Philosophy & Social Criticism

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Ultimate referentiality: Radical phenomenology and the new interpretative

sociology
Peyman Vahabzadeh
Philosophy Social Criticism 2009; 35; 447
DOI: 10.1177/0191453708102095

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Peyman Vahabzadeh

Ultimate referentiality
Radical phenomenology and the new
interpretative sociology

Abstract A brief and selective conceptual glance at the history of socio-

logical foundation shows that a certain assumption about the ultimate
referentiality of society has been at the heart of sociology. The late modern
responses to, and reactions against, foundationalism in various schools in
the human and social sciences provide a springboard for a new beginning
in sociological inquiry. Drawing on radical phenomenology and postmeta-
physical hermeneutical philosophy, this article summons attention to the
concept of ultimate referentiality as the point of moorage that supposedly
secures our theoretical postulates in a presumed locus in the real namely,
society. Given our late modern crisis of metaphysical claims about ultimate
foundations, the article makes an invitation to an interpretative sociologi-
cal renewal with an acute sensitivity toward praxis. The article provision-
ally makes a number of suggestions with respect to the modes of sociological
practice that would render the discipline attuned to our age.
Key words deconstruction interpretation metaphysics
phenomenology society sociology ultimate referentiality

In this article, I shall draw on the thoughts that I initially and briefly
outlined in earlier works,1 albeit with limited exploration of their rami-
fications for sociology. Equipped with a radical phenomenological gaze,
this article enables a critical inquiry about a certain interpretative impulse
that propelled much of sociological theories and methods ever since the
inception of sociology. Due to spatial limitations, the arguments below
are presented with painful abstraction and generalizations, which render
this article only an invitation. My guiding/critical concept will be ulti-
mate referentiality. I will argue that for much of its history, exceptions
aside, sociology has been guided by the operative assumption about the

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 35 no 4 pp. 447465

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448
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
real as True and thereby stable and foundational. This assumption has
conceptually constructed society as the ultimate referentiality of socio-
logical inquiry, a privileged domain posited by theory as a reservoir of
facts upon whose probing sociological inquiry is satisfied. This provis-
ional definition of ultimate referentiality will allow us to detect its oper-
ative presence in the works of select founders of sociological thought.
The arguments are presented in four steps: (1) a brief summary of a
selective conceptual history of sociological quest for foundations will
prepare for discussions on (2) how several contemporary schools have
already launched various criticisms of foundationalism. (3) Then, I will
explore the radical phenomenological concept of ultimate referentiality,
before (4) lastly, offering some preliminary observations about the prac-
tice of epochal-interpretative sociology that rejects upholding society as
a privileged, ultimate referentiality.

1 The origins: sociological quest for foundations

These days it is conveniently accepted that the form of knowledge we

commonly call science is a result of the Enlightenment through which
God as the ultimate source of knowledge was (gradually) replaced with
carefully drafted inquisitive methods of the rational subject. This reversal
of the ultimate source and justification of the validity of knowledge is
best presented in Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy. While
explicit about his task of commencing to build anew from the foun-
dation of sciences,2 he rhetorically retains God as the source of certainty
(or doubt).3 However, a subtle, but operative, distinction between the
sensible and the intelligible enables a division between subject and
object, which in turn reintroduces the age-old question of causality, not
in terms of Gods will or predestination, but as factual causality: idea
(theory) must without doubt derive [objective reality] from some cause
in which there is at least as much formal reality as this idea contains of
objective reality.4 Whence arises Truth as the fullness of objective reality
in the idea or concept (called adequation in philosophy). The objective/
factual is given the status of an ultimacy that holds the truth within
itself, a truth to be extracted only by the knowing/thinking subject.
In the same vein, Leibnizs famous dictum nihil est sine ratione
(nothing is without reason) denies an entitys existence if it cannot be
submitted to rational inquiry into the causes. Many decades and vicis-
situdes later, with the inception of sociology in the work of Auguste
Comte, such a conception of the world, by then dominant in the natural
sciences, re-emerged in inquiry into the nature of society. Comtes fascin-
ating breakthrough that led to sociology as a positive philosophy
would not have been possible without the intellectual and philosophical

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
foundations in the works of Descartes, Leibniz, Galileo, Bacon, and
others. Viewed as the realm of pure objectivity, society is given a priv-
ileged position whence factual data can be derived with the precision of
the exact sciences. Comte coined the term social physics to capture just
that. He founded sociology upon the operative division between social
statics and social dynamics, situating this analytical division in a tri-
partite historical framework that would explain the evolution of the
human mind in terms of its search for causality. While theological and
metaphysical stages both erred in misplacing the true causes of social
development upon, respectively, God and abstract forces, the positive
stage allows the identification of absolute causes that abolish all forms
of arbitrary projections of causation. This last stage also marks the
advent of a new humanity of rational individuals.5 Reason enables the
extraction of facts through observation, while a comparative approach
to stability (social statics) and change (social dynamics) allows the extrac-
tion of the elusive laws that govern social phenomena.6 Similar to the
Cartesian inceptive reflection, in Comte, too, there can be no separation
between the method and the subject matter, but the relation between
the two is deductive: In the formation of a new science, the general
spirit of it must be seized before its particular parts can be investigated.7
Although many varied, even opposing, interpretations of the works
of Marx and Engels are possible, one can hardly exaggerate the privi-
leged position they accorded to economy, calling it a base or structure.
In a well-known preface, Marx explicitly posited echoing Descartes
and Comte that in the social production of their life, men enter into
definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will,
relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of develop-
ment of their material productive forces.8 The point here is to ascer-
tain that there is a definite, foundational realm of relations: The sum
total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure
of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political super-
structure and to which correspond definite forms of social conscious-
ness.9 The quest for objectivity is maintained by privileging economy
and by adhering to a self-acclaimed scientific status for theory. As Engels
puts it, echoing Leibniz, everything must justify its existence before the
judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole
measure of everything.10
The 19th-century approach to sociological analysis by and large
reports a certain kind of critical gaze that analytically disregards the
fundamental difference between the world of people and the world of
things. The establishment of sociology as an academic discipline, achieved
contemporaneously by Durkheim and Weber, set up later the socio-
logical imagination on a dual origination: the positivist (Durkheim) and
the interpretative-historical (Weber) schools are different in many respects

