1st Edition
The Reflexive Initiative On the Grounds and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing
The Reflexive Initiative is an authoritative intervention in the practice and tradition of reflexive social theory. It demonstrates the importance of the reflexive imperative, not only in the investigation of everyday life but across a wide range of human sciences and philosophical perspectives. Forty years after the publication of On the Beginning of Social Inquiry, the chapters in this collection range from re-appraisals of earlier essays on topics such as ‘reunions’, ‘rethinking art’ and ‘expats’ to contributions emphasising the opening of radical dialogues with other reflexive traditions and perspectives. These include psychoanalysis, Lacan, Hegel, Rene Girard, Daseinanalysis, dialectical method, critical feminism, and the dialogical tradition.
In this dialogical spirit, the book contributes to the continuing project of analytic theorizing associated with the work of Alan Blum and Peter McHugh, and the recent turn to more ‘existential’ topics and politically engaged forms of reflexive research. It will be of particular use to students working in interpretive traditions of sociology, Critical theory, Postmodern thought and debates associated with reflexivity and dialectics in other disciplines and research programmes.
Part I: Editors’ Introduction 1. The Origins and Prospects of Analytic Theorizing Stanley Raffel and Barry Sandywell Part II: History and Contexts of Analytic Theory 2. Dialectic, Indebtedness, Ambivalence and the Pursuit of Analytic Speech: Revisiting ‘On the Beginning of Social Inquiry’ Barry Sandywell Part III: Topics in Analysis 3. Analysis and Sincerity: Warding Off Relativism Gregor Schnuer 4. Reunions: Standing and Turning Relationships Eric Laurier 5. Rethinking Art: A Borderline Case Stanley Raffel 6. Expats Richard Feesey 7. The Complaint: An Analysis Saeed Hydaralli Part IV: Dialogical and Dialectical Engagements 8. Dasein/Analysis: Between Ethnomethodological Heresy and the Continental Tradition Steve Bailey 9. The Analysis School and Feminism: Intersection, Explanation and a Challenge Steve Kemp 10. Collaboration and the Birth of Comedy: From the Symbolic to the Real in the Development of Analysis Patrick Colfer 11. Resistance in Collective and Collaborative Problem Solving Andriani Papadopoulou 12. Analytic Desire and Everyday Life: The Practice of Theory in ‘On the Beginning of Social Inquiry’ David A. Lynes 13. Dialectic, Reflexivity, and Good Troublesome Company Kieran Bonner Part V: Origins and Prospects 14. On the Unending Beginning of Social Inquiry Alan Blum References Index
Biography
Stanley Raffel is an Honorary Fellow in Sociology at Edinburgh University, UK. He taught social theory at this university for over forty years. He has published numerous articles on contemporary and classic social theory in peer reviewed journals and several books. His latest book is The Method of Metaphor. He was also one of the four authors of On the Beginning of Social Inquiry.
Barry Sandywell is an Honorary Research Fellow in Social Theory in the Department of Sociology in the University of York, UK. As a well-known teacher and social theorist with an academic career extending to four decades he has published major essays and papers in peer-reviewed journals, books and collections devoted to social analysis and cultural theory. His research has focused upon the history of self-reflection in European culture, the foundations of reflexive social theory, the sociology of philosophy, contemporary cultural theory, visual studies, Continental traditions of philosophy and social thought and, more recently, the investigation of discourse formations, narrative and narratological perspectives in the human sciences.
"This book is an invaluable guide to one of the most singularly original contributions to social thought in the last 50 years. Blum & McHugh’s On the Beginning of Social Inquiry began something genuinely new: radical reflexive analysis as a method of theorizing. The contributors to this book show Analysis still fresh and powerful today, while currents of theory have flooded and ebbed. Simultaneously an intellectual genealogy and a display of the art of Analysis in practice, Blum’s own contribution is a virtuoso performance."
—Kieran Keohane, School of Sociology & Philosophy, University College Cork, Ireland
"This is a profound book, dealing with nothing less than the problems of the grounds for reflexive speech, radical self-reflection and encountering indebtedness. It is a timely collection of reflexive dialogic inquiries; particularly germane in the present climate of new positivistic empiricisms associated with the dataverse. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the future of sociological theorizing and its ethical and ontological dimensions."
—Martin Hand, Department of Sociology, Queen's University, Canada
