Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1976"

Semi-peripheral countries and the contemporary world crisis*

Abstract: If the philosophy of praxis affirms theoretically that every 'truth' believed to be eternal and absolute has had practical origins and has represented a 'practical' value. . ., it is still very difficult to make the people grasp 'practically' praxis itself, without in so doing shaking the convictions that are necessary for action. . . This is the reason whty the proposition [in Marx] about the passage from the reign of necessity to that of freedom must be analyzed and elaborated with subtlety and delicacy.

SOCIAL THEORY AS METAPHOR: On the Logic of Discovery for the Sciences of Conduct

Abstract: The history of science is a history of scientists doing what philosophers and methodologists told them was impossible to do on a priori grounds So today, in the scientific realism of contemporary philosophy of science, we are told that sociology can not be "scientific" except when conducted by objectivist methods Yet, as such philosophers themselves have admitted, their recommended logic-among other difficulties-tells us little of how scientific theories get invented 2

Some distinctions in universal pragmatics

Abstract: One can intuitively distinguish between the objectivity of external nature, the normative character of society, the intersubjectivity of language, and the subjectivity of internal nature. If this distinction has any systematic impact, one should be able to demonstrate corresponding structures in speech, that is in the medium through which the subject realizes those delimitations within every-day life. This attempt can be made by adopting the viewpoint of a universal pragmatics, which should rationally reconstruct the general structures of speech and should thereby exhibit the communicative competence of the adult speaker. From this perspective, the membranes become visible by which language not only bounds itself off from external or objectified nature, against the normative reality of society, and against internal subjective nature, but also, as it were, opens itself osmotically to them. In what follows I can only deal summarily with the results of universal pragmatic studies which have been more extensively dealt with elsewhere.*

Major Forms of Collective Action in Western Europe, 1500-1975

Abstract: Any effort to sort into a few categories the many different ways Europeans have acted together in pursuit of common grievances or aspirations is bound to do injustice to the richness of human behavior. Yet to categorize is a first step on the way to identifying what there is to explain, and therefore on the way to explaining it. If we compare the continuous forms of collective action which prevailed in sixteenth-century western Europe-the exertion of pressure through craft guilds, the collective appeal to a landlord, and so on-with those of the twentieth century, we see a world of difference. In the twentieth century, we discover elections, political parties, associations, pressure groups, trade unions and many other factions which were practically nonexistent five centuries ago. The contrast between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries appears even more dramatically when we turn to discontinuous forms of action such as the peasant revolt, the tax rebellion, or the mutiny. This paper will sketch a rough classification of discontinuous forms of collective action, place some of the most widespread varieties of European collective action within the classification, and discuss some of the ways the repertoire of collective actions available to ordinary Europeans has changed since 1500.

On Goffman's frame analysis

Abstract: Though betraying traces of the Hauptwerk-prolonged gestation period, wideranging secondary references from linguistics to theatrical history, a voluminous file of clippings poured in pell-mell-Frame A nalysis may also be regarded as yet another version, albeit a vastly distended one, of that peculiar monographic form which is Goffman's invention and to which we return below. It is in any case further testimony to the increasing rapprochement between ethnomethodology and semiotics, a development which may seem healthier for the latter, where it means liberation from a narrow dependence on linguistics, than for ethnomethodology, where, as we shall see in the present case, it suggests the spell of some distant and unattainable formalization, and is accompanied by a decided shift in emphasis from the content of social events and social phenomena to their form, from the concrete meanings of the raw material in question to the way in which they mean and ultimately to the nature of social meaning in general.

From “the gates of Eden” to “day of the locust”

Abstract: The cohesion of the white middle class youth movement of the 1960s was based upon a shared subculture of dissidence. So long as this subculture was evolving in the direction of a more intense, more widespread revolt, with broader aims, each successive cultural phase had been spearheaded by an indicative minority which acted out the most profound impulse of revolt within the youth culture as a whole and provided a style to be emulated by those less fully committed. Smaller vanguard nuclei, basically primary groups, crystallized the idealized collective self-image of the indicative minorities into mythical models.

Women's work: What difference did capitalism make?

Abstract: Two matters have been poorly understood in writing the history of women's work: what life for women was like in the household economy of the Old Regime, and what difference the passage into the market economy of modern times has made for their relations with men. Both matters are closely tied to the impact of capitalism upon women, and up to now scholars have had little sense of how capitalism affects women.

