Dear friends of Sociologicamente , readers, and fellow sociologists, this is unfortunately my last contribution to this fine publication. The reason is the excessive amount of commitments I'm currently burdened with. Work, of course, but also my choice to dedicate myself (almost) full time to political activism . So, between research reports, blogs and vlogs, discussions with less-than-proactive clients, reflections on method, and so on, I'm doing too much (and therefore doing poorly?) with respect to my energy and time. I'm deeply saddened because Sociologicamente is a wonderful undertaking that I will continue to feel " mine ," if you'll pardon my familiarity, even if I continue to read it but not contribute. But I won't leave you with just a goodbye. Or rather: the goodbye is now argued methodologically (or rather, for the more sophisticated: epistemologically but—and here I exaggerate—I dare say ontologically...).
Anyone who has read my previous contributions will have grasped the overall spirit, the epistemological framework (this one, yes) that we can summarise as follows:
+ everything is language (ordinary);
+ the data – understood as numbers – and therefore all the rhetoric about the indicators, are for the most part the object of sensational misunderstandings that tend to overestimate them the meaning and the importance;
+ Social research includes all the uncertainties and vagueness of ordinary language, plus all the flaws of a "method" that—having positivist origins—claims to be objective (no one dares say so anymore, but it's an afterthought) but is instead essentially random; think of all the qualitative techniques, without exception; and if you're a fan of (so-called) quantitative ones, the uncertainties and vagueness shift (not even that much), but the result remains unchanged...
If you were to proceed down this path, I warn you, you would find yourself entangled in contradictions with no way out, in inextricable labyrinths that would make the hermeneutic circle seem like kindergarten material! Because, obviously, by continuing down this path, you arrive at a sort of methodological solipsism where you can only see, feel, and experience without being able to measure, certify, or determine, which would seem to render sociological work useless, indeed, impossible.
I'm sure the most methodologically organized readers are shaking in their seats thinking about the libraries of wonderful sociological research, from The Suicides onward. And they would be right: there are indeed tons of studies that demonstrate contradictions between generations, that women are economically subordinate to men, that society is becoming secularized, and that pro-European sentiment is weakening… Wonderful discoveries! Sociology, I hope you'll agree, doesn't discover social phenomena but describes them , perhaps brilliantly, perhaps with evocative labels ('social anomie', 'liquid society', etc.), but it doesn't have the ability to measure them. Thank goodness, people aren't molecules, and sociologists don't deal with constants!
The sociology towards which I am moving, and towards which I have accompanied you with twenty episodes of this column, is a sociology that is based on method , but it is a method that finds itself unable to do anything other than experiment in situation, a pragmatic sociology (in the sense of a pragmatics of language), a comprehensive sociology because it is participatory, and therefore valid always and only in the here and now.
What does this long rant have to do with my commitment as an activist? A great deal. Everything. The sociologist is a critical intellectual . His role is not to measure something but to bear witness to it. The sociologist—this useless and wonderful profession—is par excellence an observer of his time and, as an intellectual, he cannot help but desire change in the social conditions—which he knows how to interpret because he has the tools—that generate pain, inequality, ineffectiveness, anomie, loneliness...
As long as methodological work is filtered by data matrices, the sociologist will see (false) numbers and not (real, living) people; as long as it is based on a plethora of silly focus groups, the preoccupation with method (recruiting the right participants, conducting the meeting according to the rules) will be excessive, and relationships will be lost. And so on.
After 45 years of using the method, I've come to the conclusion that truly mastering the social research method means, ultimately (note! Only "ultimately"), freeing oneself from it; scrutinizing the world and critically witnessing it; immersing oneself in it; wanting to change it. Or, at least, that's what happened to me, and this epiphany has led me to become, for several months now, overwhelmingly an activist.
Look for me around…
Best wishes to all of you.
Claudio Bezzi
