Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: August 13, 2003
Latest Update: August 13, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Social Theory and War

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, August 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

This lecture was inspired by a review of Survivors, Not Heroes or Villains, in Occupied France by Alan Riding, New York Times. August 13, 2003. At p. B1. Backup

There's something "really real" about war. The people don't get up and live again after the mines blow up. The pain goes on and on along with the memories for generations. The structural constraint of the war does shape much of the action and the social system at the time, but people still live their everyday experiences as best they can, without always noticing the constraints we later see as the giant barriers erected by history. Let me link that to social theory:

Herbert Blumer, in exploring the nature of human interaction emphasized "the creative, constructed, and changeable nature of interaction." (Jonathan Turner, The Structure of Sociological Theory, Ed. 6, Wadsworth Publ., 1998. At pp. 362-363.) What this means in a modern (or post-modern, if you like "post") interpretation of symbolic interactionism is that there is something "really real" out there, something strctural, either like a war, constructed by us in all our wisdom, or a cyclone, or some other cataclysmic event, not constructed by us. Whatever, we, the creative, aesthetic producing constructors of community, are not immune to that reality of the infrastructure. Nor are we immune to the constructed racist, ageist, ethnic, non-answerable monologic constructions of Others who invoke their right to answer our utterances in the creation and establishment of our community.

I believe when I was in college, we quoted Tom Lehrer's "We'll all fry together when we fry, when we fry:"

Tom Lehrer, "We Will All Go Together When We Go" from a political science syllabus by Dr. Aron G. Tannenbaum

---

---