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CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: June 6, 2001
Latest update: August 29, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Three required texts:

• CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORY, ELLIOTT This text is difficult to read because it assumes that you have basic theory as a background. The lecture summaries will help. I chose it because it has a global perspective that I consider essential in today's world.

• READINGS IN SOCIAL THEORY, FARGANIS. This text is primarily for quick review of the basics of social theory. If you have an adequate text that you used in social theory at the undergraduate level, and are sure you understand the basic concepts of each theorist, then you may forego this text. But I will use it for reference.

• Social Theory Today, Giddens and Turner, Stanford University Press. Most difficult one to read. See me if it overwhelms you. There will be explanatory lectures on site to help with the reading.

• AND a pocket dictionary.

  First Week

  Review of Weber. Farganis: p. 102 ff. "Unlike Marx and Durkheim, both of who projected optimistic outcomes in the transition ot modernity, Weber rejects the Enlightenment's view of evolutionary progress and happiness. Instead he projects a "polar night of icy darkness," a highly rational and bureaucratically organized social order, an "iron cage" in which people are trapped." Farganis at p. 102.

  Second Week's Assignment

  Review of Durkheim:

  • Farganis: pp. 58 - 80.
    • How does Durkheim see the social fact as distinguishing sociology from psychology?

      Recall what a social fact is (pp. 63 ff.), "a category of facts" that is socially constructed by the community of individuals. A fact that comes from Others, not from the Individual herself. And one that controls her by the power of the group to enforce its cultural and social norms.

    • Farganis says that "Durkheim saw people as very much socially constructed and society as preceding and forming the individual." Is that perspective shared by any sociological group today?

  We'll talk about social constructivism. And here's a site in which Vance Peavy uses a social constructivist approach to counseling:http://www.sociodynamic-constructivist-counselling.com

• Contemporary Social Theory: Introduction, pp. 1 - 29. Skim in preparation for lecture and discussion.
  • What on earth is the disappearing subject?

    Reinterpreting Marx in a Postcolonial World in which the Subject Keeps Disappearing into the Void? Jeanne's Pre-Conference Notes on Marxist Theory.

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  Study Ahead

  • Read the files under Gordon Fellman's Rambo and the Dalai Lama.
  • Read the files under Henry and Milovanovic's Constitutive Criminology at Work for an understanding of the interdependence of theory and structural context.

  • Basic Social Theory The main theorists and their key concepts.

  Evidence of Learning Activities:

• GATHERING THE FORGOTTEN VOICES: AN APPROACH TO ORAL HISTORY BY PLATER ROBINSON. SOUTHERN INSTITUTE AT TULANE UNIVERSITY. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  This activity will require some intensive planning.

  • Describe the status characteristic in which you are intersted: race, dialect, size, darkness of skin color, gender, weight, class (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Moliere.). A status characteristic is fairly immediately discernible, visually, or by accent or language pattern. We tend to develop expectations that these characteristics will be associated with a specific kind of behavior, to which we assign status. These are normative expectations, generally out-of-awareness, and not very susceptible to rational modification. We tend to treat people differently according to the status characteristics we assign to them.

    Brief review of status characteristic differential theory.

    Use oral history to investigate life experiences with status characteristic differential theory. Build on Katz', Elizabeth Cohen's work, but use this approach to collect qualitative data to flesh out the empirical data.

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  Reading Assignments:

  • Week 1

  • Week 2

  • Week 3

  • Week 4

    • Reading:

    • Week 5

      • Reading:

        Abstract of "Thinking feminism with and against Bourdieu" by Terry Lovell University of Warwick, UK.

      • Discussion questions:

        1. Who is Bourdieu? Where does he fit into social theory?

           jeanne's notes:

        2. What is cultural capital according to Bourdieu?

           jeanne's notes:

           What is Terry Lovell actually arguing for? Acceptance of Bourdieu's habitus over Judith Butler's "subjectivity as performance"? And what on earth does that mean?

           jeanne's notes:

    • Week 6

      • Reading:

        Writing to Shake the World: The Historical Avant-Garde, Political Postmodernism, and the Post-Avant-Garde Jim Finnegan's Dissertation Summary: ". . . a Cultural Studies analysis of key issues connecting avant-garde art and literature, mass media journalism, and postmodern culture. Combining the political aesthetics of John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World and Roland Barthes’ descriptions of writing and the writerly, I take "political postmodernism" as a critical term that enables a productive tension between avant-garde artist intellectuals and mass media journalism."

      • Discussion questions:

        1. Who is Roland Barthes? Where does he fit into social theory?

           jeanne's notes:

        2. What is queer theory? Where does queer theory fit into social theory?

           jeanne's notes:

           Queer Theory by David Gauntlett, of www.theory.org.uk.

           Queer theory suggests that our identities are so complex in today's world that to assume that any one status characteristic can describe any collective is no longer tenable, says David, says Judith Butler says. Not directed exclusively at gays and lesbians, but at sociologists and cultural studies scholars in general. Status characteristic theory tried to set up positivist experiments that were to change such collective expectations on the basis of race or color or gender. It failed. Queer theory may explain why. And that is one of the failings of positivism, its tendency towards categorical thinking. (Minow)

           Queer theory fits into social theory with the postmodern approach of multiple perspectives. No single status characteristic, no single state of mind, no single philosophical approach is adequate to describe a static condition for even individuals. The structural context pervades our identities, and consequently, our selves. This was Gergen's thesis in the saturated self. This is what Butler is saying in "David Halperin has said, 'Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.' "