Search

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors' power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour's constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists' practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Stuart Hall's reading of Louis Althusser's main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser's 'structural Marxism', rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his 'superstructuralist' interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser's most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser's contribution to Cultural Studies: 'he enabled me to live in and with difference'. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall's Althusser may be read as a 'thinker of difference' who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or 'overdetermined') by gender, racial or colonial conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that Habermas's modernism and Lyotard's postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions. The conclusion calls for more nuance in the interpretation of both perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far there have usually been only two answers to the question of what to do with dichotomies in sociology, either embrace them or attempt to synthesize them. However, this has produced merely an endless vacillation between the two positions, and a paradoxical constant reproduction of dichotomous thinking, rather than its transformation. This paper works towards a 'third answer' to the question, first, by outlining how the concept of the 'Hobbesian problem of order', as proposed by Talcott Parsons, underpins all sociological dichotomies, and why it is important to re-read Hobbes and revisit the so-called 'problem of order'. Second, it explains how Bruno Latour's model of the 'Constitution' of modern thought helps us to understand the dynamics of oppositions like nature/society or agency/structure, and how the problems with dichotomies derive from only perceiving part of the Constitution, rather than all of it. The paper concludes with a discussion of one example of a type of sociology that does operate across all of Latour's Constitution because it is based on a different conception of what is problematic about social order, Norbert Elias' 'figurational sociology', as well as some observations about what we might do with sociology's Constitution from this point onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper focused on the need for theoretical unification in social theory that was presented during an international symposium in Paris, France in June 2003. It offers the author's views on questions concerning the future of sociology and of society. These questions focus on concerns regarding the specificity of the social with respect to reality and on the relation between contemporary sociological theory and classical sociological theory. The concept of society and the notion of sociology as a critical discipline are discussed.

The article presents a paper focused on the need for theoretical unification in social theory that was presented during an international symposium in Paris, France in June 2003. It focuses on the concept of sociology as anti-utilitarianism and the need to determine sociological ambition with respect to political economy and philosophy. The contemporary legacy of the sociological tradition, the relative unity of fragmented sociologies, and the relationship between sociological discipline and globalization are discussed.

The article presents a paper focused on the need for theoretical unification in social theory that was presented during an international symposium in Paris, France in June 2003. It questions whether sociology can hold its own against better disciplines, such as economics, history, and political philosophy, when the sociological ground in developed is transformed or disintegrates. The development of sociological theory by responding to new questions or providing news answers to old questions and the relation of classical sociology with the decline of the idea of society are discussed.

Orientalism continues to manifest itself in the humanities and social sciences today in a way that is different from the 19th and early 20th century. This presents challenges of doing social theory. Orientalism defines the content of education in the schools and universities of the world in such a way that the origins of ideas and concepts and the question of alternative perspectives are not thematized. It is this lack of thematization that explains the neglect of non-European thinkers and ideas. They are rarely given the same attention as European and American social theorists such as Marx, Weber and Durkheim. Furthermore, it should be stressed that Orientalism is a thought-style that is not restricted to Europeans or Americans. The social sciences are taught in the Third World too in a Eurocentric manner, contributing to the alienation of social scientists there from local and regional scholarly traditions. At the same time, university education in these countries generally does not attempt to correct the Orientalist bias by introducing non-Western thinkers. It is as if no significant ideas emerged from outside of the Western areas during the formative period of the social sciences beginning in the 19th century. There is a need to universalize the canon. This is the topic of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to demonstrate the centrality of maintenance and repair to an understanding of modern societies and, particularly, cities. Arguing that repair and maintenance activities present a kind of ‘missing link’ in social theory, which is usually overlooked or forgotten, the article begins by recalling Heidegger's concept of material things as being ‘ready to hand’. The main elements of practices of repair and maintenance are then elaborated on so as to help establish the argument that, by focusing on failure and breakdown in technical artefacts and systems, their vital contribution can be brought to the fore. The article then moves on to suggest that prevailing cultural constructions, and imaginations, of the ‘infrastructure’ that sustains modern societies, actively work to push repair and maintenance activities beyond the attention of social science. To exemplify these arguments, the article explores in detail some of the repair and maintenance activities that sustain, first, the nexus between computer communications and electricity and, second, the system of automobility. The article concludes by excavaling a politics of repair and maintenance in modern cities and societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article underlines the creation of a unified sociological theory. The author emphasized that sociology never was unified from the very beginning, neither in its primary axioms and assumptions, nor in its political and moral consideration. She identified a facet of sociology wherein it is centered on the interpretation of current events and trends, either at the local or global level. The presence of fragmentation and skepticism in this field did not dissuade sociologists to produce quality literature in this discipline. Moreover, she said that adopting a non-unitary approach to sociological theory involves making room for the assumption that no one same theory may apply to all aspects of social life.

This article examines Claude Lefort's writings in order to think about the 'social', understood as separate from the political, and in its separation, as a strictly modern phenomenon'. Prior to the modern democratic revolution, the collective order was presented through the representation of power, itself identified with both law and knowledge, and referred to a transcendent source. At a first moment, the modern democratic revolution, under the sign of the general will, renders power immanent. At a second moment, it separates power from law and, above all, knowledge, such that three domains emerge, each with its own logic, its own notion of representation, its own divisions. The 'social', in a sense, arises between these two moments. At one level, it appears as an event in, and in consequence an object of, knowledge, once knowledge need no longer be, primarily, a knowledge of power or law, that is the enunciation of the principles by which the latter establish the order, coherence and sense of the world. At another level the 'social' emerges as a response to the difficulties presented by a strictly political representation of societal order — difficulties in no small part due to the revolutionaries' inability to countenance the separation between the three domains. In this regard the 'social' appears as a presupposition that serves to stabilize an inherently conflictual political order. It is, however, an 'empty' presupposition, without determinate content, and therefore also a source of uncertainty. While this emptiness proves a stimulus for the construction of new savoirs, it also accounts for the fragility of all discourses that would speak in its name (social science, social theory, sociology). The article concludes with a few words about the 'death of the social'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu's 'critical sociology'. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through its more recent turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory -- thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the impact of 'postcolonial' critique, it is increasingly assumed in radical social theory that traditional disciplines like sociology remain palpably Eurocentric. However, this important challenge is typically advanced at a very general level, often lacking adequate instantiation. In this article some general formulations of the problem of Eurocentrism are connected to the work of three pairs of theorists in historical sociology. Foregrounding recent approaches to the classic 'rise of the West' question, these authors are probed for either substantive or 'meta-theoretical' expressions of Eurocentrism. Overall I argue that charging sociology with Eurocentrism is problematical, partly due to continuing uncertainty about the status of the concept of ideology in social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]