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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Use of Social Theory10/04/2007 18:38:11Back simultaneously in the academic world and the paradise of Santa Barbara, I find myself surrounded this quarter by readings in social theory and trying to explain its purpose to myself. Particularly in light of my recent forays into scientific research, I feel the need to re-justify the sense of non-scientific social theory. Currently, Bourdieu, who writes, quoting Edmund Leach: "In all viable systems, there must be an area where the individual is free to make choices so as to manipulate the system to his advantage" (The Logic of Practice 53). This is a start. Most basically, the goal of social theory is to cultivate a mode of thinking and discourse for participating in social life. The social is not a "thing" to be understood in quite the same way as physics, or even the human brain. Rather, it exists as a comprehensible thing only insofar as it is participated in. I have already written some on the biological constraints hovering over social life, especially in highly complex societies. In other places, I am working on that more. The effort of modern social theory, with all its accoutrements, is to provide a means for inhabiting those constraints in the context of a society larger than they intuitively comprehend. Since Max Weber, sociology has been associated with the "disenchanting" task of calculation and control. This is certainly one aspect of such work, especially in the Marxist context, where social science becomes an apparatus of the state's central control. But there is much social theory that does nothing of the kind; Bourdieu, Berger, Durkheim, Stark, Freud - there are many other projects for social theorists to choose from. Still they seem to be united by the attempt to sensibly, effectively inhabit an incomprehensible universe. As Leach suggests, a theory that does not allow for freedom to act and affect basically inhibits its own purposes. Does this formulation add anything to the discussion of market aesthetics that has been carrying on in the last few posts? We can say, at least, that the debate is over a way of talking about action in the world, with the belief that which way we choose will affect how we act. That said: Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" are an important reminder that theory alone is rather empty without the practices that it explains and informs. As we create theory, it must be attached to practices; we have to see what we can do with them. It is Bourdieu who updates this insistence after the experience of structuralism: beliefs are made meaningful in and through practices, which then constitute our beliefs. As a result, I think, it is best to put off further argument on the issue in abstraction apart from the development of a practice. My effort on this part, of course, takes the form of DoNT, and I hinge the value of my theorizing on that. |
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