Engaging French Sociology

• In Event: 385 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge and Ideas

Abstract

Underlying some of the main strands of twentieth-century French sociology – exemplified by the Foucauldian, the Bourdieuian and the Latourian – has lain a shared anxiety about the very forms through which sociologists engage audiences. More specifically, this is an anxiety about intellectual technologies such as print publication that take control over a text's circulation out of the intellectual's hands. The worry is that these forms of engagement may help, unintentionally, to perpetuate symbolic violence. In which case sociology dependent on these forms of engagement may be tantamount to an inadvertent arms trade, thwarting rather than enabling sociology's fulfilment of its public responsibilities.
Taking this anxiety seriously is important for three main reasons. Firstly, doing so enables us to understand why the French theorists in question, sensitive to the intellectual technologies they are using, adopted certain stylistic and conceptual conventions. Secondly, it allows us to identify an important goal that these theorists sought to achieve through their texts: a change in the forms through which academics engage audiences. Thirdly, it may prompt us to take this last goal more seriously as a legitimate project for sociology – one that should not be subordinated to theory and methodology.
Foregrounding these theorists' concerns about their forms of engagement allows us to read their texts as part of a single, self-reflexive tradition, despite their very different approaches to sociology. This is a tradition that pushes the sociological imagination beyond the text itself – one which values pedagogical and technological as much as textual innovation.

Author

• Josh Booth, University of Cambridge