Reaching for the Global
by Michael Burawoy

I hope this entry will be the beginning of an onslaught of entries concerning the sociology of deviance. My lunch break is over, but more later, I swear.

Goffman's remarkable insights-now commonplace-into how asylums produce rather than correct mental illness inspired and justified deinstitutionalization the world over. In a parallel argument, Howard Becker pioneered new approaches to "deviance," or what Thomas and Znaniecki had called "disorganization." Taking the standpoint of the underdog, Becker argued that there was nothing intrinsically deviant about the marihuana smoker or the dance musician. He showed that by labeling as outsiders those it regarded as disreputable, society exacerbated their "deviance." This was, of course, an old Durkheimian point, but it also demonstrated an oftquoted maxim of Thomas's, that if asocial situation is defined as real then it is real in its consequences. For Becker, as for institutional ethnography in general, it was sufficient to take the side of the underdogs and to show that they were being labeled deviants and punished accordingly. But he did not explore the broader context of labeling-who labels whom and why or how "deviants" contest their labeling.
In a famous clash of perspectives, Alvin Gouldner launched a holy war on what he perceived as Becker's moral complacency, his romantic fascination with the "exotic other," and subjected "labeling" theory to withering attack. Becker might be critical of the immediate caretaker agencies for the way they treated delinquents, drug addicts, or alcoholics, but at the same time he was feeding the oppressive machinery of the welfare state. In documenting the lives of marginalized groups, he was providing material for their regulation. No wonder the welfare state was happy to fund such research. Becker, Gouldner averred, was therefore on his own side too, pursuing his own interests as a career sociologist, and unwilling to adopt a radical critique of the world that sponsored him. Rather than present deviants as social problems to be solved, Gouldner called for their representation as challenging the regime that regulated them. He focused on sociologists' implication in the world they analyze, on the symbiotic relation of participant and observer, deviant and sociologist, institution and ethnographer, locating them both in their wider historical and political context.41 In so doing, Gouldner underlined the importance of power and reflexivity, so effectively obscured by the Chicago School's focus on social control. His critique of institutional ethnography laid the groundwork for more radical -visions of ethnography that would be critical of the welfare state. Today his critique sounds anachronistic, since the welfare state has retreated and the global has encroached onto the national terrain. Writing in the 1960s, he did not imagine that the sociologist-ethnographer, studying urban occupations and institutions, was implicated in a world beyond the nation state. He could not imagine a global ethnography. For that we need to turn to the anthropologists.

posted by neel master at 1:27 PM

Mainlining Postmodernism: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and the Art of Intervention
by Walter Kalaidjian

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s one specific site for exposing and interrupting the popular media's production of consumer society has been its sexist inscription of gender. Responding to the spectacle of postmodernism, critical artists like Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke have adopted tactics of quotation, citation, and appropriation that were pioneered some five decades earlier in Benjamin's examination of international Dada and the Russian futurists in such essays as "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "The Artist as Producer."^21^ The challenge that Benjamin laid down was for every author to become a producer, every artist a theorist, in the general remapping of generic boundaries, aesthetic traditions, and cultural conventions that the age demanded. Not incidentally, in photography this political equisite entailed a subversion of "the barrier between writing and image. What we require of the photographer," Benjamin insisted, "is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary useful value" (AP 230). In thus linking photographic activity to language and signification, Benjamin's critique of photographic mimesis looks forward to Roland Barthes' postwar argument that "the conventions of photography . . . are themselves replete with signs." In the age of mass communication, as Barthes would go on to argue in the 1960s, every pictorial form is always already a linguistic text.

posted by neel master at 10:44 AM

Stranger in a Strange Land: The dismay of an honorable man of the left
By Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is annoyed with liberals, again.

For Chomsky, everything these days is a "truism"; for him it verges on the platitudinous to be obliged to state, once again for those who may have missed it, that the September 11 crime is a mere bagatelle when set beside the offenses of the Empire. From this it's not a very big step to the conclusion that we must change the subject, and change it at once, to Palestine or East Timor or Angola or Iraq. All radical polemic may now proceed as it did before the rude interruption. "Nothing new," as the spin doctors have taught us to say. There's a distinct similarity between this world view and that of the religious dogmatists who regard September 11 in the light of a divine judgment on a sinful society. But to know even what a newspaper reader knows about the Taliban and its zealous destruction of all culture and all science and all human emancipation, and to compare its most noteworthy if not its most awful atrocity to the fall of the Bastille ...

I take a trawl through my e-mail and my mailbag. "Why sing the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic'? Don't they know John Brown was the first terrorist?" ... "What about the civilian casualties in Vietnam, Guatemala, Gaza [fill in as necessary] ...?" This goes on all day, and it goes on while I sleep, so that I open a new batch each morning. Everyone writes to me as if he or she were bravely making a point for the very first time it had ever been made. And so I ask myself, in the spirit of self-criticism that I am enjoining upon these reflexive correspondents, whether I have any responsibility for this dismal tide of dreary traffic, this mob of pseudo-refugees taking shelter in half-baked moral equivalence.

You go, girl.
posted by neel master at 10:39 AM