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
and for good reasons, but, at least initially, they were both informed by
a search for mooring sociological observations to ascertainable and un-
deniable social groundwork. Both of these foundational approaches
share a careful delineation of the subject matter of social analysis in
order to reclaim its scientific status.
Emile Durkheims greatest accomplishment rests in creating an entire
domain of social inquiry that would conform to the rigorous pillars of
scientific investigation. Social phenomena are generally elusive, often
unyielding, thus giving rise to various kinds of explanatory myths from
religion to various pseudo-sciences. Durkheims study of suicide, exem-
plary and ground-laying, became archetypical in showing precisely how
social phenomena can be turned into social facts that is, into work-
able scientific data.11 Sociology is therefore the science of the realm of
human reality. In Durkheims words, A thing is any object of knowledge
which is not naturally controlled by the intellect, which cannot be
adequately grasped by a simple process of mental activity.12 Facts are
therefore unknown things of which we are ignorant; for the represen-
tations which we have been able to make of them in the course of our
life, having been made uncritically and unmethodically, are devoid of
scientific value.13 Sociology should thus set itself a realm of inquiry that
is not reducible to political science, philosophy, social psychology, or
social history. But with the study of society, Durkheim boldly acknowl-
edges, there comes the problem of values, because everything, in society,
is considered in relation to man.14 To uphold the objectivity of sociol-
ogy, Durkheim submits values to sociological inquiry, arguing that social
nature is sui generis, that it is irreducible, not only to physical nature,
but even to the psychic nature of the individual.15 Social facts reside
exclusively in the very society itself which produces them, and not in
its parts that is, its members.16 This society is real in that it is
external to us and antecedent to our consciousness. Hence arises the
concept of social institutions as modes of acting and belief systems,
which gives rise to the sociological thirst for wresting true causes away
from the entire edifice of myths that tends to (mis)represent society to
the untrained eye. Durkheim succeeds in establishing the unmistakably
exclusive subject matter of sociological inquiry, but by constructing a
conception of society that bestows a privileged essence upon society as
the exclusive reservoir of facts.
Sociologys inceptive years also witnessed the emergence of a specifi-
cally German school in that it was historicist. Max Webers interpreta-
tive sociology was informed by the concept of Verstehen, understanding.
Significant about Webers work is not so much a vehement effort for
delineating the field of sociology by exposing the inadequacies of other
approaches to society (similar to Durkheim), but by starting from the
existing understanding of social phenomena shared by members of a

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
given society. As such, interpretation should include the individuals
worldview (weltanschauung) as well as cultural edifice. For Durkheim
the already formed structures of acting and thinking attest to social
constraints and social facts; for Weber they indicate interpretative
action. Whereas in Durkheim we witness a vigorous assertion that socio-
logical practice is value-free, in Weber the question of value judgment
is pushed back to its limits, thereby enabling a fantastic sociological
inchoation that is anachronistic because of its self-reflexive character (a
feature of postmodern or feminist approaches). The distinction between
empirical facts and practical value judgments is ultimately problematic
for Weber. In a Nietzschean vein, Weber argues that facts indeed embody
values:17 scientific attitude is but a product of value judgment. Viewed
historically, science arose from a value judgment that succeeded in
shifting the discourses of knowledge away from their dependence on God
to their reliance on carefully drafted, and thus ever-changing, methods.
But this claim does not undermine the objectivity that our profession
tends to uphold; on the contrary, scientific values increase objectivity: a
quest for objectivity and acute adherence to rigorous method of inquiry
(itself a value) can guarantee that our findings are not arbitrary or
products of our whims. The task of this objectivity is to produce
meanings that accompany social life. A knowledge system whose
source of legitimation is external to it (say, God) has little use for objec-
tivity, accuracy and rigor. Webers brilliance precisely rests in establish-
ing a scientific inquiry that is not heedless of its own social origins.
Sociology is therefore instituted as a reflexive inquiry that does not wrap
its findings with gestures of impermeable and value-free exactitude and
certitude: sociology is the process of explaining the meanings that are
byproducts of our actions. As avers Weber, But plainly in that case the
opposite of nature, in the sense of the meaningless, is not social
life but just the meaningful that is, the meaning which can be
attached to, or found in, an event or object.18 The sociologist walks
on a precarious rope, trying to maintain the balance between values and
meanings, on one side, and quest for objectivity, on the other.
Let us, for now, be content with these founding figures. We clearly
see that sociological inquiry was generally modeled, in the 19th and early
20th centuries, after the image of natural sciences. As such, it needed to
legitimize itself, as a distinct mode of knowledge, by delineating its
specific field of study (society), as the real, against which the truth of
sociological explanations would be evaluated. In itself, this does not
necessarily constitute a problem: all specialized sciences have their
specific field, their referentiality. The problem arises when the real is
treated and assumed as a privileged point of moorage that is, in our
context, as the ultimate source that can satisfy sociological inquiry.
Sensitivity toward the status of the real in sociological inquiry allows

