Stephen Pfohl

The “Discovery” of Child Abuse

This paper represents a study of the organization of social forces which gave rise to the deviant labelling of child beating and which promoted the speedy and universal enactment of criminal legislation in the mid-1960s. Initial consideration is given to an historical survey of social reaction prior to the formulation of a fixed label. Specific attention is focused on the nineteenth-century “house of refuge movement,” early twentieth+century crusades by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the rise of juvenile courts. A second section concentrates on the web of cultural values related to the protection of children at the time of the “discovery” of abuse as deviance. A third section examines factors associated with the organizational structure of the medical profession conducive to the “discovery” of a particular deviant label. The final segment of the paper concerns resultant social reaction. The paper synthesizes conflict and labelling perspectives in providing an interpretation of a particular social-legal development.

Criminological Displacements: A Sociological Deconstruction

This text re-presents a deconstructive sociological reading of Michel Foucaults several investigations of the genealogy of the human sciences. We take the sociological history of criminology as an exemplar of the relation between the form and content of Western social science theorizing and the historically material pleasures associated with the production of a certain knowledge of “Other”ness within the intellectual marketplace of modern Western society. In analyzing the epistemological pleasures of human scientific knowledge in terms of sadism, surveillance, and the realization of a normal subject in discourse, we make connections between the structures of social scientific knowledge and the hierarchical organization of capitalist, racist, heterosexist, and imperialist power. We conclude with an outline of the methodological and political implications of a critical, post-structuralist intervention into social science theorizing.

Twilight of the Parasites: Ultramodern Capital and the New World Order

This text explores the economic, sex/gender, and racialized passage of CAPITAL from its modern to its ultramodern phase. Here the parasitism qf CAPTTAList power shifts to a New World Order of social domination based, not simply upon the exploitation of human labor, but upon the technological invasion of human bodies by cybernetic feedback mechanisms, high/speed image-processing, and self-liquifying social control. Rooted in “military metaphysics” and a whitemale imagination of flexible economic accumulation, the Historical emergence of ultramodern CAPITAL signals a dangerous new ritual environment for contemporary social problems. It also presents important theoretical, methodological, and political challenges to the critical sociological imagination. Structured as an analytic collage, the paper asks that we, as social scientists, reflexively double back upon our own complicities with current informational modalities of power, so as to jam or uproot the most “possessive” features of cybernetic culture. Originally “performed” as part of the 1992 SSSP Presidential Address, the text includes visual images used during that presentation. It also includes a discussion of the relationship between telecommunicative mediums of memory and the eclipse of Historical awareness, the ultramodern police bombing of the Move community in Philadelphia, and a critical analysis of CAPITAList appropriations of Voodoo-based religious practices and other African-American styles of resistance.

Welcome to the PARASITE CAFE: Postmodernity as a Social Problem

This is an ethnoGRAPHic text, if somewhat surreally—a story of the dense and high velocity technostructuring of the society in which I find myself knotted in a complex of ritual network relations to others. Technological relations. Telecommunicative relations. Relations of modelling and simulation and control. This is a story of a postmodern society in The USA Today; a sociological story of the inFORMational powers of an ultra-modern form of straight whitemale CAPITAL gone trans-global. It is also a story of those sentenced to circulate at the peripheries of an imperially anchored and electronically mass-mediated U.S. will to power without end: women, peoples of color, and the economically impoverished. Beware: this is not a pleasing story to (w)rite. By connecting postmodernity to sociological questions of parasitism, I hope to explore the bodily invasion of an increasing number of fleshy human animals by a cold and uncanny addiction to a seemingly endless flow of inFORMation. This is CAPITAL to such an intense degree that it becomes a motion picture environment, a fragmentary televisionary collage of fears and fascinations. This is a social problem. It operates under the panicky sign-work of asetheticization, commodification, and excess. Throughout this text I read such signs as indicative of both the disembodying flight of metropolitan men of ultra-modern power and of the sacrificial ascendency of a “new and improved” form of fascist cultural rituals. READ MY LIPS! Beware: this is not a pleasing story to read.

