Abstract
‘Critical sociology’ is often synonymous for a close affinity with Marx. It is used as a self-identifying label for sociologists who still read the likes of Adorno, Marcuse or Fraser. It distinguishes a type of sociology in which the bellwether for good research is whether it draws attention to social problems and social inequities, to violence, destruction, and domination. None of these, however, really does justice to critical sociology. They do not really mark its position in the field nor explain how sociology can even be a critical endeavor and still remain sociology. They do not distinguish critical sociology from critical theory, or make it more substantive than a catchy label, or give it the vitality of an intellectual method. They do not disambiguate ‘critical sociology.’ Rather, they leave it still more ambiguous.
Which makes the present book such a unique and important addition. Mark Worrell’s The Sociogony offers a powerful demonstration of critical sociology in probably its weightiest form, as an outgrowth of Hegelianism, an unusual strain of sociology that did not take a positivist turn in the 19th century, is closely aligned with but not limited to Marxist applications, and which, in most overt fashion, critiques the given and therefore carries an entirely different understanding of social facts, data and the empirical than the measurement, recording and categorization of ‘matters of fact.’
Worrell is a capable guide to this rare school of thought and the alternative it presents to what he calls ‘ordinary sociology.’ Critical sociology ‘[demonstrates] how dialectics (literally split reasoning) is itself a feature of society at odds with itself, i.e. normal society, that reified products of human activity emerge out of a process, that the process is driven by contradictions, and that the process and procession has a structure. . . . [D]ialectics represents not only a feature of contradictory life but also the way out of alienated life as an essential intellectual method’ (p. 159). As Worrell argues, the simplest but most profound tool of critical sociology is syllogism: connecting ‘moments of particularity’ to a universal, and not mistaking particularity for individuality, which it is not (p. 20).
The Sociogony offers a first-volume (with another two to follow) synthesis of this approach, mainly of Marx and Durkheim, but more specifically of social facts and the critique of capital. Worrell situates these two classic arguments within the same intellectual trajectory that extends from Hegel, the Jena circle and his Jena lectures in the early 19th century to Marx’s Capital in the middle of the century, to the publication of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912. During this time, Worrell writes, ‘Spirit found and comprehended itself . . . philosophically and sociologically but with no power to prevent mass suicide’ (p. 276) as witnessed by the epic violence of the 20th century. Marx and Durkheim help us understand that violence. Their signal contributions offer, in a Hegelian lens, a kind of luminous self-clarification; yet because sociology is still not properly situated within this Hegelian lineage, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of social facts, how they are ‘crystallized interactions and [how] interactions are fluid structures’ (p. 163). Worrell’s original proposal in the book starts here, as he attempts to critically model that process and advance a kind of self-comprehension attempted by Marx, Durkheim, and Simmel (among a host of others) before but without success, and which means that we (‘Spirit’) still lack a kind of ‘recognition’ that we are imperiled not to have.
Worrell’s thesis is that social facts are best understood as the eponymous sociogony. He explains this as a processual understanding of social facts as they traverse through eight distinct moments: (1) assemblage or a weird nature complex, (2) ebullience or effervescence, (3) projection and externalization, (4) objectification and internalization, (5) estrangement and fetishistic inversion, (6) reification, (7) alienation and domination, and (8) desublimation and ‘myriad possible consequences flowing from the process of derealization’ (p. 162). While many in the field, shaped now by pragmatist and constructivist tendencies above all, will likely balk at any sort of teleology, even one as cautious of the dangers of teleology as this, Worrell gives space for competing theoretical approaches within his overall construct, arguing that pragmatism and constructivism theorize the first four moments of sociogony while power-oriented and structuralist frameworks theorize the next three. The final moment, meanwhile, is left to the ‘world of monsters and magicians’ and largely defies understanding by any existing theoretical school. Worrell here offers an inspired discussion of the appearance of monsters, monstrous forms, and other grotesqueries in industrial and neoliberal capitalist culture, borrowing from the category of the ‘living dead’ that Marx and Engels used to describe both capital’s accumulation of dead labor and the zombies and vampires found so often in capitalist mythologies (p. 259).
