April 2015 – Spring cleaning: thinking about Touraine and sociology as a device for bringing into being social agents – rescuing people from non-definition.
There is a special tension in our house at this time of year. My wife purports to hold, in matters of household arrangements at least, that we should ‘have a place for everything, and every thing should be in its place’. Tidiness is a desired state, where space opens out for ‘being’, and we can relax in order. Not tripping over stuff is also to be desired – as is a more relaxing sense of safety when the grand daughter comes round. At 18 months or thereabouts, anything under the size of a cat goes straight into her mouth for some testing, exploration – but hardly tasting.
Finding a place for everything, ordering our rooms and stuff, means that we go looking in corners and cupboards we have not been to for weeks, months or years. We start to look in places much more unfamiliar than their closeness and everydayness might lead us to suppose. There are numberless little dream-worlds hidden away in the darker corners of familiar cupboards. Going into these forgotten categories of older orderings, cupboards not opened for months on end, you discover things not remembered – interesting things you had forgotten you have, or never even knew were there.
And – bang! – there is the sociologist back in th room… This is what sociology is (in Touraine’s model, as I see it). He talks of sociology’s job as that of bringing into being social identities that are otherwise occluded, forgotten, damaged in to other identities, or de-constructed out of reality, or simply ignored (2007). This is the sociology of certain forms of feminism that seek to give voice to the voiceless. Here though I think Touraine is ploughing a deeper, broader conceptual furrow. Sociology becomes creative of identities, perhaps not just giving voice to the voiceless, but creating voice itself – it is a Promethean.
We are not just giving voice to existing groups that have been rendered voiceless (although we can be doing that too), but bringing in to formation, figuring, social groupings that may be nascent, or unknown in the hurly burly of life as lived.
In this I think it is present in Touraine that we are also creating society itself – so as I said in the other blog – sociology is society. For Touraine social reality is conflictual – without conflict there is not society. So when the economic realm gains total dominance and squeezes out the possibility of opposition, then society can not be said to exist. Social action is the conflictual re-rescuing of subjectivity from the totalizing master-slave relation of dominant capital.
Sociology, even in a situation of totalized domination, such as we may well be on the TTIP of now, can still operate – even though his theory suggests that its subject matter – society – no longer exists. This is because sociology’s job is to go look for not only the un-loved, derided, demonized, excluded, but also to bring them into being by that looking a describing. It is unavoidable critical creative in that.
This is what I think is [partly] meant by live methods, and by inventive methods (Back & Puwar, 2012, Lury & Wakeford, 2014)
Sociology is of course not the only ordering, figuring or creating activity going on. Things will always get lost or displaced from our ordering, just like the box of upholstery pins I know I put away her – although I do not remember this tobacco scented candle and this little laughing Buddha head being here. Nor this Flip video camera… Now this is fascinating. I’m going to play with this for a bit, what a terrific little gadget, what can it do? ...
Back, L., & Puwar, N. (Eds.). (2012). Live methods. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell/The Sociological Review.
Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (2014). Inventive methods : the happening of the social. Abingdon: Routledge.
Touraine, A. (2007). Public Sociology and the End of Society. In D. Clawson, R. Zussman, J. Misra, N. Gerstel, R. Stokes, D. L. Anderton, & M. Burawoy (Eds.), Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-first Century. Los Angeles/London: University of California Press.
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