 Greta Krippner - University of Michigan | As I suspect is the case for many members of the Section, my identity as a social theorist is inseparably tied to my identity as a teacher of undergraduate and especially graduate courses on sociological theory. Certainly, my engagement with and commitment to especially classical sociological theory has been deepened by my experience teaching the first-semester theory course to incoming graduate students at the University of Michigan almost continuously now for well over a decade. The task of brushing the dust off of canonical texts and making them sparkle anew for fresh recruits to Sociology – whether or not they see themselves as inclined toward theory – is an exhilarating challenge that defines the fall for me as much as shortened days and turning leaves. |
Lately, this challenge has become a more daunting one. The canon is now under assault in a way that requires those of us who have oriented our teaching careers to transmitting these works to new generations of students to pause and take a step back. Graduate students have become increasingly skeptical – and in some cases, totally dismissive – that works written by “dead white men” (namely, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim) could have produced insights that are in any way relevant to the contemporary practice of sociology. My own syllabus is particularly vulnerable to these critiques since it begins not with classical sociological theory per se, but with the utilitarian/liberal tradition in political thought against which Marx and Durkheim in particular reacted in constituting a nascent sociological approach. (If you think that it is difficult to convince skeptical graduate students that there is any utility in reading Marx, try convincing them to read Locke!)
I had been aware for some years that there were rumblings around these issues, but it wasn’t until my students mounted a revolt against the canon last fall that I fully understood the depth of their discontent. I’ll admit that initially this seemed to me like a contest between the wisdom of age versus the radicalism of youth. Of course, I wasn’t totally blind to the limitations of the “dead white guys”: who could deny that there are critical exclusions in these texts, and that reading them appropriately requires addressing those exclusions? I was prepared to do this and soldier on in service of the discipline – or at least I thought I was – but my students were reluctant to engage in this enterprise with me. I tried a lot of arguments to convince them, from inventorying concepts that these thinkers developed that still provide the basic conceptual framework of the discipline, to suggesting (in my most desperate moment) that to completely reject these thinkers was akin to a form of professional suicide.
Two-thirds of the way through the semester, the students had dug in, and I was losing faith that there was any value in my approach to teaching theory. I set aside a class period in which we could critically discuss the construction of the sociological canon, hoping to air the tensions, engage them constructively, and get back on track to finish the semester. But instead of dissipating the tensions, the session amplified them, and the classroom erupted in expressions of fury and despair that had no precedent in my teaching career. In the lingo of college teaching, it was a “hot moment” – or more accurately, a “hot two hours.” What affected me most was the pain students reported experiencing upon reading many of the texts I assigned in the course. I told them that the texts were painful because the world they reflected – and constructed – was in fact full of pain, and that as sociologists we couldn’t avert our eyes from the ugly reality of a social world built on hierarchy and exclusion. But of course, I was well aware in saying this that, for me, reading Locke, Malthus, or Marx was an intellectual exercise; I did not feel personally assaulted by these texts and their silences. I realized I had to grapple with a gaping chasm between my experience and what my students were experiencing in encountering the classical canon.
Two-thirds of the way through the semester, the students had dug in, and I was losing faith that there was any value in my approach to teaching theory. I set aside a class period in which we could critically discuss the construction of the sociological canon, hoping to air the tensions, engage them constructively, and get back on track to finish the semester. But instead of dissipating the tensions, the session amplified them, and the classroom erupted in expressions of fury and despair that had no precedent in my teaching career. In the lingo of college teaching, it was a “hot moment” – or more accurately, a “hot two hours.” What affected me most was the pain students reported experiencing upon reading many of the texts I assigned in the course. I told them that the texts were painful because the world they reflected – and constructed – was in fact full of pain, and that as sociologists we couldn’t avert our eyes from the ugly reality of a social world built on hierarchy and exclusion. But of course, I was well aware in saying this that, for me, reading Locke, Malthus, or Marx was an intellectual exercise; I did not feel personally assaulted by these texts and their silences. I realized I had to grapple with a gaping chasm between my experience and what my students were experiencing in encountering the classical canon.
| “Inhabiting the space between ‘blind reverence’ and ‘outright dismissal’ is easier said than done...” | What to do? As the semester concluded, I began to contemplate what a different approach to teaching theory would look like. Those ruminations continued over the following year, and into this fall when – with considerable trepidation – I rolled out a new version of the course. Here is how I explained the objectives of the course – and my approach to teaching it – on my syllabus: |
The main purpose of the course is to provide a survey of some of the key themes and recurrent questions that have motivated sociology as a discipline from its founding to the present. This immediately introduces the problem of the “canon” – a problem that has roiled the discipline in recent years when the canon’s many exclusions and blind spots have been foregrounded. Rather than leaving such problems to one side, we will integrate them as fully as possible into our discussions. The intention here is neither to encourage blind reverence for works that contain obvious flaws and limitations, nor to encourage the outright dismissal of whatever insights these works might offer, but to excavate these texts for a series of problems that are necessary to make sense of the contemporary field of sociology.