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
us to see a certain trait, however stealthy, that sociology has inherited
from Descartes: standing at the risky moment of inception without
knowing the rate of success or failure of what he was about to institute
philosophically, for Descartes the theological underpinning still func-
tioned as the utter guarantee of certitude that is reflected in the mind of
ego cogito. What we witness in Comtes founding sociological moment
is a secularized Cartesian moment, when the theological underpinnings
of the new science have served their purpose; [and] the new science no
longer needs any nonscientific backing. Its clarity and its power are its
more than sufficient, self-grounding principles. It has no need of any
other hypothesis.19 Self-grounding principle attests to the scientific
worldview that the truth of our statement about facts rests in verifiable
referentiality of the real. Among the classical social theorists discussed
above, certain realms function as self-grounding, which due to their
real and objective character attain the status of not just referentiality,
which is necessary for all human communication (let alone science), but
ultimate referentiality. For Comte, social physics functions as ultimate
referentiality; for Marx and Engels, the economic base; for Durkheim,
social facts; for Weber, given his astute awareness of the naivety of
positivist approach to sociological inquiry, a generalized notion of society
(however varied and unsettled) as the reservoir of meaning. They all
posited their conception of society as the true cause. The quest for
ultimacy continued into the 20th century: we just need to recall the
structuralist quest for the unchanging patterns of cultural life and uni-
versal structure of human mind that would do away with historicity and
societal development altogether, as Claude Lvi-Strauss announced that
the ultimate goal of human sciences [is] not to constitute, but to dissolve
man. . . . Ethnographic analysis tries to arrive at invariants beyond the
empirical diversity of human societies.20
The search for a fundamental ground that would ensure the validity
and objectivity of our inquiries in the social and human sciences is far
from over. After all, it is such a ground that presumably can separate
social sciences from art and literature, which brings us to the guiding
concept of this study: ultimate referentiality. But before attending to it,
let us explore a few critical responses to concerns similar to the one this
article tries to raise: can we still keep our discipline without an opera-
tive assumption of some fundamental ground?

2 Responses to foundationalism

The division between quantitative and qualitative methods inscribed

right in the inceptive moment of the foundation of sociology as an
academic discipline and traceable to the worldviews of Durkheim and

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
Weber respectively reports a duality that governs sociology (indeed
social sciences in general). On the one hand, the quantitative approach
tends to systematically employ useful statistical methods of data-
gathering and number-crunching in order to remove the potential
barriers that hold the researcher away from the immediacy of societal
signification. As a result, when abstracted, the findings thus gained are
context-free (e.g. demography). In quantitative methods, we witness
the closest possible interrelation between our theoretical requisites and
the factual data our methods manage to extract from reality. The over-
lapping of reality and truth is thus achieved through a language of
exactitude. On the other hand, there are the qualitative approaches
which hold, by and large, that the process of extraction of meaning from
social reality is mediated through interpretation, which in turn exposes
the inescapable contextuality of interpretative acts. As such, the findings
that qualitative methods lead to, with simplification, remain context-
bound, allowing only a certain degree of abstraction.
The immediacy of meaning, the belief that the social world is directly
and accurately intelligible, and that such intelligibility can be extracted
through predefined methods that guarantee relative exactitude, is a char-
acteristic of ultimate referentiality. Positivist methods have undeniable
place in the social sciences, particularly since sociology is entangled with
policy-making in which any claim must be supported by hard evidence.
But this means that the need for certain methods in our profession arises
from vaster necessities outside our discipline, or, stated differently, posi-
tivism accords with our technological era. This brings us full circle back
to the Comtean foundation of sociology as the science of modernity and
captured in his motto: from the government of men, to the adminis-
tration of things. It was sociology that conceptually founded modern
society rather than modern society necessitating sociology: sociology
posited a fully rational domain in the real a certain conception of
society whose truth can be revealed only if our theories and methods
are equally rational.
As for the interpretative and qualitative approaches, it has been the
case that the mediated distance between sociological discourses and their
subject matters have widened. Clifford Geertzs seminal view assigns
ethnography the task of thick description, a rich and multi-layered
account of the delicately codified and symbolic nature of social life as
observed in the field.21 Similarly, George Marcus and Michael Fischer
announce the problem of representation. Paradigm shifts and the rise
and fall of various schools of social sciences show that after capturing
the imagination of social scientists for a while, dominant frameworks
and theories lose their attempted monopoly over the interpretation of
reality, thus waning in the wake of new frameworks and approaches.22
Insofar as the search for causality is concerned, the subject matter of