But what is it? The sociogony, as Worrell explains, tries to comprehend the same thing that Marx attempted in his discussion of capital and its ‘moments’ of value in circulation, Durkheim in his dissection of the collective consciousness and its material embodiment in totems and ritual practice, and Berger and Luckmann in their tension-filled formula ‘Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.’ These are major contributions of sociology as a non-positivist critical pursuit, for which comprehension consists of self-understanding. Worrell proposes sociogony as a comprehensive attempt to finally grasp their common concern with the different moments of unfolding social facts, which is where critical sociology stakes its ground as an intellectual method and promises a whole treasury of hitherto missing forms of intelligence and recognition.
But what is it that unfolds? While Worrell admires Marxian attempts to understand the circuit of capital, he does not make this a culmination in which ‘the now is [finally] no longer like night-time’ (to paraphrase Hegel). Worrell would of course need to veer away from this if he wants to put Marx and Durkheim on an equivalent plane and synthesize them, but as he unpacks each moment of the sociogony there is something lost in translation, perhaps because most of the discussion here consists of a truly virtuoso reading of theorists and writers ranging from Julian Jaynes, to Erich Fromm, Freud, Zizek and even Guy de Maupassant. The most extensively detailed moment is the eighth and final one, which also packs the most empirical punch. For each of the other moments, the analysis comes mainly in the form of allusion and quotation, tied together with sometimes dense but often evocative and well-crafted prose.
If the above vague questions are any indication, however, then the sociogony does not offer much clarity on its primary object and what would presumably be the primary duty of critical sociology to sublate and understand. Worrell refers to the sociogony as a way of picturing ‘a spiraling of negations, inversions, reversals and the continuous return of spectral residues that haunt psyche’ (p. 162). But his analysis of its different moments offers an extensive compilation of on-the-point quotations without really explaining what inspired (or haunted) the theorists who wrote them. This book therefore reads somewhat less like Hegel’s Philosophy of History, which discussed human events even though the most important thing about them was what was written about them after the fact, and somewhat more like the left Hegelians who drew Marx and Engels’ satiric ire in The German Ideology as participating in a verbose ‘world struggle’ of spirit and ‘revolutions’ in mind that proceeded with exasperating rapidity.
Worrell’s ambitious book and his three-volume series is a welcome and important contribution to a sociological landscape that often seems far less visionary than the terrible times demand. Critical sociology of this sort promises a needed antidote. My question is whether ‘social facts’ adequately serve as the thing that has these eight different moments? If so, then sociogony arguably makes a more significant advance on the scale of something like Simmel’s social forms than it does Marx and Durkheim’s social totalities. If not, then what Worrell’s book lacks is a critical-sociological inquiry into ‘spirit’ itself, or at least one that can adequately encompass both capital and collective consciousness alike and fit the profile that Worrell wants to give them. We currently lack self-understanding as this universal (syllogistically speaking) or even a reliable vocabulary to refer to it, with the possible exception of something like the Gaia hypothesis and its planetary scale.
Any strong move in this direction, however, is probably still vulnerable to Marx and Engels’ own use of syllogism for critical purposes in 1846: ‘First of all an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based on the abstraction. That is how to proceed if you want to appear German, profound and speculative.’ The Sociogony remains largely immune from this (critical) criticism but this is mainly because the book hesitates to place its finger on spirit, slippery no doubt, even while it provides the means for a vivid phenomenology of spirit. Worrell promises to substantiate this in the eagerly awaited next two volumes, so if there is a missing link in this first volume it is not fatal. But at the very least it suggests that critical sociology, in the disambiguated version of which Worrell’s book offers such a superb demonstration, still has not completely surpassed its original cautionary tale.