Gramsci's Marxism: Beyond Lenin and Togliatti

Abstract: If, in the history of Marxism, the period from the Erfurt program to 1914 can be characterized as the age of the Second International, from 1917 to the middle 1920s that of Leninism, from 1924 to early 1950s that of Stalinism, and from the late 1950s to early 1970s that of Maoism, the 1980s are likely to usher in what may be called a new phase of "Gramscism." This is a result of an international situation wherein both Russian and Chinese communism have exhausted themselves and have found accomodation within a world order still under a U.S. hegemony, based on new and not yet fully developed imperialist relations stronger than earlier versions and immune to traditional challenges. The Second International found its historical limit in the political integration of the labor movement within late capitalism; Stalinism ran out of gas with the industrialization of Russia; and Maoism lost its revolutionary cutting edge with the completion of de-colonization. Yet Gramscism, understood as the strategy of socialist transformation in fully industrialized societies, becomes relevant precisely in the age of cybernated imperialism. Notwithstanding its historical roots in the realities of post-World War I central Europe, Gramsci's articulation of Marxism is likely to provide a framework within which to recast the problem of emancipation in a context where Southern Europe becomes the main ideological and political battlefield.

Ethnomethodology and Marxism: Their use for critical theorizing

Abstract: Each theory and, ultimately, “school” of theorizing exposes and criticizes the theorizing of others, and at the same time contains false or misleading statements. Theory as it is must rest on some presuppositions. Thus, Marxism exposes the flaws and lies of capitalism while positing another world view-Marxism—which it does not treat critically. Marxism also provides a critique of positivistic thinking. In The Grundrisse, Marx engages in a dialogue with economists and philosophers of his day. His theory emerges out of the rejection of their theory. Ethnomethodology can be seen as critique of positivism, too. It can also tell us something about Marxism, as some of its concerns are similar, although the methods are dissimilar. At the same time, ethnomethodology denies us certain information about itself. Theorists, then, question others and not themselves. Theory can be seen as a product of inquiry; the theorist shows only the product and hides what made the product. Indeed, just as the statistician reveals a correlation between two variables and omits all the common sense reasoning that went into the process (a method of theorizing ethnomethodologists criticize), so does the ethnomethodologist or Marxist omit, to a great extent, the process of theorizing involved. Thus, while neither form of theorizing, taken literally, can be critical (for to be critical, one must sometimes suspend belief in one's own theory, bracket it, or see it as strange), either form, if taken metaphorically (and in a way that is “unfaithful” to Marxism and ethnomethodology), can be used for critique. The ethnomethodological and Marxist critiques of social information, as in their processual framework and their emphasis on the thinking individual, provide critiques of contemporary society and an impetus to try to change it. Links between the two “schools” of theorizing would perhaps help overcome the deficiencies of each mode of theorizing. Taylor, Walton, and Young advocated (although they never carried it out) building a bridge in criminology so to speak, between ethnomethodology and Marxism. The advantage would be to enable us to escape from the straitjacket of an economic determinism and the relativism of some subjective approaches to a theory of contradiction in a social structure which recognizes in “deviance” the acts of men (men and women) in the process of actively making, rather than passively taking, the external world.

From depth psychology to depth sociology: Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss

Abstract: In conclusion, I would like to consider some of the common themes in the writings of Freud, Jung, and Levi-Strauss, and to offer some observations on their historical significance. Firstly, all three theorists were historical pessimists. While it may be true that their historical pessimism reflected their class position as bourgeois social theorists in the age of mass society, I think it is equally important to recognize that utilization of the theory of the unconscious itself creates a paradigm with strongly conservative and anti-utopian implications. Their dependence on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is significant. His work, early in the nineteenth century, lay the foundations both for the theory of the unconscious and for the historical pessimism that went with it. His metaphysical pessimism lies behind not only Freud's Libidolehre and Jung's “psychic energy,” but also behind the somber prophetic, cataclysmic imagery employed by Claude Levi-Strauss from Tristes Tropiques to L'Homme Nu.

Beyond the oedipus complex: A perspective on the myth and reality of generational conflict

Abstract: The myth's dominance in modern life is, however, most of all a direct consequence of Sigmund Freud's revolutionary use of the theme to help lay the foundation of one of the key elements of his theory of psychoanalysis. Freud used the widespread popularity of the Oedipus story to substantiate his contention that children bear incestuous feelings of love for the parent of the opposite sex and, as a consequence of the ensuing rivalry for that parent's love, develop feelings of hostility towards the parent of the same sex, a hostility which reaches its peak expression in murderous impulses towards that parent.

