A Sober Anarchism

Author(s): R. W. Connell
Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 81-87
Published by: American Sociological Association
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 A Sober Anarchism
R. W. CONNELL
Harvard University

Dorothy Smith is a writerof originalityand power. In TheEverydayWorldas Problematic

(1987) and in a series of essays now collected in two othervolumes (Smith 1990a, 1990b),
she offers a formidable challenge to conventional sociology at several levels: practice,
methodology, and centralconcepts. In these works she foreshadowsanotherway of doing
sociology, "a sociology for women," and offers some worked examples of how that can
be done.
We should start an appraisalof her work by registeringits scope. There is a specific
reason for doing this: mainstreamsociologists are likely to glance at The EverydayWorld
as Problematic, register its subtitleA Feminist Sociology, and forthwithconsign it to the
women's studies shelf. As I've suggested elsewhere, gender has long been seen as "the
wrong stuff" for serious sociology (Connell 1990). As Smith would be more likely to put
it, sociological theory is ordinarily constituted in a way that makes it patriarchal, that
excludes the standpointof women.
So, take note: Dorothy Smith's work involves an original synthesis of the sociology of
knowledge, ethnomethodology, semiotics, political economy, and feminist practice. It
casts light on all these fields. At the same time it is a meta-analysisof sociological theory
and one of the most substantialcontemporarycriticisms of sociology, problematizingits
practicalunderpinningsand tracing out the intellectualconsequencesof its social being.
In what follows I will discuss four conceptualthemes in Smith's work, then look at her
suggestions about method, and finally reflect on the politics of her project.

Sociology and Power

Smith was trained in professional sociology, and has made a career of it. Recently she
was chair of a well-known department,a majorworld center of researchin the sociology
of education. Therefore she offers a well-informedcritiqueof sociology from within.
One of Smith's key points of departureis the perception that her own profession is
complicit with the power structureit purportsto analyze. As she puts it in The Everyday
World as Problematic (1987, p. 109), "Sociology is part of the ruling apparatus."The
uses of sociology are given by the relationshipof the governing apparatusto the society
it governs, and its topics concern mainly the institutionalforms of ruling: organizations,
education (schools), health (hospitals), work (factories), deviance (gaols, asylums), and
so on. Look through the list of topics in a Sociology 101 textbook or read the list of
sections at an ASA conference, and you will see the point.
This perceptionof the complicity of sociology was common groundamong the radical
sociologists of the 1960s. One recalls scathingcritiquesof "zoo-keepersof deviance"and
of mainstreamsociologists who served the military and the corporationsbehind a smoke
screen of "value-freedom."Smith certainlymeans all that, but she means somethingmore
too. She arguesthat the way sociology is constitutedas a form of discourse, by abstraction
from particularexperience, commits it in this direction. Where the 1960s radicals mostly

Sociological Theory 10:1 Spring 1992

82 SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY
saw the conservatismof sociology as contingentand contestable, Smith sees it as systemic
and foundational.In a recent paper (Smith 1989) she addressesDurkheimand Parsons as
exemplarsof a process of abstraction,constitutiveof sociological theory, which obliterates
the actual.
The process of abstractioncommits sociology towardsthe powers that be, she argues,
because abstractionfrom the local and the particularis the mode of operationof the ruling
apparatusof society. In some of her most original and most persuasivewriting she argues
a kind of epistemology of power. This is almost the inverse of a conventionalsociology-
of-knowledge view whereby power shapes knowledge; accordingto Smith, a certainkind
of knowledge is formative of dominantpower structures,and sociology is internalto this
world.
I am writing this in Australia, and it strikes me that Smith's is a very North American
view of sociology. In other parts of the world sociology is understoodto be a subversive
trade, a well of opposition to the powers that be ratherthan a good and faithful servant.
Dorothy Smith spends a good deal of time digging out an oppositional mode of doing
sociology from the interstices of mainstreamtheory and method. It is a pity she did not
look much outside her own continent for other ways of doing the job; the strengthof a
radical tradition in European sociology is well known. Less well known is the case of
sociology in Australia, where one could point to the remarkabledevelopmentof the theory
and practiceof "participatoryaction research"by YolandWadsworthand her colleagues.
Smith's argument could be greatly enriched by such cases. (It is still true that North
American sociology is dominant in the internationalworld of professional sociology, so
the points made by Smith have global relevance.)

