On The Coming End Of Sociology Frederic Vandenberg Hefederal

On The Coming End Of Sociologyfrederic Vandenberghefederal Universi

On The Coming End of Sociology FREÌDEÌRIC VANDENBERGHE Federal University of Rio de Janeiro STEPHAN FUCHS University of Virginia WE BOTH PARTICIPATED at the ISA World Conference in Sociology in Toronto in 2018 and arrived more or less at the same conclusion as the Future Theory Panel that preceded it: We’ve changed epoch. Sociology is gone. Not that sociology is gone as an academic operation or disciplinary organization. But the field has, for quite some time now, been losing its substance, core, and identity, rendering it hollow and shallow, ready to be probed with a Nietzschean hammer. Exactly a century ago, Paul ValeÌry opened his reflections on the crisis of the spirit, with the words: “We, civilizations, we know by now that we’re mortal.” Like Nineveh, Elam, and Babylon, disciplines come and go.

Sociology emerged in the nineteenth century as a self-reflection and self-observation of metropolitan modernity and Western civilization. It came into being during the first wave of modern globalization (1850 to 1914), contributed actively to the second wave (1914 to 1989), but will probably not survive the third wave (1989 to 2050). Like phrenology and Orientalism, metaphysics and aesthetics, sociology has reached its end. In this ending, sociology has played a major part itself, since it has stood by watching its domain be invaded and absorbed by scores of other fields and intellectual movements, from rational choice to poststructuralism. It has become difficult to draw any lines between sociology and journalism.

Like everything else in polarized societies, the field has also become a battleground of advocacy, shaped and usurped by the ideological politics of social movements in a way no mathematics or astronomy would. One result is specialization to the point where it is no longer recognizable what the specialty is a specialty of. Next to all special sociologies (RC1: military sociology, RC2: economic sociology... RC 56: historical sociology, RC 57: visual sociology), we now also have poetic sociology, cultural sociology, analytic sociology, and public sociology with more general ambitions.

What makes any and all of these sociologies “sociology” is no longer in question. This question is not about titles and labels. It is about what our field is in its core. Just think: if one practices sociology as poetic sociology, would the opposite be “epic” sociology? If cultural, then also a-cultural? If analytic, then also synthetic? If public, then private? There is no good way to decide, and we should therefore avoid observing ourselves in the way of such distinctions. During the reign of the “orthodox consensus” in U.S. sociology, the discipline’s core was organizations and stratification. Is there another possibility for a core, an identity, for sociology?

Bourdieu has become the new hegemon, but concerns about class and domination are no longer the prerogative of sociology. Although the triad of field, habitus and symbolic violence is always and everywhere applicable, it only represents “a particular case of the possible.” As a critical inversion of functionalism, with its dialectics of internalization and exteriorization or socialization and domination, it somehow remains tied to the 1970s. The theories of late modernity (Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, but also Castells, Boltanski, and Sassen) that succeeded it have themselves largely been superseded by accelerating, intersecting processes of social destructuration, deconstruction, deinstitutionalization, desocialization, and individualization—to the point that we do not know anymore if the concepts of society, the social, the individual, and socialization are still valid after 2001, 2008, and 2016.

If one takes them away from the sociological arsenal, domination possibly remains as the only contender. But if that’s the case, then sociology vanishes, because like power, domination is everywhere and there’s no reason to think that sociology will be able to monopolize and hegemonize (dominate?) the social sciences. The question of the future of theory is therefore not only a timely, but also a critical one for sociology. If sociology is to retain its relevance, it will have to renegotiate its relation to the old social sciences and the new humanities. The ongoing erosion of sociology’s intellectual core and substance does not mean there will not be another world conference.

Nor that the discipline, along with its practitioners, will be eradicated from academic programs or institutions, or disappear altogether from the curriculum (as happened in Japan). Rather, it means that, as a discipline, sociology is no longer up to its task of “conceptually grasping its own time” (Hegel). Nor does it seem to know anymore how to examine itself in its own, that is, sociological terms. To be able to account for itself in and on its own terms is rare, for any science. Physics cannot do it, as physics is nothing physical. Biology cannot observe itself in biological terms, since it does not consist of molecules, cells, or organisms. Darwinism is not the result of natural selection, and becoming an economist is not a matter of rational choice. But sociology can account for itself in its own terms. It should be, but is not, able and willing to consider the consequences of being a self-referential observer.

At the conference, we were struck by the absence of any grand theory. The only theory worthy of this label, Luhmann’s systems theory, continues to be largely ignored or misunderstood as an AGIL-type Parsonsian classification and ordering apparatus. We had the impression that routine and normal science practitioners, working, as they unfailingly keep doing, on narrow puzzles within closed horizons, and unfazed apparently by what is occurring in their larger field, were not intellectuals. In turn, the intellectuals, denouncing Eurocentrism, racism, and other conceptual genocides, not on sociological, but ideological grounds, were disconnected from some of the more promising developments in sociology, such as relational sociology, pragmatism, and phenomenological network analysis of culture.

We do not think, however, that more “public” or “civic” sociology will do, since the major distinction should be between good and bad sociology, not public or private, or cultural/noncultural. The problem goes deeper to the heart of the discipline. We have become a discipline without substance, without a social ontology, without any thinking about what makes social reality social, and what makes it real. The task ahead is formidable. We need to reinvent sociology and rethink it as an important part of the new social sciences and the new humanities.

We cannot persist in practicing sociology as a leftover from metaphysics. We speak of “actors” and “persons,” “Subjects” and “Intersubjectivity,” consciousness and agency, but we do so unthinkingly, mindlessly, having lost our ability to regard these not as firm and evident building blocks, but as the foundational mysteries they are. We continue to invoke “society” as transcendental presupposition and empirical object of the discipline, without noting the circularity of the investigation, the metaphysical baggage of the resource or the historical index of the topics of sociology. Like Tarski’s sinking ship, we need to re-construct society, deconstruct sociology, and reassemble the social sciences plank by plank—all without being able to dock in a safe harbor.

To renew our field, we need more modesty, ambition, and hope. More modesty, because sociology is only a subsystem within the system of science, which is itself a subsystem of society. Add to that the many axes of fragmentation within the field along ideological, regional, national, gender, sexual, ethnic, and color lines. There is no coherent “sociology” left; it has lost its very idea. If only we could change society, culture, and persons, not to mention capitalism, with a piece of muckraking, we would not be in the mess we are in.

We have nothing against engaged and engaging writing, but the problem with a lot of the genre is that it is first and foremost engaged with itself and with its competitors in the academic field. We need more ambition because only an interdisciplinary social science in dialogue with the “Studies” and philosophy can make us relevant again as the reflexive medium of societies on the edge. And definitely more joy because the litany of denunciations of domination and the plethora of hypercritiques of exploitation have transformed sociology into a “melancholy science.” When we look at the current situation of sociology, we see four fragmentations—two internal ones and two external ones.

References

• Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.
• Giddens, A. (1991). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press.
• Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. Beacon Press.
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.
• Neilson, B. (2010). InDefense of Sociology: Power, Practice, and Promise. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell Publishing.
• Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books.
• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.
• Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage.
• Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford University Press.