I’ve been listening to Sociology…

I had another one of those ‘what!?’ moments driving home the other night. The kind that slaps you in the face when you encounter a worldview self-consistent and very different to your own. I was listening to a series of lectures on Sociological theories with special emphasis on explaining the nature of Deviance, what it is, where it’s sources are, it’s function, and it’s relation to morality and wider society. The Professor, an American academic, came to the final lecture and casually announced that as of 1996, the year these lectures were being given, the status of Sociology as a science was being challenged. Fair enough, I never really thought it was a science anyway, it’s practitioners would like to don that mantle and benefit from the prestige that accompanies Science, but it’s not really like Chemistry or Physics, is it? Nope, it’s just a bunch of academics pointing out the obvious, the best of them Novelists who missed their true calling. But the Professor agreed with this, and talked about a ‘new’ way of seeing the world that had originated in France, and which was in origin a literary theory, not a scientific one. He said that Sociology was like the interpretation of texts. Objective reality is a tenuous concept in Sociology: you don’t measure the attitudes and beliefs of a society against a yardstick outwith it, because Sociological reality is these attitudes and beliefs. The movement in literary criticism that had recently arisen in France, he said, similarly denied any objective criteria outwith the text itself by which to judge it. By this he meant that you cannot use the authors intentions to judge the success or failure of a work, nor can you reach through the text to the author, him or herself. Texts do not necessarily refer to anything outside themselves. Now, this is both liberating, and at the same time castrating, solipsistic, debilitating and enervating. This is basically a manifesto for wankers. The establising of objective aesthetic criteria and standards is notoriously difficult, if not impossible: pick any measure, and you can cite counter examples to refute it. Pick metaphorical complexity, retort with Homer. Choose simplicity, and argue against that with Shakespeare. Choose universality, and discuss the case of Racine, infamous for being particular to the French, yet acknowledged as great by all who are at home in the French language. Maybe aesthetic excellence is a constellation of factors, not one constellation, but plural possibilities. Maybe it’s like a flowchart! If not A, then B. If B, then C or D…etc. It starts to get messy. But that’s not really the point: what shocked me most was the deletion of the author, and the assertion that we cannot ascertain the author’s intentions or make meaningful contact with the author through the work. As anyone who has had a favourite author will know, reading their work intensively will leave you with a sense of their presence, an almost intimate relationship. This is especially true of poetry, where even ‘impersonal’ writers like Eliot and Milosz leave you with a sense of their selves. What I think is really going on here is a process the Professor detailed in an earlier lecture, where he talked about the origins of ‘Child Abuse’ as a diagnostic and socially ‘deviant’ category. A sociologists (whose name escapes me for the moment) became interested in the modern phenomenon of Child Abuse: as it is portrayed in the media, as it is dealt with by various agencies, as to the stereotypes and responses it evokes in us. He wrote that Child Abuse as we know it is a recent construct. Sure, children were abused in the past, but the modern diagnosis and response was traceable to a specific professional group: Research Radiographers. Apparently, the prevalence and incidence of modern child abuse was first highlighted and mapped by a group of research Radiographers. The Sociologist asked why it was not first highlighted by Paediatricians. His answer was twofold: first of all, Paediatrics is perhaps the one medical speciality where the client and the patient are different. The client is the responsible paying adult, father or mother, the patient is the child. Inherently there is a conflict of interest. Radiology at the time was a diagnostic sub speciality with no treatments ring-fenced to itself. In the era prior to radiation therapy for cancer, Radiology was simply an imageing service and low on the medical heirarchy. The Sociologist who studied the origins of Child Abuse argued that it was a means to gaining professional prestige that was in part the driving factor behind the research Radiologists’ highlighting and framing the incidence of injured and neglected children as a category called Child Abuse. A category they would be crucially involved in diagnosing. Same thing with literary theory that assassinates the author and then says that the text was simply a ‘pre-text’ for the interpretative readings which attend upon it, and which in strong versions of the theory actually lend flesh to its meaning: without these academic theorists reading the text, the text would have no meaning! You know what? Get out the toilet, and write your own bloody book! Sorry. My other objection is the further removal of literature and art (in general) from moral consideration. The relationship between the moral and the aesthetic is a battleground. Does truly great art of necessity have a moral dimension? Is art amoral? Most artists would say that it is amoral. They would deny the constraints placed upon art by morality, and claim total freedom of expression. But is this a Western luxury? Many East European poets, including two of the greatest 20th Century poets, Milosz and Herbert, do not deny the moral dimension of their poetry. There is throughout their poetry an emphasis on truth-telling that incorporates the obligation to draw a moral line in the sand against Orwellian forces that would have you believe that truth, including morality, is a sociological thing, and entirely in the power of the powers that dominate society, or that educate society in and through it’s universities, and it’s other organs of influence. I suppose it comes down to a last analysis of whether or not you believe that ‘truth’ can be anchored in an objective reality, and specifically, moral truth, or is it a construct of society and it’s dominant ruling interest group? And if truth is that relative, then what about the art that purports to make reference to it? It’s enough to make you scurry back to Homer and Shakespeare.