Sociology beyond suspicion: Goldfarb as post-critical critic

This paper argues that sociology has come to be dominated by an ethos of suspicion and that attending to the critical sociology of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb can help it break free from this domination and expand the range of its relation to the structures, institutions, and interactions it studies. This argument unfolds in three parts. In the first it is argued that, while critique remains essential, the ethos of suspicion has unnecessarily narrowed its scope. The space for a more capacious understanding of critique is made, secondly, through a rereading of two recent ‘critics of critique’: Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. Third and finally, this paper shows how Goldfarb’s scholarship steps into the space carved out by these criticisms, providing a model of a sociology that has moved ‘beyond suspicion’ in its attention to the liberatory power that lies in the collective, critical capacity of ordinary, everyday actors.

Common is the capacity to critique, rare the capacity to convene. What makes the life and work of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb worthy of note is his ability to combine these two capacities, to hold to together the usual and the unusual. It is the import of this accomplishment in both his person and scholarship that I would like to demonstrate in the three further parts of the present essay.

In the first I will discuss critique, attending particularly to its mood, in order to take note of the incongruity between the aloof and suspicious ethos in which it is normally practiced and that of Goldfarb. This ‘critique’ of critique will deepen, in the second part, through the examination of arguments made by two notable social theorists: Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. From the former we will learn that, to accomplish its ends, critique must be adapted to changed social and historical conditions. And from the latter’s consideration of how the performance of criticism concocts an addicting elixir of invulnerability, we will see the need for scholars to relate otherwise to that which we study. But how are we to make such an adaptation? What is a critic to do once these critiques of critique have been lodged? How can we move beyond an ethos of suspicion? The third and final part of this essay attempts an answer to such questions by returning to Goldfarb’s life and work, attending to how it follows post-critical paths opened by Bauman and Latour and searching it for clues as to how others may do the same.

If this scaffolding holds what will become visible is that Goldfarb’s sociology is powerful because it remains open, incipient, and collaborative. We will find him to be that rarest of birds: a hopeful critic. It may be most helpful to grasp that eccentric ethos, however, by first examining what it elides.

Sociology – particularly the sociology of the grand tradition of Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, Peter Berger and Charles Tilly, the kind practiced at the New School for Social Research where Goldfarb made his home for many years – is undoubtedly a critical science. As critical, it is part of a modern tradition that, in Wendy Brown’s words, ‘has prided itself on explaining both mystifications and human consort with these mystifications from a place imagined to be their opposite in every respect’ (2013, p. 7). The illusions of ages past and the irrationalities of supposedly ‘primitive’ persons are cast down by sociology’s demystifying and debunking powers. As a science, it uses these powers to aid in the unmasking and dismantling that shapes, according to Robert Pippin, the very character of modernity (Pippin, 1999).

Those of us with expertise in such a critical science are expected to have mastered its content, moods, and practices.¹ We are to know from our reading of Durkheim (1995), for example, that our own national flags are violence-legitimating totems sacralized in rituals of collective effervescence. Thanks to our reading of Marx and Engels (1978), we too ought to be able to translate the language of the commodity fetish, explaining how it transforms human affairs into relationships between things. And, as always, mastery of such a discipline in turn disciplines us. Long familiarity with seeing through the doxa makes us, as Ricoeur (1970) put it, masters of suspicion, constitutively skeptical of our social reality because we know that it was constructed and is therefore relative. Having achieved this mastery we are expected to pass it on, training in turn our own apprentices in both the inhabiting of this chary mood and the bodily knowledge that such mastery involves stepping back from the natural attitude so as to grasp how others’ performances of self have been scripted.² In each of these ways sociology is indeed a critical science – but it is a critical science motivated by a desire to set things right.

The legitimate desire, the hope that motivates what Rita Felski (2015) describes as this ‘ethos of critique,’ is that such critical expertise will help us change both ourselves and our shared world. By identifying our complicity in unjust power structures, we seek to become capable of repenting of our complicity in them – and of rebelling against the structures that constrain us. It is because the world is unjust and ought to be otherwise, because it so often frees what ought to be bound and binds what ought to be free, that we take such training to be critical. And of course, it remains true that critique of unjust structures remains as necessary now as ever it was. We still need to dig down, to identify the suppressed drives and trace the surprising histories of what we take as normative. And we still need to stand back, to see how the horizon that allows a thing to be meaningful can be reframed and reformed; how the world could be otherwise than it is.³

The problem is not that critique is unnecessary but that its suspicious mood is now taken to be the only one; that the reflexivity required to critique the normative has itself become the norm.⁴ Or, as Eve Sedgwick put it in her classic essay on paranoid and reparative reading practices, ‘in a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant’ (1997, p. 5). That is to say: the critique of critique I am offering here is aimed not at its elimination but its expansion. Or, better, this is a critique of our all-too-human tendency to reify and deify a particular mood and ethos of critique, and in so doing to eliminate alternative ways both of critiquing and relating to our fragile social world.

