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Connell RW - A Sober Anarchism
Connell RW - A Sober Anarchism
Connell RW - A Sober Anarchism
Author(s): R. W. Connell
Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 81-87
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202019
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A Sober Anarchism
R. W. CONNELL
Harvard University
Textuality
Smith's thinking has obvious common ground with the anarchismof Michel Foucault,
and this is nowhere clearerthan in her strong emphasis on discourse and knowledge. One
of the most interestingand most consistently developed themes in her writing is about the
importanceof texts.
Smith's point of departurehere is ethnomethodologists'work on the productionand
use of organizationalrecords. This approachpoints to the materialityof texts and to how
they are internalto professionalpractices.Yet Smithis not contentwith the ratherrestricted
use of this analysis made in ethnomethodology, in the deconstructionof professional
common sense. She makes a largerpoint about culturalpolitics and culturalhistory.
Such texts, she notes, are the vehicles of abstractionfrom particularlocal experience.
This abstractionis central to the means by which moder society is governed; we are not
ruled by texts but we are certainly ruled through texts. This is distinctively true of the
moder world; it was not always so. Within the last 500 years a form of society has been
created in which textuality, so to speak, is centralto power.
Smith connects this point loosely with the rise of capitalism, more precisely with the
creation of modem patriarchy.Texts, specifically, are the way men have come to speak
to each other. Women's work supportsthe world of textualitybut is not part of it. Women
are ignored by men in "serious" conversations; they are excluded from positions of
organizationalpower; their interventionsin conferences are discounted;and so on. Here
Smith draws on some of the extensive research evidence of institutionalmisogyny. Let
me add anotherexample. At a recent sociological conference I attended, about one-third
of the participantswere women. A man wrote up a reporton the conference, summarizing
the papers and the discussion. Not one contributionfrom a woman was mentioned in the
summary. The report read as if the whole thing had been conducted among the men
present, with the women in little glass bubbles. The point is not that the summarywriter
was personally sexist; ratherthis is typical of the way the patriarchalworld of textuality
works.
Smith is at pains to argue that the accounts of reality presented in texts-official
statistics, psychiatricor police records, sociology books-create an illusion of reporting
reality but do not actually do so. In taking part in the social practices surroundingtexts,
we read "through"a text purportingto give a factual account, to a virtual reality. This is
not lived actualityitself, the realm in which the standpointof women is grounded.Rather
it is an ideological account profoundly shaped by the social practices governing the
productionand use of texts and especially the process of abstraction.
Smith's argumenton textuality aligns her with Europeanpostmoderntheorists such as
Lyotard(1984) and Foucault (1980), who likewise have emphasizedthe growing impor-
tance of language, the constitutive role of texts, and the connections between knowledge
and power. Yet whereas postmodernistsbelieve there is nothing outside language, no
knowledge that fails to be constituted textually, Smith is very sure that there is such
knowledge. She is an epistemological realist of the deepest dye. She takes no shame in
using terms like ideology in its straightforwardMarxist sense of communicationdistorted
by power; she advances a sociological critique of textuality.
Further,whereas Foucault fumbles the issue of where and how resistance to power/
knowledge is to develop, Smith can name the site. It is the standpoint of women,
A SOBER ANARCHISM 85
constitutedin lived actuality, in a mode of knowing that is socially groundedbut is not
abstractedbecause it is grounded in the particularrelations characteristicof women's
work.
3 The mentorsacknowledged (Smith 1987, pp. 8-9) are George HerbertMead, MauriceMerleau-Ponty,Karl
Marx, and Harold Garfinkel.
86 SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY
opening up of new ground. I think the capacity of the procedure she recommends is
limited, and some reasons for this can be found in the terms in which the argumentis
constructed.
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