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
ethnography (and social sciences by implication) is elusive, multi-layered,
and often misleading. As such, no methodological magic can decisively
represent society and make it (and its rationality) immediately appear.
That is why feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith refuses the simple
causational explanation of human action: an observer always observes
a slice of action of someone else, therefore not knowing the entire
universe condensed in this one slice of action.23 The solution, partly, is
not to exclude the subjects experiences, a tendency in (social) scientific
abstraction, but to factor in, la phenomenology, human experiences
as irreplaceable components of social life.
These attempts at revisiting social science practices attest, each in
its own way, to the problems of referentiality, immediacy and the presum-
ably rational foundation of society. Since quantitative approaches rely
heavily on the positivist-scientific models, the application of Thomas
Kuhns radical critique of the normal science24 would not be far-
fetched. Kuhns theory brings awareness to the scientific community
about the fact that science does not neatly and gradually advance through
progress or evolutionary continuity, but through scientific revolutions
that is, ruptures and paradigm shifts. More importantly, the choice of
paradigm cannot be derived from normal sciences,25 but when para-
digms change, the world itself changes with them.26 One can therefore
observe, with Calvin Schrag, that indeed the paradigm to which we
adhere as social scientists creates a worldview and constitutes a life-world
such that for the practitioners of a new paradigm the world appears
altogether anew.27 Awareness about how we constitute our world based
on the frameworks and methods we choose becomes the springboard
for paradigm shifts of the kind to which this article invites readers.
In recent decades two schools have influenced the human and social
sciences: deconstruction and radical phenomenology. The contributions
of Jacques Derridas deconstruction to the human sciences cannot be
fairly presented here; suffice it to focus on two interrelated points that
have led to major undertakings in the social sciences: (1) the critique of
metaphysical parallelism and (2) exposing the logocentrism operative
in much of the western philosophical tradition. As regards metaphysi-
cal parallelism, Derrida argues that western thought has for long been
governed by a fundamental assumption of the duality between the
sensible and the intelligible. We have already seen this division at work
in the inceptive Cartesian and Comtean moments. Distinctions between
signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept) in Saussure, nature and
culture in Lvi-Strauss, speech and writing in Rousseau attest to the
operative assumption in the human and social sciences in which the first
term in the binary is deemed as anterior, while the second as superior
to the other.28 As a result, the intelligible, the principle that distinguishes
ego cogito as modern humanity, functions as an operative assumption

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
because it takes meaning as full presence (intelligible), a presence (bearing
the stamp of metaphysics) transparently evident in the sensible as if the
sensible effortlessly volunteers meaning to the rational mind.29 Derrida
collapses these binaries by showing, first, the traces that such differ-
ences leave behind, and second, that every difference is permanently
deferred (for which his neologism, differnce, stands). As pertains the
role of logocentrism, Derrida argues that in the discourse of human
sciences, the structure has been reduced to a center as fixed origins such
that the fixity of the center would limit the play of elements within the
structure. This is so because stability and unity are requirements for
metaphysical thought. The play of elements within the structure, a
discourse, disrupts the stability of metaphysical presence. It must there-
fore be prohibited at all costs. Derrida argues that since there has never
been an original or central (which is why the discourse of human sciences
has needed metaphysical parallelisms), there has always been the play of
substitutions for the center within a given structure. A discourse, strictly,
designates such structure as a system in which the central signified, the
original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified
extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.30
We know that anthropology, literature, various feminisms, and crit-
ical law studies have broken new grounds by incorporating elements of
deconstruction into their frameworks. Significant among recent schools
is postcolonial studies, a school that has applied Derridas critique of
metaphysical parallelism to the duality between the colonial and the
colonized, or the West and the Orient.31 Among other things, post-
colonial studies have shown the connection between colonialism and
certain applications of rational positivism. But what are the implications
of deconstruction for sociological theories and methods?
The potential contributions of deconstruction to sociology can best
be summarized in two respects: first, since in the absence of a central
signifier (society) the meaning of social action is permanently deferred,
sociological findings are always already provisional. Therefore, socio-
logical findings remain self-reflexive since sociology must acknowledge
that social life is an ongoing affair. Thus, all theoretical fixities are only
products of our discipline since fixities explain praxis once and for all
according to some grand schema based on fictitious human faculties
(e.g. rational animal) or societal characteristics (rational foundation).
One recalls the application of rational choice theory in resource mobil-
ization theory in the works of Charles Tilly and his unfounded but
operative assumption about human action, in social movements, as the
calculation of costs and benefits,32 an approach totally heedless of the
contextuality of human action and an assumption that has not escaped
objections by several other prominent social movement theorists.33 Not

