Long time coming, a lot of growth?

Should I feel obligated to write in blogs? Is it alright to just let this sit here? Well, sometimes your experiences accumulate to such an extent that I can now probably write most of a post.

It's entertaining to look at these posts I was making less than a year ago and look at how far my thinking has gone. I'm not going to call it maturity or growth, and I'm a bit less concerned about getting it "right", but there have been so many great influences. Taking Feminist Criminology and Contemporary Sociological Theory has exposed me to a lot of scholarship that has made substantial contributions to the way that I conceptualize social science, reality, consciousness, and oppression. Sociology has really helped to put my criminological education in perspective - I honestly feel that the divisions between the two are unnecessary and only hamper education.

I suppose after reading The Sociological Imagination I was skeptical as to what I would find in a sociological theory class. I expected heavy positivism and Parsonian dominance, but that's what happens when you read books that are 50 years old and treat them like they are talking about today. What I did find has really ignited some interests that were unknown/alien to me just last year.

The critique of Modernity

Two quotes:

For Marx "...modernity is seen as a monster. More limpidly perhaps than any of his contemporaries, Marx perceived how shattering the impact of modernity would be, and how irreversible. At the same time, modernity was for Marx what Habermas has aptly called an 'unfinished project.' The monster can be tamed, since what human beings have created they can always subject to their own control. Capitalism, simply, is an irrational way to run the modern world, because it substitutes the whims of the market for the controlled fulfillment of human need." - Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity

"Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened Earth is radiant with triumphant calamity." - Horkhiemer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Before setting foot in the class, I had never once thought of applying reason and science to society as a "value" that could be, or had been, otherwise. I had simply taken them for granted. While the enlightenment thinkers had displayed such exuberance in expounding those beliefs, present-day sociologists have argued that the conception and creation of a scientific society has only placed humans under, using Weber's term, an inescapable iron cage. These readings spoke to me the same way that reading Nietzsche did, kind of a "I can't believe people can say these things!" reaction. The amount of philosophy I found in sociology has been a reason that I have found it so interesting. These ideas are applied by criminologists as well, I simply had not recognized it. Whether that is my fault or the fault of my education is a moot issue.

Perceptions of reality

As I had indicated in earlier posts, I was interested in morality, and sociology has only helped. Really, my conception of "what is theory" has been expanded, from beyond positivist attributions of cause, to complete models of human reality. Very briefly, Bourdieu's concept of doxa has helped me make sense of a lot of my own questions about morality and political dispositions, and at the same time has opened many new questions.

"One of the most important effects of the correspondence between real divisions and practical principles of division, between social structures and mental structures, is undoubtedly the fact that the primary experience of the social world is that of doxa, an adherence to relations of order which, because they structure inseparably both the real world and the thought world, are accepted as self evident." - Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

Perhaps in the past I would have read such a statement and thought, "Fuck, this isn't falsifiable". Well, I'll leave that to those who care about those sorts of things. For me now though, doxa helps to explain the manner in which normative orders against the interest of those who follow them are able to persist for so long (e.g., Tea Party Movement, minimum-wage labor, women living under Roman Catholocism, etc.). Taking another quote from Adorno, doxa helps to explain why groups inevitably "insist on the very system that enslaves them".