Berlin, Jameson, and the self-reflexive nature of social-epistemic rhetoric

I'd say one point of connection with what we've already gleaned of LaTour's work can be found in Berlin's appropriation of Fredric Jameson's (version of) dialectical criticism. Borrowing, it would seem, from The Political Unconscious and articles that led up to Postmodernism, of the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Berlin asserts the following:

"The guiding narratives to be invoked in writing history that I am recommending similarly offer this capacity to provide connections while never determining in advance exactly what those connections will be. The narrative and the details it discovers engage in a dialectical interaction in which the two terms of the encounter are always open to revision, the narrative revealing data while the data revises the narrative" (Berlin 79).

Again, this seems to intersect with our discussion of Reassembling the Social, particularly Latour’s overview statements like "the last thing to do would be to limit in advance the shape, size, heterogeneity, and combination of associations. . .the duties of the social scientist mutate accordingly: it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types" (Latour 11). One mutation of the social scientist and his/her "duties" may also mirror the mutation of rhetoricians’ and literary theorists’ duties in a poststructural age: each must become more self-reflexive and self-aware of their own duty and function as "social scientist," "Marxist literary critic," or "Social Epistemic rhetorician" in a dynamic--or dialectic--with the actors / poetics / rhetorical texts being analyzed. Berlin's version of this arrives at the top of pg. 88 when he claims that social epistemic rhetoric "does not deny its inescapable ideological predispositions, its politically situated condition. It does not claim to be above ideology, a transcendent discourse that objectively adjudicates competing ideological claims" (later he mentions that social-epistemic rhetoric is "aware of its historical contingency"). Although he doesn't cite Jameson's influence in this section (clearly he does in earlier passages), this necessary self-awareness of “historical contingency” seems right in line with how Jameson reconfigured the role of the Marxist critic in response to the postmodern condition.