Date: Thu, 30 May 1996 23:51:28 +0300 (EET DST)
Subject: Calhoun & social theory, pomo etc.


Food for thought? Here's something for your appetite. Use it
the way you like.

Craig Calhoun & "Critical social theory: culture, history
and the challenge of difference" (1995).

I'll just write down some remarks made by Calhoun.

The book itself is worth reading if you're interested in
questions related with marxism, social theory and several
postisms. It consists of earlier published articles and
essays, so it isn't systematic work, but interesting enough
in mapping some issues (identity & al.) in social thought.
Calhoun is historian-sociologist, and hard to categorize as
this-or-that. He is critical of both post-al thinking as
well as of more trad. thinking as (sociological)
functionalism or marxism.

'Social constructionism'

According to GC there is risk " that the 'social
constructionist' story will become a social determinism, too
easily paired with an overly fixed, 'essentialist' notion of
society or culture. Thus sociologists who challenge
essentialist approaches to individuals willingly speak of
'the essence of community' and sophisticated role analysts
unselfcritically employ terms like 'deviance' to describe
persons who do not fit normatively sanctioned roles. Within
sociology, as Hewitt puts it, 'the fundamental reference of
identity is social location.' "

And here's, along the way, is one 'definition' of
'essentialism':

" Social constructionism has become extremely widespread,
well beyond sociology. It challenges at once the idea that
identity is given naturally and the idea it is produced
purely by acts of individual will. At their best, social
constructionist arguments also challenge 'essentialist'
notions that individual persons can have singular, integral,
altogether harmonious, and unproblematic identities. And by
the same token subtle constructionist arguments challenge
accounts of collective identities as based on some 'essence'
or set of core features shared by all members of the
collectivity and no others. (...) Essentialist invocations
of races, nations, genders, classes, persons, and a host of
other identities nonethless remain common in everyday
discourse throughout the world. "

And more on 'essentia':

" The term 'essentialism' has come to be used as a general
label for arguments that posit fixed underlying
sources of identity - essences (a label used by those who
oppose such arguments, usually in favor of some notions of
social construction and/or choice and contestation). These
arguments vary a great deal, however, from claims to
biological constitution of genders, races, or other
categories to claims to psychology, social structure,
theology, or moral prescriptions. For the most part, the
connection between these various 'essentialist' arguments
and the philosophy of 'essences' in older metaphysics is
extremely thin and distant at best. It is an argument about
claims to be able to specify unequivocally the conditions
for membership in a category with clear and fixed
boundaries, and what follows from membership in such a
category. Popper coined the term in criticism of
philosophies that looked to the 'essence' of things for the
'truth' behind concepts.. "

I think GC makes some precise remarks on, can I say,
background of post-thinking, its historical genesis, and
its relationship to social sciences - for example:

" A sociologist is apt to think that the new,
poststructuralist rhetoric of 'subject-positions' and
'enactments' is an unnecessary reinvention of the familiar
vocabulary of status and role. This is one result of the
fact that so much of the most prominent recent social theory
has been generated outside sociology and too often in
ignorance of sociological theory. Nonethless, while the
older sociological approach to 'roles' did provide a way to
note that individuals bear multiple identities, it commonly
obscured the full impact of this. Most versions of role
theory tacitly posited a kind of ontological independence of
the individual from her/his various roles. (...) In strong
versions of role theory, persons might be understood as
partially constituted by their roles. But even within its
own rhetoric, role theory did not adequately address the
complexity of the problem or relating multiple roles to each
other - (...) "

...and:

" Though these theoretical discourses have been very
sociological in many respects, they have seldom been the
product of sociologists. [Here GC speaks of feminism and gay
theory and gender & sex research.] ... If sociology has
suffered its resistance to the largely literary discourse of
poststructuralism and cognate developments in feminist and
gay theory, it should also be said that these
interdisciplinary discourses - and that of 'cultural
studies' more generally - have suffered from a relatively
underdeveloped understanding of the social dimensions of
life and a tendency to see - and dismiss - terms like social
structure, organization, or integration as always and
necessarily reified, totalizing, and/or reductionist. "

And finally, there are some direct remarks on loose and
shallow talk on 'postisms' like this one:

" A curiosity of the appropriation of Foucault in
translation is that he is identified overwhelmingly with
'poststructuralism', not structuralism, and is read as
though he were a successor to Althusser, not a contemporary
and indeed a crucial influence on Althusser's move to
structuralism. [GC obviously refers here to early Foucault
the 'archeologist', not later 'genealogist' -jl] Similar
oddities inflect the whole construction of 'postmodernism'
on the Western side of Atlantic; structuralism appears not
as a movement with a history of its own but as a reference
to the bad guys who came before. "

That's enough. Something else next time.

Yours, Jukka



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