Anti-Experiment

March 22nd, 2008 Posted in Anti-Experiment

Governor Spitzer’s ordeal in what might have been a politically motivated rush to judgment is, within in the news cycle, simply another story albeit of star quality. Starkly riveting. Large numbers attended it as, like a flooding river, it rose, crested and subsided on its own schedule.

Set in context it comes out of the continuing mass of on-going stories that each of us live daily, snippets of the narratives of our lives. The highlighted figure (individual or group) offers high drama, celebrity, power, wealth, or consequential impact. He gets a passing moment of public attention but is otherwise ordinary. Just another tale for 101 nights plus.

Traditionally sociologists avoid the on-going concrete real event because in its actuality everything is in play. The battle is lost because of the loss of a horse shoe nail. The kind of thing that confounds military science. In the real world there is a multiplicity of causes. The specific relationship of one action to another can only be approximated in the controlled experiment or in some imitation thereof. But I am arguing that the ordinary sociology is in these real life narratives. This is the motive that sets the academics to their theories and abstractions.

For the sociologist the governor’s story is in the realm of the anti-experiment. The method is speculative analysis. Anti does not mean against, merely contrary and opposite. Controls on data collection are minimal. Information available is incomplete and sometime misleading or false. Language and concepts used are imprecise. From the heights of the academy this is a sloppy slog but this is where the subject meets the people.

And it is there, it exists, bubbling like a witches’ brew, demanding attention.

The need to find the language to describe this material can feed back towards the theoretical and abstract. The not-contained-real, the anti-experiment, can be one of the centers of the sociological enterprise. It is risky, possibly wrong-headed, misleading and subject to massive error. But like Mount Everest it is there. Once we accept the task the amount of incoming data is near limitless. Like fool’s gold it might not be immediately bankable but there is a lot of it and who knows it might prove useful somewhere, sometime.

There are other traditions at work, smoothing the way, using honed methodologies that give the approaching sociologist some support and assurance. The initial heavy work of description and analysis of the concrete belongs to journalists. They are the second line (right after the people who enact and encounter the event) and they deal with what is happening now or just before now. The historians follow up selectively later trying to bring together the assorted facts and ideas and present them as a whole interconnected picture. Intermediate are the pundits and the analysts who use and summarize and critique the work of the journalists and through spin, speculation, guess and (hopefully) astute observation anticipate the historians. This is the gang most likely to introduce ideologically conditioned spin or special pleading.

The rest of us, unless directly part of the unrolling action, learn of it through the several news reporting and distributing media. Other sources of the concrete story–word-of-mouth, specialized media like journals, magazines, local neighborhood press, fliers, meetings with lectures and speeches, story tellers. Also the more formal media of books, films, the electronic media producing histories, novels, movies, biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and so on.

Our own experience in living is the most concrete, an in your face here and now. It is at the same time unique and shared. If you attempt to record it in detail it becomes very dense and complex. Even getting word second hand has its convolutions. The media that is bringing you the news from elsewhere is a direct physical experience. Read, listen or watch the media in a foreign language and though you will not get the story you will get the talking head, the print on paper, the sounds, or the package, the mechanism, which performs the magic act.

Sociologists, both academic and ordinary, by following a half-step behind the pundits and by trying to bring a disciplined social sense to the task might make a useful contribution. In any case each event we attempt offers a real and jolting challenge. The threat of error is always present, even when you intuitively feel you are right.

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This post has been a necessary detour away from the now ex-gov. It starts to place the breaking news story within the tradition of the sociological method. I will follow-up with a series of anti-experiments as a test for usefulness in practice. Metaphorically the sociologist takes a turn on the high wire.

If you have a lemon, make lemonade.

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Notes.

*The New York Times has squared the spin cycle on the Governor Spitzer Case by tracking more closely the methods of the prosecutors and comparing them with the current practice in their profession. That the Governor got special down-side treatment is transparent.

*In the dense world of the blog any unsolicited link and recommendation from a real person has the impact of a strobe flash. One is stunned momentarily. It is like the astronomer finding water on another planet–can it be that someone is actually out there? Two of my others by site of the links…Intute blog reviews (third paragraph from the bottom) and Blogtalk (fifth listing from the bottom) in New York Times. Much appreciated.