Re-forming the SSSP: Questions of “praxis”

The Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) emerged from a social movement of sociologists who wanted to apply their social science knowledge to a society riddled by cruel inequities. Recently the distinctive mission of SSSP has come under scrutiny. The organization must make some structural innovations to generate fresh and critical approaches to contemporary social problems. These innovations would include: restructuring annual meetings to reflect the urgency of social problems; being reflexive about forms of knowledge; increasing the interdisciplinary emphasis of research; promoting activism within society and the social sciences; experimenting with alternative formats of meetings.

Terror of the Simulacra: Struggles for Justice and the Postmodern

This text is an ethnographic text, if somewhat surreally. It invites the reader, not so much to agree with the evidence and the analysis set forth by its author, but to enter actively into the process of researching one’s own historical and biographically given position within what might be described provisionally as ‘the postmodern scene’ of contemporary America (Kroker & Cook, 1986). It begins with a terrifying fragment of this scene, the image of Lt. Col. Oliver North, Jr., telling the truth about the ‘facts’ of U.S. foreign policy. This scene is terrifying, precisely because for many of us there was an other side, or several, to North’s truth. There was ‘factual’ knowledge of the dead and mutilated bodies of others who opposed this country’s right to imperial domination. And there was the terror that facts of ‘the other side’ make little difference within the consumptive mediascape of postmodern America that any facts are all too easily converted televisually into their opposite and then recirculated ritualistically into a fascinating amalgam of truths. Truths that feed vampirically upon images of apparent contradiction, amassing more and more information, data-banking everything, giving nothing in return, inoculating themselves against structural contradictions with periodic massmediated spectacles of scandal.

O delírio cibernético de Norbert Wiener

Esse texto trata da condicao do mundo cada vez mais mediado por uma especie de ciber-hifenizacao delirante da realidade que parece ter comecado a partir do pensamento de Norbert Wiener.

O social e o tecnológico: questões da ultramodernidade

Entrevista sobre Pos-modernidade. A entrevista foi conduzida por Adriana Amaral com o professor e coordenador do Departamento de Sociologia do Boston College, Massachussets, Estados Unidos, Stephen Pfohl.

A Hacker ManifestoA Hacker Manifesto, by WarkMcKenzie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 215 pp.

transcendentals of everyday communicative pragmatics. But in this relocation ici bas the limits of Kantianism, that “hold tight” and renounce if the beyond is not to be squandered, have been newly affirmed: Habermas “enjoins philosophy to respect the limits that the division of labor of a democratically constituted, complex society imposes on its legitimate public activism” (p. 9, emphasis added). But as this communicative modesty leads the philosophy of autonomy back around to its own recognizably pietistic sources, what would it have to recommend to philosophy in a country where that democratically constituted complex order has become the instrument of something vicious and the nation, the United States, if it is again seriously attacked during the present administration, plausibly stands in line to be the next catastrophically insane nation in human history? This question may, indeed, be too urgent to pose fairly of anyone. Still, communicative philosophy might have even more difficulty finding ready response to a narrower and closer query, one that its entire edifice may have been designed to parry: Whether, that is, its own relentless claim to goodness, its insistence on taking everything into consideration with inexhaustible tolerance, is not in fact a mask to master all? This has perhaps driven it along its route of accommodation. For even as communicative philosophy insists paragraph by paragraph that it is fully up-to-date, having cleared with Rorty and the rest of the competition the hurdle of the linguistic turn, Habermas has ambitiously surrendered the capacity for reflection. This is evident in his painful inability to hear his own words and know what they affirm. Thus, with the hammer that Nietzsche recommended to all philosophers, tap, for its sounding resonance, this line where Habermas writes that Brandom’s “theory methodologically exploits a tendency toward self-retrieval and reflexive upgrading of itself that is built into language” (p. 133). A Hacker Manifesto, by McKenzie Wark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. 215 pp.

21.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-674-01543-6.

21.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-674-015436.