The Standpointof Women

The process of abstractioncommits sociology specificallytowardsa patriarchalstandpoint,
Smith argues. Here the analysis rests on a point about the social division of labor, one of
those points that goes completely unnoticed most of the time but becomes blindingly
obvious once it is pointed out. Most of the work of ruling-making decisions, shaping
policies and laws, runninginstitutions,managingmedia, operatingprofessionalsystems-
is done by men; and most of the men who rule are served by women, in the office
(secretaries)and at home (wives).
This point matters. It is not trivial. It is a weighty structuralfact about the way the
world works, with major consequences that almost always are overlooked in sociology's
talk about itself. Smith illustratesthe point in two characteristicways. One is by telling
the story of her own experience working both as a mother of small children and as a
university sociologist, flipping backwards and forwards between a world of pressing
particularitiesand a world of abstraction.The other is by invoking the concrete situation
of writing or reading a text, in its materialparticularities(paper,ink, chair, room, view),
and challenging the reader to think about the significance of the labor that supportsthat
practice, that keeps the writing or reading body clothed, fed, and so on.
That work of supportand articulation,she argues, is characteristicallydone by women,
and this point has an epistemological consequence. Women's experience is constituted
mainly in the here and now, in a particularsetting, with particularpeople. The "standpoint
of women" thus is constituted outside the realm of abstractionand the apparatusesthat
rule society. This is why there is no feminist sociology: sociology is formed within the
I This work is
published in the Journal of the ParticipatoryAction Research Network, Action ResearchIssues
Centre, 4th Floor Ross House, 247 FlindersLane, Melbourne3000, Australia.
A SOBER ANARCHISM 83

apparatusof ruling, while the standpointof women is outside that apparatus.Smith's

insider critique of sociology is thus at the same time a critique from outside, and that
combinationgives it much of its power.
Here Smith's argumentconnects with the very interestingdevelopmentsin the history
and sociology of science that have identified a masculine subtext in the developmentof
moder naturalsciences, and with the emergenceof "standpointepistemologies"in contrast
to universalizingclaims of truth. Some of these positions have an uncomfortablesmell of
nativism about them. Smith's position, based on the division of labor, is rigorouslysocial,
and a good deal more sophisticatedin its method than most accounts of "difference."
Nevertheless, there are some problems. The very concept of "the standpointof women"
as based in particularityneeds examination.If the term "the standpointof women" is not
an extralocal abstraction,what would be? And if it is, why should it be exempt from the
critiqueof other abstractionsas partof the relationsof ruling?Dorothy Smith's own texts
seem paradoxicalin this light.2
Next, what of the growing numbersof women who work within the apparatusof ruling?
Do they cease to have a women's standpoint?What aboutfeminists who work within the
relationsof ruling?Australianfeminism poses this point very sharply.SuzanneFranzway,
Marian Sawer, Hester Eisenstein, and others have explored the striking dilemma of the
"femocrats,"feminists who pursue women's interests within the bureaucracyand are
subject to fierce pressuresfrom divided loyalties (Eisenstein 1991; Franzway,Court, and
Connell 1989; Watson 1990). Their experienceconfirmsSmith's argumentaboutthe "line
of fault," but their practice suggests that there are ways of moving back and forth across
that line.
Finally there are obvious problems about the notion of a singular standpointof women
in view of the point, vigorously made by women of color, that white women's experience
is likely to be very different from their own. Smith acknowledges this point, which is
particularlystrong in relation to a theory that emphasizesthe division of labor. (In North
America, as in other postcolonial situations, black women often are employed by white
women.) As yet, however, she has no very substantialway of dealing with it.

