Abstract
‘Ben Agger passed away unexpectedly on Tuesday, 7.14.15’ said the email from Tim Luke. As Ben’s other friends, associates, former students, and fellow travelers have been repeating online and in other types of conversation, I was stunned and saddened by the terrible news. A marathon runner and likely far above peak fitness for his age, Ben was taken out by ‘a brief viral illness’ for which he received treatment, but which worsened and became critical in a few days. Ben’s more than 20 single-authored and co-authored books and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the Frankfurt School, Western Marxism, broader classical and contemporary theory, their intersections with postmodernism, cultural studies, and feminism, and applications in immanent or deconstructive critiques of positivist sociological approaches, digital culture, political economy, and other facets of public life constitute a very substantial contribution to the ‘critical theory’ and ‘critical sociology’ communities broadly construed. Ben would want me to mention that he co-authored publications with his partner, sociologist Beth Anne Shelton, and considered her a collaborator in his overall efforts, while he strongly supported her independent, successful scholarly agenda. Ben currently has more work in-press and a forthcoming piece with his spouse that will appear in Critical Sociology. A co-authored essay with his good friend and long-time colleague Tim Luke appeared earlier this year in the March issue of the journal. Ben was Professor of Sociology and Humanities and Director of the Center for Theory at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he had been a faculty member for more than 20 years. He held earlier academic positions at Bishops University (Quebec), University of Waterloo (Ontario), and SUNY-Buffalo.
As a freshman at York University in 1968, Ben took an intense seminar on Hegel and Marx from John O’Neill and afterwards worked closely with him. Traces of O’Neill’s effort to critically rethink sociology in his Sociology as Skin Trade and Making Sense Together are clearly visible in Ben’s corpus of published work. As a political economy PhD student at the University of Toronto in the mid-1970s, he got to know Paul Piccone and participated briefly in the Toronto Telos Group. Ben had many influences – he read Marx and other classical theorists, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and the wider critical theory tradition, works by the Telos, Praxis, and Tel Quel circles, and Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, and other recent continental theorists. Ben was influenced strongly by late ’60s political culture and the North American and European New Left. He regularly taught ‘The Sociology of the ’60s’, about the era’s conflicts, changes, and aspirations as narrated by its activists. He also wrote about the topic. Avoiding nostalgia, Ben hoped for a recovery of the era’s egalitarian hopes and political energy. Ben’s scholarship ranged widely – he wrote on the development of theoretical ideas and schools, yet also addressed very diverse political economic and sociocultural facets of ‘postmodern’ life and ‘fast capitalism’ – media, texting, cell phones, gun culture, family, gender, the body, and fast food. Manifesting Ben’s Hegelian-Marxian roots, he historicized his classical and contemporary continental influences, giving them a distinctly North American accent in interpretations and applications, while opening to the kaleidoscopic events, technologies, politics, and movements of culture and thought accompanying neoliberal globalization. He strove to identify the sociocultural and political resources and fissures in the neoliberal structure of accumulation that could open the way for immanent criticism and collective action.
Ben was a trenchant critic of positivism, or what he called ‘Midwestern empiricism’. He did not attack empirical work per se, but he emphatically opposed efforts to ‘methodologize’ and ‘dehistoricize’ sociology under the flag of ‘science’ and consequently to limit legitimate sociological practice to narrowly construed analytical and empirical foci, police disciplinary borders, and dismiss ‘social theory’ or the broader, normatively-oriented, living versions of the classical tradition (especially its more plural offspring, manifesting changing public life) that provide resources to enhance reflexivity about the ends of social research and debate them. Ben favored the ‘pandisciplinary’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘global’ purview over insular disciplinary thought. In conversations, starting 35 years ago, he complained bitterly to me about the growing disciplinary tendency to marginalize social theory (especially versions identified as ‘critical theory’), eliminate it as a specialty area in graduate sociology programs, reduce and water down ‘necessary’ courses on the classics, treat classical type theoretical practices as moribund, and dismiss them as a waste of time for graduate students and younger faculty that distracts from the practice of ‘real’ sociology and proper focus on departmental and personal professional advancement.
Ben founded his online Fast Capitalism with the intent of providing a welcoming venue for social theory practices of classical breadth and style – stressing creation of theory with critical intent via engagement with major contemporary political economic and sociocultural events, issues, and problems. In recent years, its contributors have become much more global, like Ben’s own focus and vision of contemporary capitalism and social theory. Currently edited by Tim Luke, the journal is connected with UTA’s Center for Theory, which Ben had directed since 1998, and which is devoted to interdisciplinary traditions of social theory and cultural theory. Stephen Turner has argued that while social theory languishes in disciplinary sociology, it flourishes in these emerging, increasing, and widening vibrant transdisciplinary zones, more closely engaged in public life. Like Ben’s Fast Capitalism and Center for Theory, Turner founded the International Social Theory Consortium to provide a home for social theorists. Scott McNall founded Current Perspectives in Social Theory in 1979 at Kansas for the same purpose and Ben edited it for five years in the 1990s. Current ITSC co-director Harry Dahms (with Gurminder Bambra) has edited CPST very effectively for a decade, and Ben had served on his editorial board. Social theory networks overlap and have become much more interdisciplinary, much larger, and much more global in recent decades. A key contributor to developing and expanding these spaces, Ben’s work on ‘fast capitalism’ explores the political economic, sociocultural, and technological developments that have made these larger and wider social theory circles possible. Critical Sociology occupies a distinctive niche in these networks and provides an important free space for sociologists and others working in the broader traditions of ‘critical’ social theory and related ‘critical’ interpretive and historical practices. It is a very appropriate venue for Ben’s recent co-authored contribution with Tim Luke on the Piketty debate and his forthcoming piece with Beth Anne Shelton in the Critical Education special issue.
Ben was an important contributor to contemporary social theory, especially to that rooted ultimately in Hegelian-Marxian ‘critical theory’. His work is characterized by its openness or willingness to engage critically today’s plural theoretical traditions and sociocultural changes. Although an acerbic critic of sociologists who express narrow, insular conceptions of legitimate sociological practices and actively disparage or dismiss social theory, Ben was a mild-mannered, generous supporter of his circle of friends, students, and almost all with whom he shared face-to-face relationships. He had a sober way about him that helped him be a prudent mentor for his students and effective in leadership roles. Like many senior ‘critical theorists’ and ‘critical sociologists’, Ben’s intellectual formation and especially his ‘belief’ in theory and sociology as something more than a professional career and pursuit of recognition and rank was shaped by his experience of ’60s era political tumult, tragedy, and hope. At Ben’s request, I wrote remembrances in Fast Capitalism for the preceding generation – Derrida, Baudrillard, and an unfinished third on Rorty’s passing. If perhaps not in demeanor, Ben was in spirit and thought an unreconstructed North American ’68er. This current senior generation of critical theorists is now beginning to thin and pass away. It is somewhat strange and definitely extremely sad to report the untimely loss of this friend and ‘paisan’ and ‘younger’ member of our ranks. Ben’s passing is a marker and reminder for his ’68er fellow travelers, friends, and younger folks who value and carry on the critical tradition and share in appreciation of its various roots, branches, and carriers. We will miss him.