Chasing Elusive Society

Abstract

Now, as in C. Wright Mills' times, the job of sociological imagination is a simultaneous, reciprocal translation between private and public stories: a translation of the individually faced and privately tackled problems into public, collectively confronted issues and of public interests into the individually pursued life strategies. Since its inception, the place of sociology has been in the 'agora,' that private-public meeting place, where, (as Cornelius Castoriadis kept reminding us) the olkos and the ecclesia come face to face, hoping to make themselves understood to each other through a principal yet benevolent, and above all attentive dialogue. The raw stuff processed by sociological imagination is human experience. The end product of sociological imagination (called 'social reality') is cast of the metal smelted from the ore of experience. Though its chemical substance cannot but reflect the composition of the ore, the contents of the product also bear the mark of the smelting process which divides the ore's ingredients into useful product and waste, while its shape depends on the mould (that is, the cognitive frame) into which melted metal has been poured. The products of sociological imagination, imagined social realities, may therefore vary in composition and shape even if the same experience supplies the raw material for the processing. Not any social reality, though, can be melted and moulded from the given ore of human experience: one may expect contemporaneous products, however different they might otherwise be, to carry a 'family resemblance' betraying their common origins. But we can also suppose that once the deposits of a certain kind of ore are depleted and a different type of ore is fed into the furnaces, the smelting techniques would be, sooner or later, modified and the moulds recast.