Dr. Sharmila Rudrappa
Office Hours: Wed 10:00am - 12:00noon; Office: 574 Burdine
Phone: 232-6310 (O); 452-4420 (H); Please do not email me.
Sociological Theory: Self And Society
SPRING 2010
One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to
see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself... this generation, especially
of our people, has a burden, more so than any other time in history. The most important
thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves (Malcolm X, cited by Patricia
Hill Collins in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. Edited by Joe Wood. 1992: 59; my
emphasis).
Introduction
I begin this syllabus with a quote from Malcolm X. Malcolm X spoke these words during a time
when African Americans were changing the very definitions of what it meant to be Black. In this
quote he urges Black youth to re-define themselves, re-infuse blackness with new meanings, and
re-constitute themselves. His words are an exemplar of agency, propelling people into re-making
themselves and their history.
But how does one go about re-making oneself? Or speaking sociologically, what are the sources
of individual agency? How do the structures of everyday life shape our experiences, our choices,
and ultimately, our sense of self?
At a fundamental level Malcolm X is grappling with an issue that animates social theory— and
that is, the constitution of the individual. How is human subjectivity formed? Does society fully
structure us, or do we somehow autonomously generate our subjectivities? How do we conceive
of ourselves— to paraphrase Malcolm X, “how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and
think for yourself”— given that we making meaning of the world around us based on inherited
categories, and the concomitant meanings imposed on us?
The constitution of the individual in society, and the constitution of society are central concerns
for sociology. In this class we will take on the individual, who is at once autonomous and
socially determined, as our primary subject of inquiry. We will begin with Descartes, and then
move onto the classical social theorists, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. Central to their theories is
the conceptualization of the individual as social, as constituted only within society. Yet, there are
fundamental differences in their conception of society, history, and individuality. Over the
course of the semester we will examine the basic sociological questions of structure, agency, the
basis for knowledge, human action, social change, and individual emancipation through looking
at classical theorists mentioned above, as well as recent scholars such as Erving Goffman,
Michel Foucault, Susan Bordo, and Judith Butler.
This course is designed to give you a broad overview, rather than an in-depth examination of any
one theorist. We will read translations, or the original texts by the various theorists. In addition,
we will watch videos and films to help grasp the concepts we come across in our readings.
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Required Books and Reading Package:
The SIX required books that I recommend you buy on Amazon, or Half Price Books.
1. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air. Used copies from $ 6.33/- on
Amazon.com
2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls Of Black Folk. (Norton Critical Editions, edited by Henry Louis
Gates). Available from $3.84/- onwards on Amazon.com.
3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. Used books around $8/and new ones around $10/- on Amazon.com
4. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The cheapest version at
Amazon
is
http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Self-EverydayLife/dp/0385094027/ref=pd_sim_b_7, published by DoubleDay).
5. Arlie Hochschild, Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Feeling. (The original was
published in 1983, but I don’t think many prints are available. The book was re-issued in
2003. I’d prefer you buy the older version, but the newer version works for our purposes).
6. Max Weber (translated by Talcott Parsons) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism. Used copies available for $3/- on Amazon.com
Reading package: The reading package is available on Blackboard.
Course Expectations And Grading
Class attendance
Attendance to class is mandatory. You may miss up to two classes, without affecting your grade.
Subsequently, for every class you miss your grade will fall by 1/2 a grade. For example, if
you miss four classes, you grade will change from an A to a B.
Participation: 10%
Participation in class makes huge a difference. I encourage you to ask questions, express doubts,
answer your classmates’ questions, and engage intellectually. I urge you to complete all readings
so that we can have active participation. Our collective success this semester hinges on your
individual participation; participation is crucial for not just your own learning experience, but
also your classmates’ learning in the classroom.
“Surprise” quizzes: 10%
Over the course of the semester, you will receive in class “surprise” quizzes over the readings.
The quiz is open book, to be answered in class. As a result, it is absolutely necessary for you to
bring your books to class.
