Sociology is Bollocks
Sitting down once again to some writing I am preparing for submission, I am bowled over by internal sound waves intoning the mantra of Sociology. Is. Bollocks. This might not be such a problem if I wasn’t (a) three months into my second year of a doctorate in sociology as well as (b) preparing said writing for submission to a sociology journal. I have always been somewhat sympathetic to the SIB view, but since my return from so-called ‘field work’ in Brazil and consequently my return to my writing I am overtaken by it sometimes to the point of intellectual-ethical paralysis. I think much of my newfound resistance comes from the gradual discovery (accelerated by my move to Sydney to start said doctorate, and the exposure that entailed) of philosophical writing that does not need to prop itself up with empirical evidence and endless justifications of the rigour of the method applied to obtain said evidence. As time has gone on I have become less and less enamoured of the idea that truth is found in objectivity, this of course being because objectivity is always situated and therefore not actually objective. The connotations of the ‘truth is objectivity’ notion are the egotistical claims to superior knowledge that sociologists all too often construct through matrices and numbers (and raise their students to aspire to), under the rubric of an alleged social science which can speak definitive truths based on the same scientific method that is applied to cultures in a petri dish. To this end I have been majorly influenced by Derrida and Foucault from a theoretical point of view, and Bent Flyvberg from a methodological one (but even then, the whole idea of methodology is starting to lose any of its lustre as the SIB mantra goes into its 157396th round).
Sure, I’m open to the idea that there are some universals, and that sociological knowledge is useful and important (for example, I think it is missing in the French state where it could probably assist in social planning - gathering social statistics based on ethnicity is apparently illegal, which the recent rioting might suggest is a bit silly). I just feel very pulled in the wrong direction by the requirements of official sociology: having to have this scientific method explicated thoroughly, having to justify your ideas based on thorough, concrete evidence (as though there is no space for your own thinking or your own stories, when of course all that methodological justification is just a forced legitimation of said own thinking anyway). Even though I deliberately do not espouse the truth-in-objective-rigour view, I still have to explain in pages and pages of justification why that is so, and I am bound by the sociological field in order to make that justification, which is just becoming exhausting, as I become more resolved that I am just not interested in answering to those particular gods. I am totally cool for sociology to want to have less narrative or theory in favour of more so-called rigour, it’s just that I think narrative/theory is arguably far less restrained and far more inspiring in its impact on social thought. The more I think about it, the more I think I need to change departments/disciplines. Sociology feels like a field whose utility is restricted to social planning and social policy, and I embarked on the PhD in a decided effort to move beyond all that. I have obviously thought that the field could accommodate thinking beyond that (and I totally dig sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Ghassan Hage, Anita Harris and the work of the sociologists who taught me in Adelaide) - but it seems I might serve and be served better in something like cultural studies.
Or maybe I’m just procrastinating.