Inhabiting the space between “blind reverence” and “outright dismissal” is easier said than done, but I followed several guiding principles that have made this possible. First, rather than approaching these texts in terms of their context of production, I have attempted to situate theories by examining their conditions of possibility. It is perhaps a subtle shift, but I think a critical one. By “context of production,” I mean an analysis of the particular circumstances in which specific theorists wrote, including the conventional ideas available to them at the time they fashioned their ideas. This of course is the bread and butter of theoretical exegesis, and in certain respects it is essential to interpreting the meaning of a text. But there is the temptation here to explain too much away, giving theorists a “pass” by suggesting that we ought not judge them by moral and social values “ahead” of their own time. Instead of engaging texts from this angle, I focus on the historical “conditions of possibility” that determine the production and selection of these texts as “canonical,” as well as the exclusion of other texts from this elevated status. Put differently, the emphasis here is less on celebrating or condemning particular theorists for what they did – or did not – write, and more on developing a sociology of knowledge that helps us to understand how the ideas that underpin the discipline gained their position of privilege.
A second orienting principle is to seek continuous dialogue between canonical texts and perspectives that are implicitly or explicitly excluded from those texts. In my reconstructed syllabus, I do this by systematically pairing readings: we read Locke’s Second Treatise of Government against Patricia Williams’s essay, “On Being the Object of Property”; we interrogate Adam Smith’s musings on the division of labor against Paula England’s critique of dichotomous thinking in economics; we study Marx’s historical materialism against Cedric Robinson’s early formulation of “racial capitalism”; the Marx of Capital is read against feminist writings on care work; Weber’s “Bureaucracy” gets placed side-by-side with Joan Acker’s and Victor Ray’s attempt to “gender” and “racialize” organizational theory, respectively; Gayle Rubin’s “Traffic in Women” is situated in a global context by virtue of an encounter with Kimberly Hoang’s Dealing in Desire, and so on. In each such pairing, the question is whether a particular exclusion is integral to the text, or merely incidental to the author’s argument and meaning. If we re-narrated the theory fully attending to social difference, would that theory operate in basically the same way or would its architecture and logic be fundamentally changed?
Inhabiting the space between “blind reverence” and “outright dismissal” is easier said than done, but I followed several guiding principles that have made this possible. First, rather than approaching these texts in terms of their context of production, I have attempted to situate theories by examining their conditions of possibility. It is perhaps a subtle shift, but I think a critical one. By “context of production,” I mean an analysis of the particular circumstances in which specific theorists wrote, including the conventional ideas available to them at the time they fashioned their ideas. This of course is the bread and butter of theoretical exegesis, and in certain respects it is essential to interpreting the meaning of a text. But there is the temptation here to explain too much away, giving theorists a “pass” by suggesting that we ought not judge them by moral and social values “ahead” of their own time. Instead of engaging texts from this angle, I focus on the historical “conditions of possibility” that determine the production and selection of these texts as “canonical,” as well as the exclusion of other texts from this elevated status. Put differently, the emphasis here is less on celebrating or condemning particular theorists for what they did – or did not – write, and more on developing a sociology of knowledge that helps us to understand how the ideas that underpin the discipline gained their position of privilege.
A second orienting principle is to seek continuous dialogue between canonical texts and perspectives that are implicitly or explicitly excluded from those texts. In my reconstructed syllabus, I do this by systematically pairing readings: we read Locke’s Second Treatise of Government against Patricia Williams’s essay, “On Being the Object of Property”; we interrogate Adam Smith’s musings on the division of labor against Paula England’s critique of dichotomous thinking in economics; we study Marx’s historical materialism against Cedric Robinson’s early formulation of “racial capitalism”; the Marx of Capital is read against feminist writings on care work; Weber’s “Bureaucracy” gets placed side-by-side with Joan Acker’s and Victor Ray’s attempt to “gender” and “racialize” organizational theory, respectively; Gayle Rubin’s “Traffic in Women” is situated in a global context by virtue of an encounter with Kimberly Hoang’s Dealing in Desire, and so on. In each such pairing, the question is whether a particular exclusion is integral to the text, or merely incidental to the author’s argument and meaning. If we re-narrated the theory fully attending to social difference, would that theory operate in basically the same way or would its architecture and logic be fundamentally changed?