Common is the capacity to critique, in other words, and rare the capacity to convene. Or, to put it more precisely, the question facing critical sociology today is whether we can rehydrate the shrunken ethos that animates much of what counts as critique. Can critique be animated not only by the practices of detaching, destabilising, and deconstructing but also the nouns modified by each prefix? Must we sociologists be confined by the mood of suspicion, or can we learn from our cousins in anthropology, queer theory, and literary criticism to rearrange, reorient, and refresh our ways of relating to the real? There is, I think, reason to think we can. Not least because Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour have already gestured in this direction.

From the time that I was a student in his ‘Social Interaction’ seminar, I had a sense that the theoretical importance of Goldfarb’s interactional sociology could be better grasped within the historical framework traced by Bauman in Liquid Modernity (2000). The Marxian metaphor of liquidity is particularly useful to Bauman because it allows him to understand modernity interactionally – as a process rather than as an end state. This means that, for Bauman, our ‘post-modern’ times are not in fact ‘post’ anything, that the contemporary social world is still being shaped by the dissolving, acidic powers of modernity. The difference between then and now is not in the process, then, but in the social objects being dissolved. Much of Liquid Modernity tracks the effects of modernisation as its powers were unleashed not on the vertical ties of the ancien régime but on the reconstructed horizontal institutions of ‘solid’ modernity – citizenship, the nation state; marriage. What we are left with once the ideals and institutions of solid modernity have been dissolved in the acids of modernisation, he contends, are the fragile, melted ideals and institutions of a liquid modernity.

Bauman pursues this argument through a series of analyses regarding how these two types of modernity, solid and liquid, have shaped some of the constitutive ideals of modern life, ideals such as work, community, and freedom. It is precisely in the last ideal where I sensed that the small, interactional, sociology Goldfarb modelled in The Politics of Small Things (2006) and Civility and Subversion (1998) offered new ways of responding to the dilemmas faced in liquid modernity. But here I am running ahead of my argument. In order to see how Goldfarb’s sociology responded to the contexts Bauman names we must sketch the unique challenge to freedom that arises within each.

In solid modernity the primary threat to human freedom was domination of the individual. In such a society autonomy was threatened through ‘icons’ such as the Fordist factory, Weberian bureaucracy, and Orwellian observation. As Bauman put it, in solid modernity ‘the totalitarian society of all-embracing, compulsory and enforced homogeneity loomed constantly and threateningly on the horizon’ (2000, p. 25). In the shadow of such a dominating power, the role of critical theory was to make room for freedom by warding off or dissolving a looming threat.⁵ As he wrote:

But under our present liquified conditions the threat to freedom has changed. Now the fundamental constraint on freedom is less that we will be caged in a static and pre-determined social role than that we may not be able to find one to inhabit at all. The concern is that even if we can identify what we are ‘called’ to be, we will find ourselves lacking the social resources to attain it. Today our freedom is not primarily dominated but insufficiently empowered. In liquid modernity, in other words, it is the unavailability of the shared means through which we might realise our self-chosen ends that undercuts our freedom.

One consequence of this is that many, particularly the impoverished, are saddled with a ‘duty of freedom’ unaccompanied by the ‘resources that would permit a truly free choice’ (Bauman, 1996, p. 88).⁶ It is living in this vice, Bauman holds, that produces ‘the noxious and sickening feeling of perpetual uncertainty in everything regarding the future. [Today] there is little the individual can do … to make sure that the results s/he wishes to hold tomorrow will be achieved’ (1996, p. 85, emphasis original). It is because of these radical socio-historical changes in what threatens freedom that critique must be reconceptualized.

What this new task consists in is not a change in purpose but a renewed understanding of what it is that prevents emancipation’s realisation. This is why a critical theory that is satisfied with having critiqued dominating institutions is no longer sufficient. And this means nothing less than that the task of critical theory ‘has been reversed’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 39). In order to realise the same goal, it is would-be critics who must adapt. Instead of blasting apart totalitarian constraints to our freedom, we must learn instead to ‘defend the vanishing public realm’ (Bauman, 2000). Instead of mastering an ethos of distanciation and suspicion, we must redesign and repopulate a ‘now largely vacant agora – the site of meeting, debate and negotiation between the individual and the common, private and public good’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 41). The task of critique in our liquid times is no longer dissolution, then, but assembly.⁷

Like the first, our second critic of critique thinks that ‘a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies’ (Latour, 2004, p. 231). Bruno Latour, however, follows through on this appraisal not by analysing our changed socio-historical context but the stance of the critic with regard to that which is critiqued. In his essay ‘Why has Critique Run Out of Steam?’ Latour argues that the error ‘was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible’ (2004, p. 231, emphasis in original).

