Introducing Myself: Vittorio Giovine
Thinking about what to write to introduce myself made me think that my (late) arrival to sociology has roots in a question that, oddly enough, I have been asking myself since I was a child: we wake up in the morning and experience a world — what is that all about?
Then, when as a mature student I had the opportunity to undertake a degree, my interest in our lived experience led me to the discipline of psychology. There I realised two things, which, in turn, shaped my research interests: 1) our experience is embodied, and 2) our experience is social. That is why I am currently researching embodiment from a transdisciplinary yet sociologically-based perspective.
At the same time, to answer my long-standing question, I needed an explanation — in fact, a theory. But what should this theory look like? I think Jana’s (Theory as Practice) and Mark’s (The Impact of Social Theory) blogs already provide many (if not the most) helpful answers — I feel very much attuned to their arguments, and a few thoughts sprung to my mind when reading their blogs.
Above I have used the term ‘transdisciplinary’, rather than, for instance, ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘multidisciplinary’. At the risk of theoretical totalitarianism, here I agree with Alfred North Whitehead: a theory needs to make sense across disciplines (yes, I know, it should make sense first across sociology — forgive my grandeur!). In fact, such a theory would address, at least in part, the issue of the accountability of the field — a field that, I believe, has never expressed its full potential to impact on other disciplines (forgive my grandeur again!).
A theory should be faithful to our phenomenological world — it should be consistent with our experience (without, of course, falling into naïve positivism). This, too, is an argument of Whitehead’s, although it is often evoked in relation to William James’ radical empiricism. Seen from my personal perspective, a theory should be consistent with human embodiment, which is in fact the primary source of our knowledge — hence my specific interest in a theory of embodiment.
A theory should be able to deal with — rather than solve — troubling relationships: individual/society, monism/pluralism, language/matter, representational/non-representational, mind/body, or, indeed, theory/practice, to name but a few. And I am saying ‘dealing with’ as these (and many more) ‘knots’, albeit in different guises, have been around for millennia, and it seems unlikely that they will go away overnight — shall we decide what to do with them? (In too many cases they are, more or less explicitly, ignored.)
A theory should ‘work’ — i.e., it should be able to make a difference; not only in the sense of understanding patterns and dynamics, and positively changing them, but also in terms of the impact of the ideas, concepts, and discourses advanced by a theory. These (ideas, concepts, and discourses) too, we know, are performative (and I am here regrettably leaving aside the crucial issues pointed out by Jana in relation to performance and power) — ideas, as Spinoza sustained, are mental actions, that are not less actual than material actions.
And a theory should be able to transcend — in the sense of retaining the gains and avoiding the pitfalls of — extant theories. How can we, for example, integrate a critical realist approach with a process-oriented ontology? I am aware that it is very easy to ask and highlight the above questions and issues rather than answering and addressing them. However, is not the very organisation of a summer school on the Practice of Social Theory a very promising sign that something is moving in the right direction?