Goffman exercise and presentation: 20%
This is a group assignment due towards the end of the semester; you will work in groups, and
submit a 10 page double spaced group report. We will discuss this further at the time of the
assignment. The entire group will receive a group grade, which is 20% of your overall grade. If
you do not put in 100% effort, then your entire group’s grade will be negatively affected. We
will have class presentations based on this particular project.
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Take home exams: 60%
I encourage you to work in groups to discuss your answers and prepare outlines; however, each
one of you will write your exam individually. I will consider it as academic misconduct if two or more students turn in the exact same exam, or an exam with similarly
structured sentences. Such exams will not be graded.
Mid-term: 30%
Final: 30%
Missed exams/ late submissions: You have your syllabus with you, and you know when
assignments are due. Late exams or assignments will NOT be accepted.
Special Accommodations
Students with special needs should notify me by presenting a letter from the Services of
Students with Disabilities (SSD) Office.
Requests
1. Please turn off all cell-phones before you enter class. You may be asked to leave the
classroom if your phone rings in class.
2. Please come to class on time.
3. Please complete all reading assignments before coming to class.
Dates to remember
January 22: Last day of the official add/drop period; after this date, changes in registration
require the approval of the department chair and the student’s dean.
February 3: Twelfth class day; this is the date the official enrollment count is taken.
February 15: Last day to drop a class without possible academic penalty.
March 15–20: Spring break.
March 29: Last day an undergraduate student may, with the dean’s approval, withdraw or drop a
class except for urgent/ substantiated, nonacademic reasons.
Last day to change registration in a class to or from the pass/fail or credit/no credit basis.
May 7: Last class day.
May 10-11, 16: No-class days.
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Reading Assignments
Week 1— Introduction
January 20 and 22
Going over syllabus, introductions, etc.
What are the origins of sociology? Where do we see it going?
Stephen Pinker, “My Genome, Myself,” The New York Times Magazine, Feb 11, 2009.
Week 2— Descartes
I think, therefore I am… (Descartes, 1637, Discourse on Method).
January, 25, 27 and 29
1. Rene Descartes, 1637. “Part IV” from “Discourse on Method” in The Philosophical
Works of Descartes. 1968. Edited by Haldane and Ross. Cambridge University Press.
2. Descartes. 1641. “Second Meditation” from Meditations on the First Philosophy. Edited
by John Cottingham. Cambridge University Press, New York.
3. Susan Bordo, 1987. Chapter 6 from The Flight To Objectivity: Essays On Cartesianism
And Culture.
Week 3— Emile Durkheim on the Sources of Society
… the whole does not equal the sum of its parts; it is something different, whose
properties differ from those displayed by the parts from which it his formed. Association
is not, as has sometimes been believed, a phenomenon infertile in itself, which consists
merely in juxtaposing externally given facts already given and properties already
constituted (Durkheim, 1982. The Rules. Ed. by Lukes).
February 1, 3 and 5
1. “What is a social fact,” The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile Durkheim, edited by
George E.G. Catlin (1938: 1-13).
2. “Rules for the observation of social facts,” The Rules of Sociological Method by Emile
Durkheim, edited by Steven Lukes (1938: 60-84).
3. On solidarity, and division of labor. Emile Durkheim: On Morality and Society, Edited by
Robert Bellah. (University of Chicago Press, 1973:86-146).
Week 4— Marx on Labor and Alienation
The worker puts his life into the object; then it no longer belongs to him but to the object.
The greater this activity, the poorer is the worker… The greater this product is, the
smaller he is himself. The externalization of the worker in his product means not only
that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside him
independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him… (Marx, Economic and
Philosophical Writings).
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February 8, 10 and 12
1. Alienated Labor. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Ed. by Lawrence H. Simon (1994: 58-68).
2. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Edited by David McLellan (OUP). Read pages 421-430,
and 450-462.
