comments
sounds like a complex issue! hope you sort it out. Sometimes too much theorising leads to endless dead-ends, if such a thing is possible lol.
and maybe the deepest issue that what has ‘happened’ is not subject to today’s analysis; ie the motivations and the methods are only comprehensible (or deeply understood) by those at the time. Through the lens of history and documentation we are only grasping things second hand; a faint image of a fast moving object.
life.
gee, someone reads my blog! thanks ggw_bach. i tend to forget that lesson.