Analysis as Craft

Abstract

A lot of “stake claiming” goes on in defining policy analysis. The landscape of our knowledge is surveyed and boundaries that delimit the domain of each discipline are drawn: “this belongs to political science, that belongs to economics.” Over past centuries, the great empires of theology, geometry, and natural history have broken up, spawning a multitude of disciplinary fiefdoms. New alliances, formed on marginal lands, claim independence: econometrics, social psychology, political economy. Subdisciplinary groups coalesce, border disputes flare, while intrepid basic researchers of each discipline fan out in search of virgin territory on which to plant their flags. Explorers bearing the ensign of policy analysis seem bewildered by this scramble for territory. They expropriate lands claimed by political scientists decades ago and more recently by planners and public administrators. They skirt the edges of economics, law, organizational theory, and operations research. Some seek refuge in these disciplines. Others wait for a Moses to lead them out of the wilderness to the promised land of professionalism. Still others, being more nationalistic, want to carve out a “policy analytic” domain. But where? Establishing a discipline in the interstices of disciplines already distinct is risky; the new map is likely to reveal an impossibly gerrymandered state composed of marginal lands already contested by others.

His mutations of color originated as much in theory as in observation. When one of his visitors was puzzled to find him painting a gray wall green, he explained that a sense of color was developed not only by work but by reasoning.… “He began on the shadow with a single patch, which he then overlapped with a second, and a third, until these patches, hinging one to another like screens, not only colored the object but molded its form.

… He deduced general laws, then drew from them principles which he applied by a kind of convention, so that he interpreted rather than copied what he saw. His vision was much more in his brain than in his eye. (pp. 57, 58, 59)

The move toward a disintegration of the object in some of the most memorable works of a painter so passionately attached to objects is the attraction and the riddle of Cezanne’s last phase. The element that usurped its place, the patch of color in itself, had a history of its own in his art, one that is worth tracing. In the middle 1860’s, when Cezanne for a time built pictures out of paint that was applied with a knife, in patches shaped by the knife-edge, his handling had an originality which has not always been understood. Among the Aix painters it is said to have caught on like an epidemic, and Pissarro appreciated it immediately; pictures like his still life at Toledo, painted with the knife in the following year, show how well he understood its meaning. Earlier in the century knife-painting had been the mark of an attachment to what was actual and physical in a subject. It was so for Goya and for Constable and, in particular, for Courbet who was Cezanne’s inspiration. But only Cezanne realized that in the new context a picture that was touched with the knife should be painted with the knife throughout. He instinctively understood that in the new age the handling was the picture.…(p. 56)

Lawrence Gowing, “The Logic of Organized Sensations.” in Cezanne: The Late Work, ed. by William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977).