Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
thesocial sciences or cultural studies ‘observation’ drags behind it an
excess baggage of ontological and epistemological assumptions, albeit
unexplicated, that can direct us to the origins of ‘our ways of seeing’
through modernity. Three items are paramount: (1) assumptions concerning
the finite and ‘visible’ character of social phenomena; (2) assumptions
concerning the ‘clear sightedness’, that is, the moral and political
disposition of the theorist; and (3) assumptions concerning the manner of
‘visual’ relationship that sustains between the theorist and his/her
phenomena. In large part these sets of assumptions have been subsumed
under the analytic posture that has become both stereotyped and
generalised under the blanket term ‘positivism’. Others before me have
made thorough and valuable attempts to formalise the key characteristics
of positivism, in the senses of it being both a technical philosophical term
and also a cultural disposition, and I shall therefore only briefly rehearse
some of their arguments here. 18
THE DOCTRINE OF IMMACULATE PERCEPTION
Positivism, for social theory, came into prominence through the highly
influential works of Auguste Comte. It was he who envisaged sociology, his
‘queen of the sciences’, becoming the culmination of the endeavours of
positive philosophy. Sociological positivism was, for Comte, the pinnacle of
an intellectual rational-reformist trajectory developed as a response to the
social, and moral, instability that had been precipitated by the French
Revolution. Sociology was allocated the role of completing a supposed
hierarchical evolution of all scientific disciplines: it was to supersede all
other forms of thought. Particularly to be transcended, within Comte’s ‘Law
of Three Stages’, were the developmental stages of ‘theological’ and
‘metaphysical’ forms of cognition (and we might note that ‘metaphysical
questions’ have remained the anathema of positivisms, such as that of the
‘Vienna Circle’, ever since). Proper (modern) scientific thought, Comte
envisaged, was initially to grow out of a knowledge of great generality,
relating to phenomena furthest from humankind’s own involvement, like
deities. Having transcended this beginning, understanding should then
metamorphose steadily onwards towards a stage of great specificity, relating
to the phenomena of closest proximity to immediate human experience, that
is, the law-governed things that surround us.
Such an epistemological evolution heralds the advance and arrival of the
‘observer’. As humankind’s attention is directed more and more closely
towards itself and its immediate environment, quite simply more and more
objects enter into ‘vision’. From the opaque distance required of gods, through
the hazy and incalculable horizons of metaphysics, to the necessity and
familiarity of things-in-themselves, inexorably the world drew nearer and
nearer, it became more focused, and it assumed the vivid shapes ofempirical
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