Latour initiates this call for a criticism of attachment, however, by making a confession: that his own critical scholarship on the ‘social construction’ of scientific facts contributed to the problem.⁸ His effort to diagnose the logic behind the kind of critique he himself has practiced arises in part from a desire to rectify his mistake. In Latour’s account, then, there are two typical ways critics relate to that which is criticised. And although they seem opposed, they in fact share a fundamental similarity: the expectation of putting distance between themselves and the object or interaction being criticised. A word about each strategy may help to reveal their similarity.

In the first mode the critic criticises by revealing that ‘what the naïve believers are doing with objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that does nothing at all by itself’ (Latour, 2004, p. 237). This means that when a Catholic couple places roses at the feet of a statue of Our Lady of Częstochowa during their wedding, it is the critic who knows that their petitions for a lasting love are being made only to a block of marble. In this first mode, then, the critic’s tactic is to show the emptiness of the fetishised object. ‘This statue is empty of any innate sacral power,’ says the critic, ‘it is your meaning-making, the power of your agency, that fills it with force.’ This is the mode of critique practiced by Durkheim in his analysis of totemism, for example, or by Marx in his analysis of the commodity fetish.

But once this mode of critique has been recognised – the fetish, as it were, de-fetishised – Latour describes a second strategy. This one unveils not the power of agency, however, but the agency of an unseen power. It takes as its target those who have mastered the first mode of criticism; those who ‘know’ that social reality is socially constructed. To these the still-distanciated critic says: ‘you may think that your human agency is the unseen power behind each social fact, but in actuality you have been disciplined to think just that. Your agency is hardly yours; it has been fashioned in you by the structures of power – race, gender, class – in which we live and move and have our being.’ This is the mode of criticism made famous by Foucault and deployed so effectively by the early Judith Butler.

Latour lays out the logic of these two strategies of critique to show what they share: the assumption that critique requires deciphering, deciphering requires suspicion, and suspicion requires distance. Regardless of which mode is used, then, being a critic means taking up the role of a sophisticated actor in a practice in which the other is unfailingly naïve. Regardless of what the interacting agent says – ‘The facts made to do it!’ or ‘I made the facts myself!’ – they are wrong, and the omniscient critic is correct. It is just this strategy that produces what Latour calls the invulnerability of the critic, the ‘potent euphoric drug’ of criticism (2004, p. 239).

The upshot of Latour’s criticism of critique is not that we ought to abandon criticism and slump back into the doxic world of raw acceptance. Instead, like Bauman, he holds that we ought to broaden our understanding of what criticism is – to give up our addiction to invulnerability and cultivate in its place a dissatisfaction with critique practiced solely as deconstruction. Rather than stepping back from our socially constructed social world into the protective bubble of distanciation, then, a Latourian critic is both adept at drawing nearer to our liquid world and able to attend to the fragile interactions that hold it in place. Such a critic is, then,

For Latour as for Bauman the critical task must involve more that defusing the constraining power of totalising institutions by showing that they are socially constructed and therefore malleable. In liquid times critics must also know how to draw close, how to produce and sustain the space – the civil space of the public sphere – within which agonic critiques can be made. In an Arendtian sense, then, such criticism makes politics possible.⁹

While both Bauman and Latour sketch the outlines of a critique that might operate otherwise, I would now like to turn to Goldfarb’s work, reading it for clues to such a ‘post-critical’ criticism. This is, I contend, an apt name for the project in which Goldfarb has been engaged for decades.

With regard to Bauman’s concern that critical theory must reorient itself in order to realise its aims in liquid modernity, Goldfarb responds by resisting the reification of critique. Over the entire course of his career, in fact, he has constructed an interactional political and cultural sociology capable of attending to how agents actively assemble publics large and small.