The Relations of Ruling

Dorothy Smith's argumentshave come over time to center on the disjunctionbetween the
experience of women and the "relationsof ruling"or the "apparatusof ruling." By this
she means not only the state but also corporations,professions, education,and the abstract
discourses throughwhich they all operateand communicate.
In a number of passages Dorothy Smith celebrates the work of Marx, especially his
early writing such as The German Ideology. Yet it seems to me that her conception of
power is not Marxist at all. It is much closer to anarchism,which from its earliest days
problematizedthe state and culture as realms of power and oppression. Smith's writing
presents as a single entity what Marxists would keep conceptuallydistinct-state, corpo-
rations, ruling class. It is pretty much what 1960s radicals used to call "the system,"
except that Smith views it as specifically patriarchal.
The end product is a kind of anarchistfeminism, producedby a quite different route
2
They have become more paradoxical with time. The first work of Dorothy Smith's I ever read was a
wonderfulpiece published in 1975, called "The Statisticson Mental Illness: What They Will Not Tell Us about
Women and Why." This was republishedin The ConceptualPractices of Power (Smith 1990a) and now is called
"The Statistics on Women and Mental Illness: The Relations of Ruling They Conceal." It has been partly
rewritten;the rewritinghas eliminated most of the simple, direct speech to the readerthat markedthe original,
replacingit with heavy, abstractphrasingand academicreferences.One wondersat a textualpracticeso strongly
at odds with the principles that the text is recommending.
84 SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY
from the lively grass-rootsmovement which took that name as a blend of two historically
distinctpolitical traditions.Smith makes feminism as such the principleof anarchy,outside
and opposed to the operationsof a deeply patriarchalinstitutionalizedpower structure.

Textuality
Smith's thinking has obvious common ground with the anarchismof Michel Foucault,
and this is nowhere clearerthan in her strong emphasis on discourse and knowledge. One
of the most interestingand most consistently developed themes in her writing is about the
importanceof texts.
Smith's point of departurehere is ethnomethodologists'work on the productionand
use of organizationalrecords. This approachpoints to the materialityof texts and to how
they are internalto professionalpractices.Yet Smithis not contentwith the ratherrestricted
use of this analysis made in ethnomethodology, in the deconstructionof professional
common sense. She makes a largerpoint about culturalpolitics and culturalhistory.
Such texts, she notes, are the vehicles of abstractionfrom particularlocal experience.
This abstractionis central to the means by which moder society is governed; we are not
ruled by texts but we are certainly ruled through texts. This is distinctively true of the
moder world; it was not always so. Within the last 500 years a form of society has been
created in which textuality, so to speak, is centralto power.
Smith connects this point loosely with the rise of capitalism, more precisely with the
creation of modem patriarchy.Texts, specifically, are the way men have come to speak
to each other. Women's work supportsthe world of textualitybut is not part of it. Women
are ignored by men in "serious" conversations; they are excluded from positions of
organizationalpower; their interventionsin conferences are discounted;and so on. Here
Smith draws on some of the extensive research evidence of institutionalmisogyny. Let
me add anotherexample. At a recent sociological conference I attended, about one-third
of the participantswere women. A man wrote up a reporton the conference, summarizing
the papers and the discussion. Not one contributionfrom a woman was mentioned in the
summary. The report read as if the whole thing had been conducted among the men
present, with the women in little glass bubbles. The point is not that the summarywriter
was personally sexist; ratherthis is typical of the way the patriarchalworld of textuality
works.
Smith is at pains to argue that the accounts of reality presented in texts-official
statistics, psychiatricor police records, sociology books-create an illusion of reporting
reality but do not actually do so. In taking part in the social practices surroundingtexts,
we read "through"a text purportingto give a factual account, to a virtual reality. This is
not lived actualityitself, the realm in which the standpointof women is grounded.Rather
it is an ideological account profoundly shaped by the social practices governing the
productionand use of texts and especially the process of abstraction.
Smith's argumenton textuality aligns her with Europeanpostmoderntheorists such as
Lyotard(1984) and Foucault (1980), who likewise have emphasizedthe growing impor-
tance of language, the constitutive role of texts, and the connections between knowledge
and power. Yet whereas postmodernistsbelieve there is nothing outside language, no
knowledge that fails to be constituted textually, Smith is very sure that there is such
knowledge. She is an epistemological realist of the deepest dye. She takes no shame in
using terms like ideology in its straightforwardMarxist sense of communicationdistorted
by power; she advances a sociological critique of textuality.
Further,whereas Foucault fumbles the issue of where and how resistance to power/
knowledge is to develop, Smith can name the site. It is the standpoint of women,
A SOBER ANARCHISM 85
constitutedin lived actuality, in a mode of knowing that is socially groundedbut is not
abstractedbecause it is grounded in the particularrelations characteristicof women's
work.

