WE CALL IT A GRAIN OF SAND 375And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they’re three seconds only for us.Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.If a world emptied of meaning making is the inhuman one that Szymborska evokes, if mean-
ing making is so intimately bound with the human condition, then why, it makes sense to ask, are
approaches to the study of politics that seek out and underscore the interpretation of meaning
currently waging a guerrilla war with mainstream social sciences from a position of “invisibility
or marginalization in the face of hegemony” (Schwartz-Shea, chapter 5, p. 110, this volume)?
Indeed, dear reader, be not deceived. However their professor-like demeanor and academic
style may have led you to interpret them, what we actually have in some of the contributors to this
book are guerrilla fighters intent on resisting a political and social science that would ignore,
crowd out, or actively repudiate the unavoidably interpretive nature of all inquiry into humans
and their various common and contested projects of meaning making.
As with all guerrilla wars, however, questions of identity and tactics inevitably push them-
selves to the fore. Taken collectively as a group, many of the chapters seem to be saying, “We
know what we are united against.” But, I ask, are we as certain about who we are? About what we
are united for? About who will be permitted to join our movement and who will fall beyond its
boundaries? About what our practices and repertoires of resistance should be?
First, I turn to the question of identity. The differences separating interpretive and positivist
approaches are distinctively mapped in these chapters, and much attention is justifiably given to
disarming critiques lobbed at interpretive approaches from across this particular divide. But I
think it is also important to ask about interpretivists’ relationships with others, such as
poststructuralists, who also share a profound skepticism toward a positivist approach to the study
of social life. Perhaps these relationships also harbor important distinctions that lurk underneath
the surface of a shared opposition to a momentarily larger and more powerful opponent.
Interpretive work, at least as understood by Mark Beuir (chapter 15), is or ought to be united
by an insistence that all humans, everywhere, possess a situated agency that expresses itself through
actions that are in turn constituted by beliefs. This emphasis on beliefs carries implications for the
relationship between interpretivists and poststructuralists in particular.^2 Discussions of the place
of situated agency and belief within an interpretive orientation might aptly be subtitled, “Is Michel
Foucault an interpretivist?”^3 Certainly, the Foucault of The Order of Things would appear to fall
outside of an interpretive boundary marked by an emphasis on belief. As Foucault writes in the
“Foreword to the English Edition” of that volume: