Anne Game: Undoing the Social: Towards A Deconstructive Sociology

deconstruction — literary analysis theory: by the very nature of language and usage, no text can have a fixed, coherent meaning.

semiotics — general theory of signs and symbols; analysis of the nature and relationship of signs in language.

desire — inter-subjective relationship between self and other which motivates knowledge processes (p. 65).

sociality — the ‘always’ relational of subject and meaning (p. xi).

Question posed by French feminists in relation to photographs and the oppositional nature between nature and culture (p. xi):

"Is this a desire to return to origins, or might we discern something of another desire, a desire that gives the prerogative to the other, a desire without end or goal.

— in short, a desire not structured around binary opposition?"

Memory and experience as the remembering body:

Memory ‘reminds’ us that the so-called ‘present’ self is defined in relation to the past of the self, and that the present is marked by the traces of the past — past and present (and future) cannot be held apart. If memory is personal and particular, it is also necessarily cultural, constituted in and through sociality — in relation to an other (ibid).

Different structures of desire, or relations between self and other:

Social world: comprised of a multiplicity of orders, different ways of meaning that

inscribe and are inscribed in different structures of desire.

Agency — status of the subject of sociological knowledge (p. 6); oppressed groups as the other which are constituted as objects of knowledge, in order to effect a return to self, the subject of sociological knowledge...

(human beings as discursively produced subjects, pp. 40-42)

•  there is a reification of power, just as there is a reification of the social in the structure-agency formulation. The problem becomes:   How can this all too solid thing — power, the social — be changed?" (p. 34).

Foucault:  insistent that ‘how’ questions rather than ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions be asked in connection with power. To ask how is to refuse reified and total conceptions of power, and any notion that power has a source, an origin (p. 35).

Transformation does not come of truth or privileged knowledge, nor is it a matter of consciousness. In fact, it is in practices that run counter to these conceptions of knowledge that it is possible to discern a ‘redemptive’ moment that is disruptive to the cultural order (p. 36).

Foucault and Bergson: take from physics the idea of forces and the body as a site of forces (p. 45).

Writing the body — (as related to Freud’s Dora) a bodily inscription of difference that disrupts knowledge; the unconscious, embodied, escapes the order of discourse (p. 59).  Hegel: knowledge is necessarily inter-subjective; self-consciousness is always mediated; independence is dependent on a relation to an other (p. 67).

Social positioning of women/women as infrastructure (pps. 62,126).

Questions:

As part of the construction of knowledge, how do the different formats for boss/secretary interviews effect the meaning?

How does the unquestioning acceptance of the death instinct replicate the structure? How does systems theory fit in with this stasis model?

Is there ever, really, a binary relationship? If so, how could this structure act as choreography and script?

How might we look at this whole thing if we used chaos theory as a base?

How is a fixed image, upon which identification/identity is effected (a la Lacan), chosen?

How might a cognitive psychological approach effect a deconstructive sociology?

Movement Forward Movement of Return (p. 129).

*multiple order/disruption * single order/homeostasis

*feminineflife *masculjne/death

*change/opportunity * origins individual significance

studium — the cultural, the coded; the idea; consciousness; objective; continuous; moves the mind

punctum — breaks through, wounds, disturbs; accidental, uncoded; subjective; affect; involuntary memory, unconscious; has temporality; moves the body

Role of the photograph in replication of the structure (p. 144).