Recollection of Notes Past

January 2nd, 2008 Posted in Review

We are into a quick and informal review of the kind of sociology we have been advocating here. A clearing of the throat and singing Auld Lang Syne before continuing.

The recognition that a hard science sociology is gone is a moment of liberation from a false constriction. Striving to do the impossible is a futile ritual. It hides bias and error and imprecision. Giving hard science up is paradoxically closer to the requirements of the scientific method than holding on to the insubstantial hope.

This giving up does not commit us ipso facto to an absolutist ideology that we propagate to students and audience. We still want to crack the codes to the reality/mystery we are dedicated to understand. But the code and the coder, the key and the lock, are no longer differentiated absolutely. All statements echo probability. True and false switch with point of view.

Social class is a perfect, if anything social and cultural could attain this state, example. It is a concept growing out of history while contributing to it. In its contradictions it is precise and measurable. And whether and how it exists is a matter of political action, military force and propaganda. In the USA the success of those against the class-conscious solidarity of the workers seems to have been overwhelming. The possibility of social and economic mobility has been magnified into a universal hope. Class struggle from the left is driven to shadows and dreams sequestered behind alternate politics. The middle class is a moral category, including all who participate within the broad moral consensus. Practically, at this moment and against some contrary signs, traditional social class does not exist in the USA.

The consensus, which under the new dispensation is itself problematic and waffling, is still a pillar of social analysis. The reality is, or seems to be until we look for its negation, what we as a unified group say it is. We agree and we act, in some problematic configuration, and behold the one fact we prefer.

A fall-out, very like a plague, follows because the consensus, sometimes accompanied or preceded by law, defines qualities outside the will of any individual as sick or evil or comic or unfortunate. Not beautiful in a conventional way, shame on you. Not smart or too smart, shame on you. The mark, who after all is also within the consensus, feels guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, alienation. The issue posed by the group seems to demand that the individual with the disparaged qualities find the resolution. Grin and bear it. Change the unchangeable–size, color, volatility, voice, and so on. Go to psychotherapy. But what if, even in part, the issue is within the social consensus, the social definition, the socially imposed reality?

The first step is to accept and value the totality of yourself in all particulars. With physical challenges like a broken leg or blindness this is obvious. Ignore the consensus and the public opinion, stay within yourself and who you are. You have the options of development: training, new drugs and understandings but this is not a cure. There is no cure as with some infections and diseases.

But this act of acceptance of self is an assertion against the group and the consensus. More generally it is the dilemma of the individual versus the group. Maximizing the necessary freedom for the one against the necessary unity, cooperation, security and solidarity of the many among whom the one exists.

But dilemma, paradox, contradiction are endemic within the social field and so within the conceptual apparatus that seeks to define and understand–the stage and backstage, the exposed and the hidden, the transparent and the secret, the agent and the private person, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the hero and the coward.

This brings us to the quest for tasks for the sociologist. Isn’t the identification of these fronts and the detailed description and nuanced analysis of them one of our jobs of work?

Don’t we owe the public (the people directly and not mediated through third parties with their commercial and ideological interests and investments) critiques of all scams and manipulations and the protective secrets that conceal them?

Meanwhile continue with the basics, all together now.

Moving on.