Deena Weinstein

Alternative youth: The ironies of recapturing youth culture

’I feel stupid and contagious/ Here we are now entertain us’, sang Kurt Cobain in Nirvana’s 1991 hit song Smells like teen spirit. Cobain was talking about and speaking for his audience, a new generation of American youth (culture) drenched in what rock critic Jim DeRogatis (1994) calls ’cynicism, skepticism and ironic sense of humor’. How did American youth become ironic an attitude that Nietzsche associated with old age? Let me first inquire into the vicissitudes of youth as a signifier in the modern period, concentrating on what happened in the United States after World War II. The

An existential approach to society: Active transcendence

The basic question to which a philosophy of sociology must respond is that of the possibility of knowledge about society. Raising the question of the possibility of knowledge about society presupposes a description of what society is, not merely in the sense of defining it as an object for inquiry which is differentiated from the objects of other sciences, but in determining whether or not it even is a phenomenon that can be studied adequately from the standpoint of natural science. Implied in the determination of the structure of social phenoma is a position about the way in which society appears, is disclosed, or can be known, and the limits and characteristics of any knowledge that might result from it. Insofar as sociology comprises a body of systematic knowledge, it is constituted by principles that demarcate its limits from other kinds of thought and provide it with integrity. Any conception of sociology contains, then, either implicitly or explicitly, an epistemology. The possible epistemologies that might ground sociology involve positions with regard to the relations between knowledge about society and other types of knowledge, such as knowledge of being (ontology), reality (metaphysics), and good and evil (ethics). Reflexivity about sociology is a process of placing sociology in the field of questions that make up philosophical inquiry.

Is postmodern organization theory sceptical

The practitioners of postmodern organization theory have had to respond to the charge that postmodernism has a declivity toward skepticism. Their response to organizational skepticisim is to decenter dominant theories, paradigms and organizational forms, rather than to negate them. Decentering supplements discourse by augmenting its repertoire; the opposite of skepticism, which diminishes its object. The main ways in which postmodern organization theories try to overcome the specific sceptical position of paradigm incommensurability (the reduction of discourse about organizations and organizational discourse to a solipsism of private language games) are described and assessed in terms of three positions: John Hassard’s “multiple paradigm” approach on the level of methodology, Stewart Clegg’s “embedded rationalities” on the level of empirical conceptualization, and Kenneth Gergen’s “heteroglossia” on the level of discursive practice. Hassard and Clegg are engaged in the mapping function of postmodern organ...

Dimensions of Conflict: Georg Simmel on Modern Life

Among the founders of sociology as a distinctive discipline at the turn of the twentieth century Georg Simmel is distinguished from other major figures such as Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Max Weber by his breadth of intellectual interests and contributions. In continental Europe sociology ordinarily arose as an outgrowth of the generalization of more specialized concerns about social relations into comprehensive accounts of social organization. Durkheim’s use of anthropology to ground his visions of society, Tonnies’s expansion of modern classical political thought to interpret the social bond, Pareto’s synthesis of economic rationality and non- logical motives in a general sociology, and Max Weber’s amplification of economic history into the study of types of social organization are all exemplary of the emergence of sociology as a coherent discursive formation. Simmel, too, constituted sociology through its relation to other fields of knowledge, but alone among the founders his primal discourse was philosophy, which provided him with a totalizing viewpoint from which he could enter a wide variety of areas and place them in dialectical reciprocity with each other.

Just So Stories: How Heavy Metal Got Its Name—A Cautionary Tale

An etymological inquiry into the origin of the term “heavy metal” to name a genre of rock music yields the surprising result that the conventional accounts of the term’s origin are mistaken. Tracking down the actual origin, through research in the rock press and correspondence with participants in the naming, reveals the term, in part and as a whole, was in the cultural air of the times. There were competing terms for the kind of music that came to be called “heavy metal,” but none of them would have given the genre the same configuration and sensibility that it has taken on.

