Sociology beyond suspicion: Goldfarb as post-critical critic

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that sociology has come to be dominated by an ethos of suspicion and that attending to the critical sociology of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb can help it break free from this domination and expand the range of its relation to the structures, institutions, and interactions it studies. This argument unfolds in three parts. In the first it is argued that, while critique remains essential, the ethos of suspicion has unnecessarily narrowed its scope. The space for a more capacious understanding of critique is made, secondly, through a rereading of two recent ‘critics of critique’: Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. Third and finally, this paper shows how Goldfarb’s scholarship steps into the space carved out by these criticisms, providing a model of a sociology that has moved ‘beyond suspicion’ in its attention to the liberatory power that lies in the collective, critical capacity of ordinary, everyday actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• suspicion
• liquid modernity
• democracy
• freedom
• hope

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Thinking, as we have learned from Heidegger, is always already en-mooded and attuned, cf., section 29 of Being and Time (1996). For another example of how the 'unthought' shapes thinking, this time around issues of secularisation and modernity, see Part IV of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), particularly his critique of Steve Bruce.

2 For a striking – and subtly funny – description of how this standard sociological attitude manifests itself, see chapter 2 of Christian Smith’s The Sacred Project of American Sociology (2014), in which he describes browsing through the titles of the book exhibit at the annual ASA meeting.

3 ‘Digging down’ and ‘standing back’ are phrases used by Rita Felski (2015) to describe, respectively, psychoanalytic and post-structuralist modes of criticism.

4 For more on how reflexivity can itself become a habitus see Paul Sweetman's fine essay ‘Twenty-First Century Dis-Ease? Habitual Reflexivity Or the Reflexive Habitus’ (2003).

5 Cf., Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1975), particularly chapter 6, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory.’

6 In her masterful critique of the effects of neoliberalism on democracy, Wendy Brown has made a similar argument about what she terms the ‘responsibilization’ of the abject. See chapter 3 of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015).

7 It is small coincidence that embedded in the title of the sourcebook of actor-network theory is the word ‘assembly’ – cf., Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005).

8 C.f., Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979). It is notable that the book’s subtitle was eliminated in its later editions.

9 Although I lack the space to demonstrate it here, there is a connection to be drawn between the understanding that suspicious, deconstructive criticism is suited for the dominations of solid modernity and Arendt’s argument that the free space of political action is in fact built upon the durability of what she calls ‘world.’ See The Human Condition, (1998), particularly Parts 4 and 5.

10 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this essay back to my attention and for noting its import to my argument.

11 An eloquent and concise version of this critique is offered by political theorist Jason Blakely in We Built Reality (2020).