This paper proposes a performative idiom to help IPS avoid getting entrapped in meta-theoretical dichotomies that force it to oscillate between a phenomenological reduction to the local and ontological complicity with structural totalities.
Building on recent critiques of how an exclusive focus on ‘prioritizing the micro’ may fragment dissident voices and confine them to the local, I argue that the predominant ‘epistemological register’ of fracturing prevents a clear understanding of the co-production of scientific knowledge and social order.
I draw on speech act theory to show how and why the ‘fracturing’ of dominant social realities needs to be analysed as an inherently performative problem. Building on the distinction between illocution and perlocution (proposed by Austin and refined by Butler) to clarify how the fracturing and re-assembly of social reality requires both experience-near perspectives as a starting point for inquiry, AND social-scientific modes of abstraction as two functionally complementary (rather than rivalring) types of knowledge.
I exploit the analogy and symmetry between the production of scientific and social reality highlighted by Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network-Theory to show that social scientific theorizing fulfills an analogous role to the re-assembly of social realities as Kuhn's 'revolutionary science' does for enabling scientific paradigm shifts. To do so, I draw on insights from linguistic theory to show how scientific theorizing provides what Boltanski refers to as 'meta-pragmatic registers' that are indispensable for helping situated social actors to overcome the illocutionary structurality of social reality and re-assemble it in line with locally articulated differences or dissonant values.