What was sociology?

Abstract

This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline’s jurisdictional hold over ‘the social’. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: (1) that a surprisingly conventional urge towards disciplinary reproduction often animates accounts of sociology’s crisis; (2) that, even more surprisingly, these same accounts are often haunted by a hidden metaphorical architecture centred on biology, vitality, vigour and life. The central gambit of the article is that, perhaps in spite of itself, this subterranean image of life actually hints at less reproductively conventional ways of understanding – and intervening in – sociology’s methodological ‘crisis’. Drawing, empirically, on the author’s recent work on urban stress and, theoretically, on Stefan Helmreich’s (2011, 2016) account of ‘limit biologies’, the articles ends with a call for a ‘limit sociology’ – a form of attention that could, similarly, expand rather than contract the present moment of transformation. At the heart of the article is a hope that thinking with such a limit may help sociologists to imagine a less deadening future than that on offer from a canonised discipline cathected by endless crisis-talk.