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Abstract
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Professor Sampson's paper offers a valuable snapshot of the professional sociologist's craft. His methodological innovations will prove influential and his focus on durable inequality and the social ranking of places is instructive even if those dynamics are gravely complicated - as they are in contemporary London - by increasing inequality, the after-effects of the privatization and adjustments in the inflated market for dwelling space. Sampson's concern to show where what he calls the prevailing 'structuralist' analyses of these matters might be productively supplemented by a greater concern with matters of culture is to be applauded.
I take the fact that he has drawn his epigraph from the inspirational fiction of Ralph Ellison as a warrant allowing my response to roam in different directions than the one he has himself followed. For those who are unfamiliar with Invisible Man (Ellison 2004), Ellison's mid-twentieth-century novel was in a deep dialogue with philosophical, sociological and political concerns. A rare and stimulating conversation between humanities, literature, psychology and social theory can be traced back through figures like Ellison and Richard Wright to the towering influence of W.E.B DuBois. That intellectual breadth is something that can enrich the contested domain of social science even as the dominance of rational choice models and mechanistically applied quantitative methods stifle and undermine other strategies of inquiry and academic reflection.
Ellison's picaresque tale centres on the currency of visible - phenotypical - difference and its special place within the US racial nomos - the spatial and legal order of racialized forms of power and inequality. He has much to teach us about those two totalizing categories 'blackness and whiteness' and the manichaean system into which the history of racial slavery organized them. Today, that arrangement is retreating in favour of more complex, multi-polar arrangements in which African Americans are no longer the largest racialized minority and the USA's traditional one-drop of blood rule has lost its old authority.
Ellison anticipated critical work on sight, science and social life undertaken by Martin Jay, Tony Woodiwiss, Jonathan Crary and others who distinguish between vision and visuality. He was a humanist concerned to challenge the commonsense obviousness of racial type and to emphasize that the eye had to be educated: trained, sensitized and habituated if it was to see the world and interpret bodies according to the inhuman logic of racial hierarchy. From Ellison's perspective, race as political ontology, was anything but a natural outcome. He and his Cold War interlocutors could admit no such thing as what Professor Sampson calls 'The human tendency to categorize racial and ethnic groups despite their lack of scientific separateness' (Sampson 2009: 8). ...
Ellison, R. 2004 Invisible Man, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lefebvre, H. 1991 The Production of Space, John Wiley and Sons
Sampson, R. 2009 Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (dis)order revisited', British Journal of Sociology 60(1): 1-31. |