Sociology as Regime: Between Sense and Anti-Sense

Abstract

Pressing at once upon questions of disciplinary specificity and substantive rearticulation, this paper examines the standards of reflexivity being brought to bear on an assessment of the practice of sociology (especially in India, but also elsewhere). The track pursued is primarily conceptual and methodological, and the same is further grafted onto a theme of a reflexive sociology of modernity. This recounting of the spaces and grounds of discipline and history alternates between contend ing conceptions of the matter and, implicated on the terrain of sociology per se, translates into a conception of the latter as regime. I take it that the very subject of our discussion is a translation and expres sion of the crisis that the discipline we practice and profess, namely, sociology, is currently undergoing. Also, that our choice of this subject is conditioned by the appearance of a conception of the discipline that, breaking with all previous modalities of inscription, makes sociology an intellectual-or, better still, logico-historical-creation. Contemporary agen das see in sociology a regime that is indissociable from a substantive conception of the ends of social science, and from a view, and an aim, of the type of modernity that corresponds to it. It is also easy to see that, whatever the philosophical or historical window dressing, a substantive conception of the discipline itself originates in the crisis of the imaginary significations that concern the idea of modernity and aims at covering over this ground by implicating all discussion about this idea in the 'cultural' (read 'institutional') form of the discipline, and, ultimately, even by suspending that reference. The deep-seated connection between this conception and what is problematically called 'historical social science' is quite manifest, and I will return to it. But let me begin at the beginning. I have designed a developmental sequence for this paper, which while working off extant formulations about sociology in India and sociology in general also grafts onto the theme of modernity per se as part of a