Robert Nozick's anarchy, state, and utopia

Abstract: Robert Nozick is a natural rights theorist, beginning his book with the sentences, "Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do." The book, then, is an attempt to answer this question, beginning with a set of rational, self-interested persons possessing individual rights in the "state of nature," and potentially engaged in a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Making scenes in public: Symbolic violence and social order

Abstract: A scene takes place when a social actor rejects the boundaries of what those around him define as normal orderly behavior. Even the most provisional of such rejections involves risk, and the inquiry into the nature of scenes begins with a structural consideration of how scene participants seek to minimize the risk of their entrance by keeping the scene from becoming something more than the lowest level of public disturbance.

The satellite/metropolis model: A critique

Abstract: Andre Gunder Frank's satellite/metropolis model is an important and influential development in the study of Latin American history and society. Most criticisms of Frank have been based on arguments over specific facts and are significant to a fundamental critique only in so far as these prove irreconcilable with Frank's model as a whole. A stronger objection is that Frank's work is itself too general to be "useful." The satellite/metropolis model is, after all, created in direct opposition to the modernizationists' schemes and as such is couched on the same level of generality.' Nevertheless, the real question is not whether Frank's model is too general but instead, whether it is logically possible to move from the structure of Frank's model to the specific situation under consideration. Only when this attempt meets with frequent failure which cannot be explained without contradicting the model do empirical findings call his scheme into question.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the end of wild conjectures

Abstract: The widespread debunking of the theoretical canons and political groundings of structural-functionalism, as well as the equally trenchant attacks on dominant sociological research methodologies, have plunged sociologists collectively, and sometimes individually, into a crisisnonetheless real for its having become almost a platitude. This crisis, in some sectors, has verged on paralysis. Other, more dynamic traditions have seized the time to develop

“Revolutionary” art and the “art” of revolution: Aesthetic work in a millenarian period

Abstract: The anarchist orientation and antinomian life style characteristic of the counter-culture' has been endemic to the twentieth century avant-garde. Modernist art might even be regarded as an enclave in which anarchism has been kept "on ice" and given symbolic expression during periods in which it lay dormant politically. If past generations of artists looked upon revolutionary activity with admiration as the "fine art of the proletariat,"2 an isomorphism in the expression of political and aesthetic revolt also encouraged aspiring revolutionaries of the sixties to look for inspiration to the avantgarde tradition in the arts.

Conventions of theorizing and of multiple personality

Abstract: Reasoning can be addressed prescriptively or descriptively. The preceding analysis has attempted to describe a convention of reasoning. It began with a text on the limitations of symbolic realism that (as a contribution to the social scientific study of religion) explicitly attempted to reason rigorously rather then conventionally and that, in addition, provided data on the convention of interest here: required immediacy. Three arguments were addressed; the first two, drawn from the limits text, made judgments about reductionist and symbolic realist approaches to religion; the third was initiated by the present analysis and pointed out a contradiction in the first two. No attempt was made to side with or resolve any of the three arguments. Instead the question was posed: what conventions of reasoning do they require?

The tally: A dialogue on Feyerabend and Ford

Abstract: Formerly the natural state of man was not what it is now, but quite different. For at first there were three sexes, not two as at present, male and female, but also a third having both together ... why there were three sexes, shaped like this, was because the male was at first born of the sun, and the female of the earth, and the common sex had something of the moon, which combines both male and female ... They had terrible strength and force and great were their ambitions; they attacked the gods, and what Homer said of Otos and Ephialtes is said of them, that they tried to climb into heaven intending to make war upon the gods. So Zeus and the other gods held council what they should do, and they were perplexed . . . After a deal of worry Zeus had a happy thought. 'Look here,' he said, 'I think I have found a scheme; we can let men still exist but we can stop them from their violence by making them weaker . . . I will slice each of them down through the middle! Two improvements at once! They will be weaker, and they will be more useful to us because there will be more of them.'. . . While he sliced each, he told Apollo to turn the face and half the neck towards the cut, to make the man see his own cut and be more orderly, and then he told [Apollo] to heal the rest up ... [Apollo] left a few [wrinkles] about the navel and the belly, to remind them of what happened. So when the original body was cut through, each half wanted the other desiring to grow together in the embrace, and died of starvation and general idleness because they would not do anything apart from each other. When one of the halves died and the other was left, the half which was left hunted for another and embraced it, whether he