Abstract
‘Nothing will come of nothing’, King Lear responds to Cordelia. ‘Not so’, maintains Susie Scott in this closely argued and pioneering book. Sociology, she argues, has largely neglected Nothing through its emphasis on visible, structured action. This is in contrast to other subjects, especially Philosophy, and the arts in general, not to mention everyday life. Think of Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1957), ‘negative space’, the silences and pauses in plays by Beckett and Pinter, of the paths not taken.
Susie Scott displays considerable sociological imagination in her re-examination of an impressive range of studies as well as in her use of 27 personal stories that she gathered. She sees Nothing as both a form of social action and as a social process and these core assumptions inform her presentation of a variety of topics. A chapter is devoted to each of her main themes: non-identity; silence; invisibility; emptiness; and stillness. Her analysis is largely at the micro or meso levels although, as in her chapter on ‘Silence and quietness’ or where she discusses the ‘Slow Movement’ in her conclusion, more macro, political issues also come to the fore. Authors discussed include Husserl, Sartre, Mead, Weber and Goffman.
I shall simply note a few of the topics covered in order to give a flavour of the book. A distinction between acts of ‘commission’ (doing nothing) and acts of ‘omission’ (non-doing) serves to order these topics. Thus ‘shyness’ (a subject of earlier research by the author) is an example of omission, a self-conscious emotion which inhibits sociability. ‘Phone phobia’ is a particular manifestation of shyness. Later, there is a discussion of ‘boredom, role distance and conspicuous absenteeism’. These are all disappearing acts, social acts of commission. Again, she writes of ‘social death’ the process whereby a once some-body is turned into a no-body, dementia for example. In the experiences of miscarriage and stillbirth, pregnancy occurs but is lost and an act of commission becomes one of omission. These and many other illustrations are presented in well-referenced but short paragraphs and each reading will find the unfamiliar jostling with the familiar as Scott shows how these stories contribute to her overall argument.
Scott’s writing is generally lucid, despite the complexities of some of the arguments, and often memorable. Every word is made to count and seemingly random sets of topics are, in fact, closely linked. Readers should be prepared to spend time on this text, to stop and to think and perhaps to imagine how this analysis might contribute to their own areas of study or, indeed, to think through, to re-imagine, their own biographies. The book can be challenging personally as well as intellectually.
Inevitably, in a book which seeks to open up new areas of enquiry, there will be points which require clarification or elaboration. It took me, for example, some time to grasp the omission/commission distinction especially where it is applied to death. Also, earlier in the book, I found myself wondering why understanding Sociology as a study of social things ‘meant a focus on the extreme’ (p. 2). Of course, deviance of all kinds remains a popular topic but so too is the study of the unexceptional or the everyday (to which this present discussion makes an important contribution).
There is an impressively extensive and wide-ranging list of references and one which will be helpful to many future scholars. But there is one large gap. There are no references to Marx or Engels or to any major Marxist scholars. But would not a discussion of the dialectic, the negation of the negation and to the class struggle make an important contribution to the analysis of Nothing and one, moreover which would deal with the macro as well as the other two levels? Even at a more experiential level of class analysis, the everyday processes by which someone might be defined as ‘not one of us’ might clearly provide an indication of the way in which the study of Nothing might illuminate class and other social divisions.
But this is, perhaps, just another example of the way in which this book encourages thoughts to race off in all sorts of different directions. The Social Life of Nothing is, undoubtedly, far from being the last word on the subject. But I predict that it will stimulate much more discussion, more re-reading of established texts and redefinitions of topics. This is a book which is sometimes touching, occasionally puzzling but certainly not forgettable. Something has indeed come from Nothing.