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
only positivism but also interpretative approaches (including the Weberian
school) in sociology need to step back from their ultimate faith in the
stability of meaning another metaphysical assumption. Secondly, it must
be acknowledged that the subject matter of sociology, itself a conceptual
construct called society, is not anterior to sociological practice and its
postulates. Society is in fact a product of the sociological gaze a gaze
that is not innocent, impartial, or unaffecting, but rather paradigmati-
cally contaminating in the sense that it reduces society to those aspects
or realms for which the framework that conditions the observers gaze
has been conceptually equipped.
The other school that, I believe, holds insights into a new interpre-
tative sociology is what I call, following Reiner Schrmann, radical
phenomenology. As a post-Heideggerian school of philosophy which
advocates a critique of metaphysical assumptions that govern our thinking
and acting and advocated by Schrmann, Gianni Vattimo and Werner
Marx radical phenomenology takes the classic phenomenological turn
in the social sciences to new, epochal levels. Phenomenology is not a
stranger to sociology: it has been several decades since Alfred Schutz
brought Husserls phenomenology to the study of society in his The
Phenomenology of the Social World (originally published in 1932), a
book praised by Husserl himself. Schutz acknowledges his oblique debt
to Weber as well as the need to revisit Weberian interpretative sociology
because of its imprecision.34 He stresses the intersubjective construction
of reality in which perpetual attempts at (re)constructing the meaning
of social action (partly based on past experiences) creates a stream of
consciousness in the (uncritical) natural attitude shared by a collective.
As a result, there are certain basic assumptions which induce us to
consider this world as a real one.35 Later, with the 1966 publication of
The Social Construction of Reality, major ideas of Schutz were popu-
larized in sociology.36 What is significant about this work is the key
position bestowed, quite appropriately, upon epistemology and sociology
of knowledge within social theory.
Phenomenological sociology, however, still remained within the
ambits of Husserlian concern for the theorization of objective reality in
a manner of methodical bracketing (epoch) of presumed reality, which
was Cartesian at heart.37 As such, the retrieval of the immediacy of
meaning was the task of Husserlian phenomenology which phenomeno-
logical sociology inevitably inherited. With major Heideggerian imports
into the human and social sciences in the past couple of decades, the
classical phenomenology itself underwent major revisions. One that
concerns us here is the shift away for the knowing subject (ego cogito).
The phenomenology of our time is radical because it refuses to grant
the subject the seat of ultimate judgment. Instead, due to the centrality
of time in Heideggers analysis of the history of metaphysics, the issue

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
of knowing is pushed back to the limits of time because time reveals
itself to us as epochs.38
From a radical phenomenological standpoint, the fact that the social
sciences in general and sociology in particular appear at a specific
historical period holds an essential truth about the epoch in which we
live. Following Heideggers Destruktion of western metaphysics, radical
phenomenology situates modes of thinking and acting in the context of
each epoch of western civilization, since thought and action bear the
stamps of the epochal principles within which they emerge. Here the
notion of epoch deserves a closer attention, because Heidegger never
used the term simply as era or age, but in the sense of the Greek term,
epoch, which means withholding. Thus an epoch can be understood
as a historical period which, inevitably, witnesses the self-withholding
of Being in a specific fashion. In each of the epochs of western meta-
physics, from the classical age of Greek, to the medieval period, to the
modern era, and todays technological age, the epochal mode of uncon-
cealedness of beings (entities) has withheld Being from our views (hence
his definition of metaphysics as the oblivion of Being), making us attend
beings (entities) instead of asking how beings come around differently
in different times. To ancient Greeks, a star represents wisdom, to a
medieval Christian an angel, to modern humanity a constellational com-
ponent: with the shift of epochs and their specific constellation of truth,
entities mutate into new forms of presence. What is significant about
the study of epochs is that each epoch has its economy of presence and
its constellation of truth equipped with, and supported by, the proper
mode of thinking. This is how layman and scholar alike can easily distin-
guish between, say, medieval and modern humanity.
Given our awareness about the epochal character of Truth, post-
Heideggerian philosophy is intent upon rethinking metaphysics in this
technological age. Radical phenomenology intends to show the epochal
character of thinking and acting: metaphysical quest for foundations
(i.e. Being as stable presence) has historically tried to reduce thinking
to the affirmation of (assumed) pregiven foundations, and action to
submission to the normative requirements of such foundations. Our
awareness about metaphysics as well as our attunement to the point
that thinking and acting are historical-epochal will lead us to the point
of refusing foundations and norms that dictate what is to be thought and
what is to be done. As such, the thinking and acting that aims at chal-
lenging metaphysics will become an-archic (that is, without a founding
First or arch).39
Another post-Heideggerian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, argues that
in our postmodern time when metaphysics is deeply in crisis and when
philosophy can no longer function as securing principles and founda-
tions (Heideggers end of philosophy), postmetaphysical philosophy

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
takes the form of sociological impressionism. He calls for the identi-
fication of philosophy with sociology.40 In other words, actuality, the
subject matter of sociology, reports our present historical situation. Post-
modernity, Vattimo argues, has placed western, colonial monolithic
understanding of the world in deep crisis. As a fact of our time, the
emergence of the new voices women, ethnicities, aboriginals, Third
Worlders, gays and Lesbians, in general, identity politics marks multi-
dimensional and varied refusals against the governing metaphysical
principles in the West. This crisis is especially acute as the technologi-
cal West is conquering the last corners of the planet through military
occupation and capitalist globalization. Instead of homogenization and
universalization, however, we witness irreducible heterogeneity and
increased pull toward particularity.
Refusing the assumption of ultimate referentiality in sociology could
not have been possible without this brief history to which I find myself,
if only obliquely, indebted.