Sociology Into AnotherDimension

This site is the key to Smith's proposalsfor the reconstructionof sociology. It is important
that she sees a reconstructionon the agenda. Although profoundlycritical of sociology
as it is generally practiced, she values the idea of sociology and acknowledgesher debts
to sociological traditions.3(Interestingly,she does not acknowledgea debt to the sociology
of Mills and Gouldner, or to Europeansocialism except for Marx.)
This reconstructionis to be "a sociology for women," based in women's standpoint
outside the extralocal relations of ruling. It cannot consist of abstractionsand generaliza-
tions because these properties would commit it to the same kind of practice that is
constitutiveof the relationsof ruling. So it cannotbe the same kindof thing as mainstream
sociology.
Rather it must be a form of knowledge constructedfrom the standpointof individual
experience, which explores how the particularsocial relationsthat constitutethe particular
world in which that experience arises have come into being and how they now operate.
It is a matter of unmasking the ideological forms in which experience is generally
understood, of probing through and finding the social machineryat work behind them:
not a virtual machineryconstitutedwithin the abstractedgeneralizationsof conventional
sociological theory, but the actual machinerythat does this job here and now.
The awkwardtitle The EverydayWorldas Problematicdescribes the intellectual core
of this sociology: it is to take the everyday world of actual experience as its problematic
(read "problematique,"not "uncertain").In the latter part of the book Smith works out
two related examples. One is the experience of being a single parent, in relation to
children's schooling. The second is the experience of being a mother-specifically, how
the work organizationof the household is linked to the work organizationof the school.
These cases explore how the experience of the women concerned is discredited by the
power relationsoperatingin the school and beyond it in the bureaucracy,the professional
world, and the state.
Smith calls this procedure"institutionalethnography."She is a skillful decoder of the
taken-for-grantedin institutions. The argumentpicks up themes from her earlier work
about the displacing of individual experience by generalized professional narratives,in-
cluding her well-known discussions of mental illness statistics and of accounts of suicide
(such as Quentin Bell's account of Virginia Woolf's suicide), which discount the agency
of the person involved. The procedureinverts the conventionalrelationships,asking what
it would be like to displace the professionalnarrativewith a researchprogramconstructed
for the people who are usually the objects of professional discourse, and from their
perspective.
Smith carries throughthis logic rigorously, though not very far; the worked examples
admittedly are sketches. I think a genuinely different sociology would result if it were
carriedthroughcompletely. There is an original vision here and a methodology which is
unlike that of conventional social science.
There are also problems. Perhapsit is not accidentalthatthe sketches are not developed,
and that much of Smith's recent writing has been a reworkingof old texts ratherthan an

3 The mentorsacknowledged (Smith 1987, pp. 8-9) are George HerbertMead, MauriceMerleau-Ponty,Karl
Marx, and Harold Garfinkel.
86 SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY
opening up of new ground. I think the capacity of the procedure she recommends is
limited, and some reasons for this can be found in the terms in which the argumentis
constructed.

