Creative disorder: A response to Chafetz

Abstract

For several years I have read and used the work of Janet Saltzman Chafetz on gender and society in my own work. Her brief piece on theory in Perspectives is also stimulating, but several of its points deserve a response, in particular, the issue of teaching about "long dead scholars" requires comment. Chafetz is raising an important point here, especially since courses on "the classics" can easily be white males speaking about the thought of earlier European white males. Such power-based, rational, economic, structure-functional thought may miss another important perspective and may be encapsulated by its own concepts and worldview. We are being reminded today that this process needs to be "deconstructed," so as to question many of the assumptions on which it is based. A course in which white males speak of other white males may simply be ignoring (or not understanding) much of social reality. A course of the classics does not have to be like that. In my course on classical theory we deal with thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who spoke of consumption before Veblen, who applied Durkheim's division of labor to the home, and who raised many of today's feminist issues sixty years ago. But the male scholarly world saw to it that she was vilified and then ignored. Aside from Judith Nies's book on Seven Women, it is still hard to find references to her today?even by feminist writers. The point is that classical theory does not need to be either anachronistic or captured by a single perspective. This leads to a second point. Discussion of dead scholars at its best is not merely intellectual history. The questions they asked and the answers they gave are being lived by and died for today. Here we are not talking about "minor revisions" to make them applicable. Rather, we are saying that, rightly or wrongly, they are being applied by whole ethnic groups and societies. A theory about "is ness" easily becomes an ideology of "ought-ness." of good/best, right/wrong, better/worse. And this has happened with many "classics." A third point concerns Chafetz's statement that relevant theoretical ideas should be incorporated into substantive classes. This is do-able except for certain major theoretical questions, such as the nature of society (consensual, coercive, etc.) or the nature of societal change (evolution, revolution, reform, etc.). The fact is