3 Ultimate referentiality

Earlier, I provisionally defined ultimate referentiality as a presumed ulti-

mate ground that we hold as manifesting itself in the real, which serves
to verify and secure our theoretical postulates. It always shows itself as
an endpoint where our inquiry uncovers the causal/rational relations that
explain a social phenomenon. We test our hypotheses against findings
in empirical research, which hold the truth about our postulates. Partially
coining the term ultimate referentiality, I was inspired by Reiner
Schrmann (1987) who uses the term ultimate referent to point out the
metaphysical foundations that have given rise to the epochs of western
history. Ultimate referents are key theoretical postulates that render
phenomena within a given epoch intelligible in certain ways. The natural
substance, God, and the rational subject have respectively functioned as
the ultimate referents of the classical Greek, the medieval period, and
modernity. Ultimate referents hegemonize an entire epoch so that
phenomena make sense in certain ways and certain modes of acting
become possible, even necessary. As hegemonic grounds, ultimate refer-
ents render themselves invisible and as such are embedded in everyday
life: Epochal principles are ontic givens.41 Before their exhaustion, when
they are critically revisited, proximity renders actors almost blind to the
inescapable power of ultimate referents that govern their thinking and
acting.
I use the term ultimate referentiality to designate a point of ultimacy,
a foundation or a ground, that justifies an entire theoretical approach to
social phenomena. As an operative assumption, ultimate referentiality

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
simultaneously runs on two levels. (1) It bestows upon a certain locus
in the real a privileged status and unique power to define phenomena
by virtue of an existing theoretical approach that corresponds to this
locus. The privileged, real locus reorganizes (within theory) social
phenomena and social life according to its perceived logic. (2) Ultimate
referentiality constructs a specific concept (or a body of concepts) whose
mission is to elevate the status of the presumed and privileged locus in
the real to the center of theory. This center, as Derrida has argued,
limits the play of differences within the theoretical discourse, thereby
solidifying the correspondence between an actual phenomenon and the
concept that captures it in theory. Thus, theory produces an exact
conceptual match of the real that it posits. Ultimate referentiality is
thus a theoretical assumption and not a characteristic of the facts. By
rendering itself invisible through this double movement, ultimate refer-
entiality directs theory towards reinforcing certain conceptual grounds
that are simply assumptions. Although ultimate referentiality has un-
deniable affinities with the poststructuralist term essentialism, it does
not seek to merely identify a presumed essence or ground that elevates
a certain theoretical construct of a phenomenon to the center (e.g. human
nature). Rather, ultimate referentiality reflects on how theory constructs
and conceptualizes such centers, while internally legitimizing itself through
assumptions about ultimacy.
Society has generally served as the ultimate referentiality of socio-
logical practice. Through abstraction we have elevated society to the
reservoir of factual things that have been functioning according to certain
logics which our investigations tend to unravel. The act of unravelling
the pre-existing societal logic we call sociological explanation. Society,
in other words, lends itself to sociological inquiry as if the former is
entirely external to the latter, and not as the latters construct. We also
explain human praxis according to the mysterious logics of society. As
such, society functions as an ultimate point of moorage for theory: it
becomes possible for sociologists to evaluate the actual according to
the a priori principles of the real. Such legislative hegemonization is
foremost among the clandestine projects of modernity.
Thus, there is a double edge to referentiality: there can be ultimate
conceptions of referentiality, in which case society is deemed as the
mysterious bearer of Reason, always preceding us, and therefore the
final judge for the exactitude of our findings. But deconstruction shows
us that such a conception of society can only be possible when we
perceive of society as an enclosed totality that limits the play of elements
that do not conform to its master logic or grand narrative (Lyotard).
That is why ultimate referentiality originates with an inceptive interpret-
ative act when the society is reduced (i.e. brought to a discursive closure)
to those aspects for which positivist worldview can account. Positivism

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
is no less an interpretative act than any other self-declared interpretative
school, except positivism has sent into oblivion its own original founda-
tion as an interpretative act: Descartes foundation of scientific rationality
and the division between subject and object are simply interpretations
except they have grown hegemonic.
Given our postmodern, postmetaphysical critique of foundations,
however, there can also be referentiality without ultimacy when society
is deemed as an inexhaustible source of knowledge, always richer than
our findings, perpetually in the process of reshaping its own laws, and,
above all, indifferent to our theoretical expectations. This conception of
society leads to a sociology that is deeply interpretative, because: (1) with
the rejection of foundationalism there remains no ultimate judgment to
which the principles of our theories should conform; and (2) the condition
of possibility of the actual is nothing but the permanently deferred
discursive closure, or, in other words, the actual takes place in the play
of openness and closure, in redrawing the boundaries of the social,
which is always a reinstitution of society. This second point is on par
with Zygmunt Baumans proposal, in his advocacy of sociology of post-
modernity, to replace the concept of society as an enclosed totality with
that of sociality which captures social processes.42
With a radical phenomenological critique of ultimate referentiality
that abandons the notion of society as an ultimate, rational fundament
a new interpretative sociology is born. Let us, in conclusion, attempt to
conceptualize this new interpretative sociology.