Week 5— Feminist Reconfigurations of Marx on Labor, and Knowledge
As an engaged vision, the understanding of the oppressed, the adoption of a standpoint
exposes the real relations among human beings as inhuman, points beyond the present, and
carries a historically libratory role (Hartsock, 1987).
February 15, 17, and 19
1. REQUIRED BOOK. Excerpts from Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization Of
Human Feeling.
2. Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically
Feminist Historical Materialism.” In Feminism and Methodology, Edited by Sandra
Harding, (1987: 157-176).
Week 6— On Modernity
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Marx,
Communist Manifesto).
February 22, 24 and 26
REQUIRED BOOK. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Selections—
Introduction, Sections I, II & V.
Week 7— Max Weber and the Spirit of Capitalism
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. … this order is now bound to
the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the
lives of all the individuals who are born into this economic acquisition, with irresistible
force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt…. The
care of external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which
can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate has decreed that the cloak should become an
iron cage (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1992: 181).
March 1, 3, and 5
REQUIRED BOOK. Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Selections TBA.
You will receive your first exam on March 5.
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Week 8— EXAM WEEK. No readings.
March 8—In-class discussion of exam questions. Please bring your notes, and readings.
March 10—No class. Work on your exams.
March 12—Recap and discussion on readings completed so far.
Return exams on March 12 in class.
Week 9— SPRING BREAK March 15-19
Week 10— Goffman’s Performance
… each individual is expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings, conveying a
view of the situation which he fells the others will be able to find at least temporarily
acceptable. (Goffman. 1956).
March 22, 24, and 26
REQUIRED BOOK. Erving Goffman, Excerpts from The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life.
You will receive guidelines for your Goffman projects.
Week 11— On Judith Butler’s Performativity
… the rearticulation of kinship in Paris is Burning might be understood as repetitions of
hegemonic forms of power which fail to repeat loyally and, in that failure, open possibilities
for resignifying the terms of violation against their violating aims (Butler, Bodies That
Matter, 1993).
March 29, 31, and April 2
1. Video to be watched in class (over two periods)—Paris is Burning
2. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge Press, 1993: 121-140).
Week 12— Foucault’s Disciplining and Punishing
Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of power that regards
individuals both as objects and instruments of its exercise. (Foucault, 1977).
April 5, 7, and 9
REQUIRED BOOK. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Parts 1, 2,
and pages 135-23.
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Week 13— W.E.B. DuBois’ double consciousness
It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sensation of looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on
in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness— an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,
whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. W.E.B.Dubois, The Souls
of Black Folk, 1903.
April 12, No class but you will meet in your groups to work on your Goffman exercises.
April 14 and 16, REQUIRED BOOK. W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk.
Week 14— Goffman presentations in class: April 19, 21 and 23, 2010
Please submit your Goffman group projects on April 30, 2010.
Week 15— Patricia Hill Collins, The Outsider Within
April 26 and 28: Patricia Hill Collins’ Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice.
1998. Chs. 6 and 7.
April 30: No readings. Please submit your Goffman exercises.
You will receive your take-home exam in class on April 30.
Week 16— The Traumatized Self
Survivors of trauma frequently remark that they are not the same people they were before
being traumatized. As a survivor of the Nazi death camps observed, “One can be alive
after Sobibor without having survived Sobibor.” … Migael Scherer expresses a loss
commonly experienced by rape survivors when she writes, “I will always miss myself as
I was.” What are we to make of these cryptic comments? How can one miss oneself?
How can … fail to survive a death camp and still live to tell one’s story? … what self is it
who remembers having had this experience? (Susan Brison, 1997).
May 1
Susan Brison, “Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity.” In Feminists
Rethink The Self, edited by Diane Tietjens Meyers. (1997: 12-32).
May 5
Class discussions on exams
May 7
Last class day; wrap-up.
Take home exams due on May 10, 2010. Please submit your exams
over email, as attachments.
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