This book is written with multiple audiences in mind. It is at once an introduction to political sociology and an intervention into the field. Its style, design and purpose juggle these different purposes. Readers with different backgrounds and interests may make different uses of what this book has to offer. Students and teachers in different contexts can find this book useful for their projects.
Following typical educational categories, undergraduate students may make the most of this book after having completed at least one introductory course in sociology, politics, philosophy, media studies or anthropology. Yet as the foundations of these disciplines themselves are treated analytically, they might also study this book without any preceding introduction. In fact, the book can be used as a supplement to undergraduate and graduate studies all along as a critical compendium.
Parts and their chapters are designed to allow construction of a semester-long (5 months) course on political sociology. Sections host a number of exercises to assist the pedagogical process. These range in their complexity and duration. Some can be finished in a few minutes and others suggest more intense research projects. It is also possible to teach parts and chapters individually as stand-alone topical studies.
The artistic treatment of political sociological problems, historical persona and historical periods are presented as possible lines of inquiry to open up an experiential engagement that draws on multiple sensory channels.
Hyperlinked glossary terms are accessible when the book is read online at https://pressbooks.cuny.edu/polsoc25/ . Similarly, there are a number of external materials linked to the text which are more readily available in the online version. As opposed to the common place pathologization of the digital learning experience, the author invites familiarization and experimentation with digital spaces instead of segregating them into a mere place of triviality and degradation. Just like any other material configuration (libraries, markets, forests…), digital relations simply offer distinct juxtapositions and rhythms —some predetermined, and some yet to be composed/discovered. A diversity of practices and socio-political possibilities can exist thanks to these new potentialities. Please email tissevenler@ccny.cuny.edu for questions, comments and suggestions.
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In a famous passage in one of Plato’s writings (Plato, 1997/370 BCE; Derrida, 1972/1981) Socrates and Phaedrus leave the city to continue their conversations in the rustic areas outside the walls of the city as a book brought by Phaedrus keeps them company as they accompany each other. Socrates, the lover of wisdom, who is otherwise not interested in leaving the city as he thinks he can only teach to and learn from citizens by having conversations with them, goes along in this walk as the ambiguous status of book/technology/nonhuman/knowledge offers an intriguing question. Socrates says perhaps one should not pay too much attention to whether it is the trees that speak the truth or the elderly who preserve the myth, as what is said is more important than who says it. Yet, he also cautions against books, because true knowledge can happen in a context of dialogue that encapsulates it whereby it stays alive. Conversation allows pedagogical questioning of knowledge, thereby also makes possible, ideally, the emergence of the correct interpretation of what’s said. Conversation protects both the piece of knowledge and the learner from misuse. Thus, the role of teachers. Just like doctors and politicians regulate the circulation of medicine, public circulation of knowledge/information presents difficult conundrums.
The unresolved irony of the fact that this conversation is relayed through a book is apparent and a testament to Plato’s achievement in showing the essentially incomplete and complicated nature of knowledge. While some of the later intellectual, metaphysical and religious traditions took from Plato only the thought of eternal/unchanging forms, in his written dialogues, he was equally puzzled by the irreducibility of change and difference. We can argue that ironies such as this protect the unattended book by way of avoiding giving ready-made answers that can be applied to all circumstances.
In the same written dialogue, Socrates suggests that perhaps it’s better to write on the soul than write on paper. A whole series of alternative traditions of knowledge will emerge and fuse with non-Greek practices of knowledge from Diogenes to philosophical musicians (ashiks). They will philosophize only in the presence of another soul to sustain the essential dialogue.
The subsequent centuries saw also authors having conversations not only with the past generations, thereby impossibly continuing the dialogue across centuries and millennia, as if to denounce death, witnessed the survival of inquiry/conversation in writing in solitude —being ahead and behind times (İşsevenler, 2022). This theoretical writing/reading can also be done individually, finding a multiplicity, and thereby an inner conversation, in the individual—as the irreducible difference of time dictates that speaking and listening are separate events, mediated even in the individual (Clough, 1997). This separation in time could be seen as the existence of simultaneous yet still distinct temporalities as time moves differently at different points in space, makes possible their related and dependent functioning (Buzsáki, 2006, 2019). Maurice Blanchot names this The Infinite Conversation (1969/1993). A movie by Francis Ford Coppola named The Conversation tells the story of metamorphosis of knowledge into dispersed signals in the age of political cybernetics.
Political sociological writing, then, may benefit from experimenting and socializing with new media to understand anew the boundaries of the city and the meaning of what lies beyond. Thus we can move from immediacy (point) of experience to movement (circle) of understanding (Bion, 1965, 1970) —both presupposing the other and hence form a spacetime of living .
Works Cited
Blanchot, M. (1993). The infinite conversation (S. Hanson, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1969)
Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations: Change from learning to growth. London: Heinemann.
Bion, W. R. (1970). Attention and interpretation. London: Tavistock Publications.
Buzsáki, G. (2006). Rhythms of the Brain. Oxford University Press.
Buzsáki, G. (2019). The Brain from Inside Out. Oxford University Press.
Clough, P. T. (1997). Autotelecommunication and autoethnography: A reading of Carolyn Ellis’s Final Negotiations. Sociological Quarterly, 38(1), 95-110.
Coppola, F. F. (Director). (1974). The conversation [Film]. Paramount Pictures.
Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972)
İşsevenler, T. (2022). An event-without-witness: A Nietzschean theory of the digital will to power as the will to temporalize. The Agonist: A Nietzsche Circle Journal, 16(2), 83–93. https://doi.org/10.33182/agon.v16i2.2753
Plato. (1997). Phaedrus (A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 506–556). Hackett Publishing. (Original work written ca. 370 BCE)