4 Toward a postmetaphysical interpretative sociology?

Perhaps the most basic step toward a postmetaphysical view of sociol-

ogy is to push the very notion of science of society back to its specific
historical conditions of possibility, when, in the nineteenth century, the
search for the fundamental principles that govern societies was aided
by scientific rationality and modeled after the natural sciences. This
observation shows that society itself is not in fact antecedent to our
sociological inquiry; it is rather the latters product and therefore a
historically bound concept and only thus changing. Having established
this, the new interpretative sociology makes fresh departures in theory
and method, of which I will briefly discuss five aspects due to page limits.
First, the new sociology insists on a distinction between the real and
the actual. A certain conception of the real has always exploited reality
as an undeniable source of (dis)proof. Since interpretative sociology
treats every sociological concept only as yet another interpretation, it
submits such monolithic and unchanging conceptions of the real to
scrutiny. But it does not jettison reality either. Instead, interpretative

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
sociology subjects the real to the test of the actual. Here actuality is
taken in a Heideggerian fashion: actualization hides possibilities. A phen-
omenons actual presence covers over its many possible and unrealized
forms of presence. Actuality is therefore only one mode among a phenom-
enons many possible modes of presence and cannot be simply reduced
to the real as a closed, rational entity. Thus, strictly speaking, actuality
takes conceptual precedence over reality. This conception of actuality
allows us to treat reality as utterly open, an ever-changing process, which
presents not only actualities but also the unactualized possibilities.
Second, and as a result, the new interpretative sociology is future-
oriented, because it identifies with emergent modes of thinking and acting
beyond our modern, technological and metaphysical boundaries. Inter-
pretative sociology acutely heeds its own historical conditions and acts
based on sensitivity toward the fall of grand narratives. My earlier
provocative and action-oriented designation for this sociological view, the
sociology of possibilities,43 captures just that: Higher than actuality
stands possibility.44 By liquidating ultimacies that govern sociological
theory and methods, the new sociology prepares for the possibilities that
our postmodern historical junction may reveal. One must understand the
Heideggerian concept of history properly to appreciate my advocacy of
possibilities. He plays with the words Geschichte (history) and Geschick
(destiny): history alludes to past actualizations (closures) while holding
future possibilities (openings).
Third, futurity is the reason why the interpretative sociology is
action-oriented. Sociology has a tendency to study patterns, systems,
structures, trends, paradigms all of them expressing closure. By contrast,
the sociology of possibilities seeks openings and thus heeds the develop-
ing ways out of the existing systemic closures. Our present situation
in which actual cultural plurality and the emergence of new social move-
ments (womens, gay, aboriginal, ethnic minorities, etc.) challenge uni-
versal models and unilinear notion of progress necessitates sociology
to have Janus face: retrospectively, the new sociology subjects the
existing social structures and institutions as well as universal models
(these sedimentations of past particular actualizations) to historical
interpretation. Prospectively, new interpretative sociology identifies the
possibilities that the actual, existing institutions and structures have
concealed. One can only observe a social phenomenon before its actu-
alization through acute sensitivity toward action, or, strictly, praxis. So
much so that the main component of the sociology of possibility is
praxiology. The new interpretative sociology seeks those paradigm shifts
in human praxis that can capture the changing nature of our acting and
thinking.
The concept of praxiology (obviously different from what Luc
Wacquant advocates45) deserves a closer attention because praxiology

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
is caught between metaphysics and postmetaphysics. It relies on the
actual to uncover the possible through human action. Since the notion
of unilinear and monological progress is no longer held valid, modes of
societal development are to be understood as plural, diverse and context-
specific. The sociology of possibilities is therefore still grounded in
empirical research, but now empirical findings are regarded as bound
by our epoch. Thus a ground can no longer reveal the logic of action.
Only by taking action qua action into sociological analysis can sociol-
ogy attune itself to the new without submitting to the lures of ultimacy.46
Action is the site where the epochal code reveals itself. As unfolding
modes of practice that reveal new modes of intelligibility about social
life, action allows us to see how society transforms through creative
thoughts. Action is always situated in the existing social conditions but
has the capacity to break away, if only partially, with the dominant
norms and logics of the existing social structures and institutions. This
would be the beginning of a sociological gaze that does not regard social
movements as expressive types of action proper to presumed social
conditions; rather, this new sociology deems social movements and
actors as genuinely institutive of social life, which, to repeat a point, is
always epochal and historical.
Ironically, praxiology situates sociology in a place historically com-
parable to sociologys origins, when Comte created sociology to found
modern society. Now, the sociology of possibilities seeks to advocate a
postmetaphysical social organization. That irony itself is part of our
historical juncture as we both confirm and refuse the past (just like my
oblique loyalty to the sociological tradition!).
Fourth, the new interpretative sociology brings epistemology to the
fore. Since, as discussed, it is no longer possible to validate our findings
according to the dictates of universal principles, the epistemological
question becomes part and parcel of every sociological claim. The new
interpretative sociology has certain affinities with Sandra Hardings re-
formulating the question of validity through standpoint epistemology,47
while pushing the standpoints of the subject back against this historical
context of late modernity and responses to the crises of foundational-
ism. In our time when diversity reveals itself as an actuality, cultural
plurality and consensus replace universal validity and gestures of normal
science. Our findings remain provisional because the very methods of
validity are without exception interpretative. What the new interpreta-
tive sociology adds to standpoint theory is a historical analysis of the
origins of the processes that lead to experience as the basis of standpoint.
Moreover, since standpoints are inevitably historical, they are future-
oriented. The new interpretative sociology sets itself the mandate of
exploring the possible futurities of experiences and the standpoints they
ensue.