The Subject of Argumentand Action

Smith is sharply critical of the way sociological abstractiondenies the agency of people
and attributesagency instead to abstractentities like stratification,motivation, or frames
of reference. She notes how this procedureinfects and subvertseven feminist sociology
(Smith 1989, pp. 52 ff). Her alternativeis to assert the absolute priority of individual
experience and the agency of individualpeople.
Perhapsit is surprisingto find a writerwho claims allegiance to Marx and to feminism
coming down so hard for individualism at a crucial point in the argument. Here again,
Smith is more anarchistthan Marxist;there always has been a radical individualistwing
of anarchismopposed to the collectivist versions (Woodcock 1975).
I can understandwhy Smith moves in this direction, but the move neverthelesscreates
a political dilemma in her theorizing. Is her theory basically feminist at all? Granting
priorityto individualexperience is not necessarilya feminist move. Conservativeideology
likewise exalts the agentic individual. Smith does not at any point seriously confront the
New Right or the theoreticaldilemmas it poses.
Moreover, Smith's texts are written as if the subordinatedindividual were always a
woman, but this is obviously not so. The majorityof men are not part of the apparatus
of ruling, but are subject to it. Almost everything Smith says about the standpointof
women outside the extralocalrelationsof ruling could also be said for working-classmen,
for colonized peoples, for subordinatedethnic groups, for gay men. Smith knows all this
and acknowledges it from time to time, but does nothing with it conceptually. It seems
that her sociology is contingently,not inherently,feminist. (Her work seems to offer no
inherentreason why the relations of ruling must be patriarchal;they happen to be so.)
Does the "sociology for women" then sit alongside parallel sociologies for gays, for
workers, for colonized peoples?
To note this point is also to note political and intellectualtraditionsthat are organized
differentlyfrom the project Smith espouses. Her vehementcriticism of extralocalabstrac-
tion from lived experience is a powerful critique of ideological practice in professions
such as psychiatry and social work, but it ignores the importanceof generalizationfor
movementsof the oppressed. There is a famous statementof this idea in one of the classic
texts that Smith likes, where Marx and Engels write about the formationof working-class
consciousness as a process of generalizationbeyond immediate experiences.4The labor
movementneeded and producedabstractgeneralizationsaboutclass, capitalism,and crisis,
just as the women's movement has needed and has producedabstractgeneralizationsabout
gender, patriarchy,and sexual politics.
Smith's principledrejection of textuality and abstractionis so vehement that she con-
sistently ignores the transcendentpossibilities of abstraction.In her view, abstractionis
always contained within the iron cage of the relationsof ruling. There are no utopias, no
breakouts,in the intellectual world she discusses; it is a very sober universe. I think this
4 "But with the development of industrythe proletariatnot only increases in number;it becomes concentrated
...
in greatermasses, its strengthgrows, and it feels that strengthmore The real fruit of their battles lies, not
in the immediateresult, but in the ever-expandingunion of the workers.This union is helped on by the improved
means of communicationthat are created by modem industryand that place the workers into contact with one
another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same
character,into one national struggle between classes." (Marx and Engels 1969, p. 116).
A SOBER ANARCHISM 87

perspective misses an importantdimension of radical thinking, as lively in feminism as

in any other case. This dimension is the capacity to imagine far beyond the given and the
local, which drives political mobilizationand helps organize strugglesto change structures
of domination.
At the same time, the individualismof Smith's notion of the site of resistance shapes
the style of work in her "sociology of women" as a labor process that still presupposes
an agentic professional. It is notable that in her two worked examples of a sociology for
women, the problems still were defined by the academics concerned. The "we" in her
writing is shadowy, an implied collectivity that her own methodology keeps
disaggregating.
This is the issue on which Wadsworth'smodel of participatoryaction researchhas made
good progress. Wadsworth(1984, 1991) emphasizesthe importanceof a "criticalreference
group" as the source of the research agenda; in her work, this is typically a community
group confronting state or corporatepower structuresand needing informationand ideas
to pursueits agenda. The key differencehere between Wadsworthand Smith is the notion
of a collectivity, not an individual, as the point of departure,and the location of the
researchprocess in the actual social life of that real collectivity.
A more systematic look at collectivities as bases of sociological practice would be in
the spirit of Dorothy Smith's work, I think, though it would change significantlysome of
the terms in which that work is now presented. I think this is worth doing because many
of Smith's ideas are original and illuminating. I have a deep respect for the spirit of her
work. She is an engaged intellectual in a classic vein, and this is engaged sociology of a
high order.

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