How Is Metal Studies Possible

From its inception four decades ago, metal music has been studied first by critics, then by political/religious detractors, and then by an increasing number of scholars based in academic settings. It is only, however, in the twenty-first century that the idea that there is and/or should be an academic specialization called “metal studies” has gained momentum and support. On the face of it, there is no reason why academic and other discourses on metal might not have simply proceeded without any attempt being made to gather them up into a specifically denominated field of inquiry. For someone who was studying metal long before metal studies was even remotely conceivable, the advent of the latter has been a welcome development. At present, the academic literature on metal has become so copious that it is high time that researchers and commentators had forums of their own in which to acknowledge, share, critique and synthesize one another’s contributions. The need for enhanced communication is particularly important for those who are concerned with understanding metal, because the music, its visual and textual context, and the social dynamics that sustain it have become so diverse and complex – with the formation of a dizzying array of subgenres and a global reach – that hyperspecialization has become a real danger. In addition, research on metal does not proceed from a single discipline or methodological approach, but is multidisciplinary and comprehends the fields of musicology, sociology, cultural history, political science, economics, literature, communications and social psychology, among others. There are no “metal studies” departments and probably never will be, so loosely organized forums for interchange and a resultant cumulative development of knowledge are beneficial for all researchers into all aspects of metal. If the advantage of having an explicitly defined field of “metal studies” is that it provides a rubric for bringing together diverse research proceeding from different disciplines, theoretical perspectives and methodologies, then it follows that it is a mistake to attempt to define that field precisely, either in terms of its content (object) or the forms through which to study that content (project). JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH VOLUME 15 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2011) AQUATIC INSECTS

Freud On the Problem of Order: the Revival of Hobbes

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Freud addresses the problem of how groups are formed or of how society is possible. The question of the possibility of society presupposes that in some sense human beings are not thoroughly social beings. that they must agree to or be made to participate in a common life in which they submit to general principles regulating their conduct towards one another. The notion that the grounds for social order cannot be taken for granted originates in the be-

Individual and Society in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Views of Life

Standing on the cusp between modern and modernist discourses, and one of the most comprehensive thinkers of his times, Georg Simmel also anticipated postmodern discourses through his identification and analysis of social and cultural forms and tendencies that he observed that would reach fuller development in our own era.

Hail to the Shrub Mediating the Presidency

With regard to the American presidency, the prestige media perform the primary function of nonpartisan interested mediation between the president and his supporters and the loyal opposition to the president. This article draws on the formal sociology of Georg Simmel as a theoretical background, the American prestige newspapers as a resource, and the presidency of G. W. Bush before and immediately after 9/11/01 as a case study. When, as in the instance of the crisis following the 9/11 skyjackings, there is no partisan opposition to the president, the prestige media take up that role as interested mediators to try to ensure what they as representatives of hegemonic capitalism consider to be the proper functioning of the office.

On the Possibility of Society: Classical Sociological Thought

The seriousness of an inquiry is determined by the depth and significance ofthe question that it poses. A tradition of thought is sustained by a continual renewal over many generations of a fundamental doubt, a conscious disquiet that is not stilled, perhaps because the mind does not and cannot, on account of its finitude, marshal the resources to provide an adequate resolution. The quality of thought is a function of the quality of doubt. The more important the question raised by in? quirers, the more thoroughly will their wits and energies be mobilized to answer it, and the more critical they will be of one anothers responses. When the impor? tance of a query is at its maximum the very lives of those who pose it will be drawn into its resolution. At such a high level of attention, the boundaries between pri? vate life and public function, individual interest and social obligation, will col? lapse, not by defect or privation, but in the service of a comprehensive integrity. All of the investigators resources, conscious and unconscious, will be deployed to respond to the question; and it will be impossible to determine whether the in? quirer subserves the project or the reverse. Such a genuine synthesis occurs only when a significant question is raised, because only such a question demands the commitment ofthe totality of experience for an approach to an adequate response. Only a few inquiries among all of those undertaken in society are serious in the sense that they require for their fulfillment a dedication of the inquirers life to their service. The leading example of such a serious inquiry and the one which provides all others with significance and depth by contact with it is philosophy, particularly metaphysics and cosmology. It was a philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1962), who called attention in the twentieth century to the great extent to which the very structure of life is formed by the character of questions that guide inquiry. According to Heidegger, the fundamental question of philosophy?Why-are there things rather than not??is, when it is genuinely raised, the medium of authentic existence. Meditation on this question, for Heidegger, evokes wonder at Being for