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Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
Lastly, a work of new interpretative sociology moves away from the
cut-and-dry prose that dominates much of sociological works (just like
the one used here!). Instead of finding an expression that would match
objective reality, a certain tendency toward creative writing will surface
in interpretative sociology: while the new sociology retains the referen-
tiality of the actual, it is self-conscious about its own narrative con-
struction. In fact, interpretative sociological writing adopts the genre of
autobiography because: (1) an autobiography acknowledges the position
of its author/narrator; (2) in autobiography, referentiality is specific but
not ultimate; (3) autobiography builds its narrative according to a
heightened sensitivity toward contexts in which events have taken place;
(4) an autobiographical account shows how certain decisions have been
made under determinate circumstances, while it reflexively alludes to the
possible decisions (even potentially better ones) that have been missed.
Reflexive sociology, of course, is hardly new, but in this invitation this
reflexivity is specifically tied to a conception of time as history and thus
to the futurity of acting and thinking. The autobiographical genre, there-
fore, presents a closely knit account of actuality, while offering possi-
bilities through reflection the paths that, although never taken, could
have been life-altering. The new interpretative sociology, then, finds a
writing style that is appropriate for our historical junction.

University of Victoria, Canada

PSC

Notes
1 See: Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Critique of Ultimate Referentiality in the Social
Movement Theory of Alberto Melucci, Canadian Journal of Sociology
26(4) (December 2001): 61133; Peyman Vahabzadeh, Articulated Experi-
ences: Toward A Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Move-
ments (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), ch. 7; Peyman
Vahabzadeh, Technological Liberalism and the Anarchic Actor, in Ian Angus
(ed.), Anarcho-Modernism: Toward A New Critical Theory (Vancouver:
Talon Books, 2001), pp. 34150.
2 Ren Descartes, Key Philosophical Writings, ed. E. Chvez-Arvizo (Hert-
fordshire: Wordsworth, 1997), p. 134.
3 ibid., p. 149.
4 ibid., p. 153.
5 See Auguste Comte, Social Statics and Social Dynamics: The Theory of
Order and the Theory of Progress (Albuquerque, NM: American Classical
College Press, 1984).
6 Auguste Comte, The Positive Study of Social Phenomena (Albuquerque,
NM: American Classical College Press, 1984), p. 88.

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464
Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (4)
7 ibid., p. 69.
8 Karl Marx, Marx on the History of His Opinions, in Robert C. Tucker
(ed.) The MarxEngels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 4.
9 ibid.
10 Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian or Scientific, in Tucker (ed.) The
MarxEngels Reader, p. 683.
11 Emile Durkheim, Selected Writings, ed. A. Giddens (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972), p. 51.
12 ibid., p. 58.
13 See ibid., p. 59.
14 ibid., p. 61.
15 ibid., p. 62.
16 ibid., p. 69.
17 Max Weber, Value Judgment in Social Science, in W. G. Runciman (ed.)
Weber: Selections in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977), p. 77.
18 Max Weber, The Concept of Following a Rule, in Runciman (ed.)
Weber: Selections in Translation, p. 107.
19 James Barry Jr, Measure of Science: Theological and Technological Impulses
in Early Modern Thought (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1996), p. 179.
20 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), p. 247.
21 Clifford Geertz, Thick Description, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 330.
22 George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology As Cultural
Critique: An Experiment in the Human Sciences (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 716.
23 Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), pp. 11920.
24 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1962).
25 ibid., p. 109.
26 ibid., p. 111.
27 Calvin O. Schrag, Radical Reflection and the Origin of the Human Sciences
(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1980), pp. 667.
28 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 63, 105, 1445.
29 ibid., p. 73.
30 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1978), p. 280.
31 See: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and London:
Routledge, 1994); Donna Landry and Gerald M. MacLean (eds) The Spivak
Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); Gayatri Chakravorti
Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London:
Methuen); Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpreta-
tion of Culture (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988),

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 465
Vahabzadeh: Ultimate referentiality
pp. 271313; Gayatri Chakarvorti Spivak, Subaltern Studies: Decon-
structing Historiography, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (eds) Selected
Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 332;
Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,
Dialogues, ed. S. Harasym (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
32 Charles Tilly, Models and Realities of Popular Collective Action, Social
Research 52(4) (1985): 71847.
33 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual
Needs in Contemporary Society, ed. John Keane and Paul Mier (London:
Hutchinson Radius, 1989); Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective
Action in the Information Age (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996); Alain Touraine, Return of the Actor: Social Theory in
Postindustrial Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
34 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. xxxi.
35 Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. IV, ed. H. Wagner, G. Psathas and
F. Kersten (Dordrecht and Boston. MA: Kluwar Academic Publishers,
1996), p. 36.
36 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality:
A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966).
37 See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomen-
ology (Dordrecht and Boston, MA: Kluwar Academic Publishers, 1950);
see also Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcen-
dental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
38 See Reiner Schrmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to
Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 467.
39 See: ibid., p. 1; also: Vahabzadeh, Technological Liberalism, pp. 3423.
40 Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law, ed.
Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 5; see also
Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992).
41 Schrmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, p. 81.
42 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (New York and London:
Routledge, 1992), p. 190.
43 Vahabzadeh, Articulated Experience, ch. 7.
44 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962),
p. 63.
45 Loc J. D. Wacquant, Toward a Social Praxeology: the Structure and Logic
of Bourdieus Sociology, in Pierre Bourdieu and Loc J. D. Wacquant, An
Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1992), pp. 159.
46 Vahabzadeh, Articulated Experiences, ch. 7.
47 Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms,
and Epistemologies (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1998).

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