research notes: breakthrough

my new email signature is a bertrand russell quote: "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise."

the rhetorical truth of that statement would appeal to me even i f i hadn't been living the real hell of it for the past year, but i just figured something out!

i've been so confused about designing a model for my project because at the same time i was insisting that i was not interested in telling an origin story, i kept slipping into the language of origins. this is the curse of the terminology associated with cause and effect. but i am not looking at single effects and single causes, but rather dynamic interactions which create systematic conditions of possibility.

i have always known this, of course, but it has been so tough to stick too it because my training and my readers questions often conflate these two research goals. they are soooo not the same! especially when your trying to create a precise, limited and doable research design.

i have been running round and round on the place of dissenters in my research design and had a terrible time explaining why i want to start with the text of the news and not the action repertoires of the groups (as in traditional social movements literature) and i just stumbled upoin my answer--it's simple--i don't care where the impetice for change comes from, in truth it probably comes from a billion different interactions between structure, agency, and historical serendipity. my question is: once the impetice for dissent has developed (however it developed) under what circumstances can the non-elite voices organized around the desire for new/different policy 1)get a hearing in and 2)alter public discourse, what big daddy foucault called the "moving substrate," through which most (and all controversial) political policy must pass in order to be legitimate and thus publically actionable.

other people can follow organized dissenters around, sitting in on meetings where they decide about orgazational tactics. i've done enough of that in organizations i've participated in over the years and trust me, those kinds of meetings are not where i can answer my questions. what i want to know about dissenting organizations is: 1) if they got the word out 2)how they did it 3)how far the word strayed from what they intended to project 4) and whether (and in what way) their word, distorted as it might have been, changed the tenor and content of elite public discussion.

full stop.

i will not be bogged down by the social movements question again.

(i feel kind of like like scarlett o'hara--you know: "i will never be hungry again!" except much less morally compromised by my positionality.)