Sociology and susan sontag: Re-shaping the discipline

Abstract

Sociology's origins lie in moral idealism, in a concern to end human misery and, instead, create a humanistic society. It has betrayed these origins through an overconcern with its stature as a science. The desire for academic respectability has limited sociology to conventional methodological practices, whereas, to fulfil its original ambitions it needs a broader vision and wider data base than is conventionally permitted. Indeed, those works outside the academic framework, from the avant-garde to Feminist scholarship, come closer to explaining modernity than does the discipline commissioned to do so. The continuity between all acts of intellectuality and conceptuality is based upon the human experience. The emergence of interpretative frameworks and metalanguages limits understanding: there is a need for broader research questions and perspectives. Feminist scholarship offers that vision and the works of Susan Sontag, her concern with art, photography, language and modernity, illustrate the principles of this alternative scholarship. With sociology reshaped through a new perspective, its research questions would focus on the authoritarianism of knowledge systems; the hierarchical arrangement of ideas; the infantilism of individuals through certain linguistic practices; and the need to construct knowledge which is emancipatory. The arts, the avant-garde, marginal voices and alternative knowledge systems should, thus, become beacons for sociology in its desire to understand the modern, social experience.