Examples of this can be found in his earliest work.¹⁰ Over a decade before the fall of the Berlin wall, for example, Goldfarb was already seeking to ‘explain the persistence of independent expression’ within Communist societies (1978, p. 922). He made this persistence visible by shifting his focus from the ‘traditional analysis of cultural life in Communist societies [which] explains cultural expression simply in terms of the changing nature of the political elite’ to the equally real ways that everyday persons resisted and avoided such control (1978, p. 934). This expansion of his critical attention allowed even the young Goldfarb to highlight the ability of ordinary people to imagine another world and act so as to realise it even when distanciated sociologists could not. Indeed, it was this expansion of critique that allowed him to see that these small acts of creative resistance preceded major political events, capacitating large scale political change by creating ‘zones of autonomy and orientations which promote more directly not only independent expression but also independent political action’ (1978, p. 937).

As his thought matured, Goldfarb continued to show the relevance of creative (inter)action not only under oppressive regimes, but also in the public sphere of democratic societies. A recent essay, co-authored with Yifat Gutman, captures his thought on the interactional nature of such publics well. Publics, they write, only appear

This insistence on the interactional nature of publics in democratic societies shows that it is in and through active assembly that, as Bauman put it, the now largely vacant agora is repopulated, and democracy can be enacted rather than simply theorised. Which is just to say, as Goldfarb writes, that ‘democracy is in the details’ (Goldfarb, 2012b, p. 28).

But Goldfarb has laboured to convene such publics not only in theory but also in practice. From his work establishing The Democracy Seminar, through his administrative service to the sociology department at NSSR, to the founding of Public Seminar, Goldfarb has built spaces that realised in action what he wrote about in theory. In the process of so doing, he has not only convened new publics but filled them with both debate and friendship.

A second aspect of Goldfarb’s work responds to Latour’s concern that would-be critics learn to draw closer to the fragile social world. It can be seen by remembering Goldfarb’s argument that the task of intellectuals includes not only subversion but also civility. This means cultivating not only the capacity to ‘ask uncomfortable questions’ but also that of facilitating ‘discussion among those who disagree about their answers to such questions’ (Goldfarb, 2012a, p. 143). It is his attention to this latter role – his refusal to stand apart from the interaction that is argument around a round table, for example – that establishes the possibility of another culture of criticism. Just as the cultural world of ‘the arts, philosophy, and the sciences present critical alternatives to the dominant value system,’ so also does this capacity to convene forge a post-critical alternative that resists the habitual practice of suspicious criticism (Goldfarb, 2012b, p. 34).

What Goldfarb helps make clear is that the common understanding that the truly subversive intellectual must work to overthrow is the regnant ideology of critique. Knowing that to forge a public enemies must become, if not friends, then at least interlocutors, he is particularly critical of intellectuals who refuse to consider that real differences may be preserved not by suspicion but also by civility. His invitation, we might say, is to become suspiciously civil intellectuals – which strikes me as an apt description of Goldfarb himself.

Sociologically, he is a critical interactionist. Politically, he is a convener, an assembler of spaces for debate. By disposition, he is a collaborator, celebrating the freedom of his interlocutor as much as he does his own. And in all three ways – in his theoretical work, his politics, and his person – he is suspiciously civil. He does not offer a pre-packaged system, a playbook that, if run properly, will always produce the proper outcomes. It is a regular temptation of social scientists to lean into prediction and control, to give unreflective credence to the kind of technocracy that undermines agency or underplays its relevance.¹¹ But Goldfarb resists this, instead building spaces wherein, and gathering interlocutors with whom, he can think about ‘the pressing issues of our times’ as the put it when writing the mission statement of Public Seminar.

It is true that such trivial remedies can seem an inadequate response to the grand problems of our times. But both implicitly and explicitly Goldfarb’s work reminds us that adequate responses to big problems come only from assembling small ones – responses like the essays collected here in his honour. More than a panegyric, my own hope is that these tributes will be read as demonstrations of how Goldfarb has helped form both his students and his friends into practitioners of the kind of post-critical sociology that knows both how to lean close and how to leave space so that others can be different.

Goldfarb’s scholarship steps into the space carved out by the criticisms of Bauman and Latour, providing a model of a sociology that has moved ‘beyond suspicion’ in its attention to the liberatory power that lies in the collective, critical capacity of ordinary, everyday actors. In so doing Goldfarb offers a hopeful, critical sociology – a sociology of the critical capacities of everyday actors. Moreover, he maps out a way of doing social science that is powerful neither because it is perfectly able to realise its ends nor because it makes invulnerable those who practice it, but because it is willing to rethink what it is to critique – and to reimagine thereby what a critical politics might become. A sociology that moves beyond suspicion must take interaction – incipiency – seriously. In Goldfarb we find an interactional political sociology that, while remaining critical, refuses to be constrained by the ethos of suspicion.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).