Bell, Michael M. 2003. “Dialogue and Isodemocracy: Creating the Social Conditions of Good Talk,” in Walking Towards Justice: Democratization in Rural Life, Michael M. Bell and Frederick Hendricks, eds., with Azril Bacal. Research in Rural Sociology and Development book series. Amsterdam and New York: JAI/Elsevier.
Anderson, Cynthia and Michael M. Bell. 2003. “The Devil of Social Capital: A Dilemma for American Rural Sociology.” Pp. 232-244 in Country Visions, Paul Cloke, ed. London: Pearson.
Carolan, Michael and Michael M. Bell. 2003. “In Truth We Trust: Discourse, Phenomenology, and the Social Relations of Knowledge in an Environmental Dispute.” Environmental Values. 12(2):225-245.
Abstract
In this age of debate it is not news that what constitutes “truth” is often at issue in environmental debates. States, scientists, environmentalists, and more all clamor to be heard, constructing and deconstructing the “truth” of dioxin, BSE, GMOs, global warming, and other environmental issues. But what is often missed is an insight that the speakers of Middle English understood a millennium ago: that truth comes from trust.
That truth comes from trust, and that trust in turn comes from truth, is the central theoretical position of this paper. Our point is that truth depends essentially on social theory relations—relations that involve power and knowledge, to be sure, but also identity. Thus, challenges to what constitutes the “truth” are equally challenges to identities and the social theory networks of trust in which that truth is embedded. We therefore attempt to move beyond Foucaultian discursive theory by reintroducing the subject as both the product and producer of discourse. For Foucault, the subject is reduced to the discursive relations of power/knowledge. In his effort to free us from the Cartesian cogito and the modernist absolutisms that eventually followed, Foucault lapses into a kind of postmodern functionalism. All is the product of discourse, but discourse itself is no product. We therefore argue that we should not speak of power/knowledge, as Foucault suggested, but of power/knowledge/identity, recovering the actors and concrete social theory relations that produce discourse, and are not only produced by it. We then argue that these social theory relations become constituted (and reconstituted) in particular moments of phenomenological challenge—discursive moments that confront the existing social theory relations of knowledge and their dialogue of trust and truth. We illustrate the implications of a threat to the social theory relations of environmental knowledge through an analysis of one such moment of phenomenological challenge: a dispute over whether or not the power plant in the community where we used to live, Ames, Iowa, is producing dioxin.
sustainable agriculture, social theory, michael mayerfeld bell, agroecology