| “...the emphasis here is ... on developing a sociology of knowledge that helps us to understand how the ideas that underpin the discipline gained their position of privilege...” | The third organizing principle of my revamped course is the concept of “repurposing”: we consider whether and to what extent theories that are built on problematic foundations (when considered from the vantage point of race, gender, sexuality, the non-Western world, and so on) can nevertheless be directed toward ends that are different than those imagined by their originators. There are many instances of such repurposings in social theory. Perhaps my favorite such maneuver is Gayle Rubin’s appropriation of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud in order to build a feminist theory of the origins of gender subordination. Rubin observes: |
“The place to begin to unravel the system of relationships by which women become the prey of men is in the overlapping works of Claude Levi-Strauss and Sigmund Freud. The domestication of women is discussed, under other names, in both of their oeuvres. In reading through these works, one begins to have a sense of a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products. Neither Freud nor Levi-Strauss sees his work in this light, and certainly neither turns a critical glance upon the processes he describes. Their analyses and descriptions must be read, therefore, in something like the way Marx read the classical political economists who preceded him. Freud and Levi-Strauss are in some sense analogous to Ricardo and Smith: they see neither the implications of what they are saying, nor the implicit critique their work can generate when subjected to a feminist eye. Nevertheless, they provide conceptual tools with which one can build descriptions of the part of the social life that is the locus of the oppression of women, of sexual minorities, and of certain aspects of human personality within individuals.”[1]
Of course, repurposing theory is no simple exercise. As Rubin notes later in the same essay, “Levi-Strauss and Freud write within intellectual traditions produced by a culture in which women are oppressed. The danger in my enterprise is that the sexism in the traditions of which they are a part tends to be dragged in with each borrowing.”[2] Herein lies the key conundrum posed by attempts to repurpose theory: can we lift concepts out of their original contexts and shape them to new ends, or are those concepts forever contaminated with the mark of their origins? There may not be one answer to this question, but I appreciate the formulation offered by one of my students this fall: “You eat the meat, and throw away the bone.”
Of course, repurposing theory is no simple exercise. As Rubin notes later in the same essay, “Levi-Strauss and Freud write within intellectual traditions produced by a culture in which women are oppressed. The danger in my enterprise is that the sexism in the traditions of which they are a part tends to be dragged in with each borrowing.”[2] Herein lies the key conundrum posed by attempts to repurpose theory: can we lift concepts out of their original contexts and shape them to new ends, or are those concepts forever contaminated with the mark of their origins? There may not be one answer to this question, but I appreciate the formulation offered by one of my students this fall: “You eat the meat, and throw away the bone.”
| “...can we lift concepts out of their original contexts and shape them to new ends, or are those concepts forever contaminated with the mark of their origins?” | As the semester draws to a close, I do not feel I have resolved all the issues involved in teaching theory in the transformed landscape of the present, but I do feel like I’ve learned some things – and will continue learning with the assistance of my students. Since I know from conversations with colleagues across the country that I am not alone in facing new challenges in the theory classroom, I’ve organized the program at next year’s ASA to engage in and reflect on these challenges. |
One invited panel on “Canonization” will explore the mechanisms by which some authors and texts are elevated to – and others excluded from – canonical status. An open panel on “Globalizing Social Theory” will interrogate the Western biases of sociological theory, and attempt to correct these biases, without reproducing a dichotomous mapping of the terrain of social theory (e.g., “the West” versus “the Rest,” or the “global South” versus the “global North”). A second open panel on “Heretical Theories” seeks to encourage precisely the kind of “repurposings” I’ve described here, inviting borrowings from unexpected (and sometimes controversial) sources to produce novel insights that can be applied to some of the most pressing problems our society currently faces. (A fourth invited panel on “Democracy in Distress” is not directly related to the themes I’ve explored here, but hopefully the motivation for that panel is clear in the current context.) I invite you to review the call for submissions (https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/section_calls.pdf) and look forward to your contributions to these various conversations!
With best wishes to all for a peaceful and prosperous New Year!
Greta
[1] Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.” In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 34.
[2] Ibid., p. 58.
With best wishes to all for a peaceful and prosperous New Year!
Greta
[1] Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.” In Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 34.
[2] Ibid., p. 58.
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